hi everyone! i figured i would give you a little bit of an idea what arusha is like... even though i've been here for only a week! it's very hard to explain... and we can't take any pictures so hopefully i'll kind of be able to give you an idea!
first of all, my homestay. i'm staying at mama zubeyda's with 5 other volunteers. there's emily, clare (australia), connie (canada), catherine (chicago), and terin (washington state). we might be getting a few guys today but we really have no idea. the girls are all SUPER nice, and clare and catherine have been here for a while so are really helpful with showing us the ropes. mama z is very wealthy by arusha standards, so our house is pretty nice...although our room is not so great. we have a room less than half of the size of my room at home with all 6 of us girls living in there. needless to say, it is very very cramped. also, the light doesn't really work and the window is blocked, so we have to use our head lamps whenever we're in there. the bathroom facilities are okay... to take a shower we have to heat water on the fire outside and then take bucket showers, but it's actually not that bad. the thing that really gets to me is the toilets here... they're basically just holes in the ground that, thankfully, in most places, flush. at mama z's we all chip in to buy toilet paper and then carry it around with us because nowhere has it. hand sanitizer is also a must as apparently washing your hands doesn't happen around here. mama z does not speak english so we don't talk much to her... we talk mostly to her 15-year-old daughter (haimen) and the housekeeper (rita), although we're mostly on our own.
i only have a couple of minutes left on the internet so i'll have to do an update on arusha later... it is a pretty big town but we live on the outskirts, which is kind of nice. a lot of safari operators are in arusha so it's become known as somewhat of a tourist town, but because of where we live, it really isn't at all. in fact, when emily and i walked around for 2 hours yesterday (somehow we managed to forget where we live... it was a near crisis but we survived!), we did not see a single mizungo (white person) and it was difficult to find someone that spoke good english. the town basically consists of run-down shacks that function as shops and bars.. i'm trying to find a picture on google but there aren't really any of the area where we live. this is probably the most accurate one i can find: http://www.google.co.tz/imgres?imgurl=http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1356/781408323_d6d071c9a5.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.flickr.com/photos/34514886%40N00/781408323/&usg=___raVmXE04wgV6xvIkmoS_XlSLes=&h=339&w=500&sz=107&hl=sw&start=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=QmHpzY0BXYd6KM:&tbnh=88&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Darusha%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dsw%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26ndsp%3D20%26tbs%3Disch:1
people are pretty nice, although it's difficult to know who to trust... we want to be friendly and get to know everyone but at the same time we don't want to get ourselves in trouble! it's a fine line that we're working on figuring out. there are like two paved roads that the dala dala (public transportation here --- that will be a whole additional blog post, they're hilarious!) run on, but after that they're just dirt with gigantic bumps. i'm honestly amazed every time we make it home in a taxi, the roads are ridiculous. and there are no street names... hence getting extremely lost yesterday. ok well my time is up, feel free to e-mail me! more updates to come soon after i begin teaching!
