Mustafa has a strawberry farm at the very top of a mountain. I know this because I hiked up, up, up, on rough, slippery trails. Tanzanians don’t use switchbacks or water bars or stone steps. There is no conservation corps of eager high school students to maintain the trails. As we climbed higher, past the waterfall that we went to earlier with the students, the views of the mountains, the town far below and land beyond became increasingly beautiful.
Mustafa’s grandfather learned from a German man how to cultivate strawberries, and he passed on the knowledge to his son and his grandson. Now Mustafa’s entire family grows raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, peaches, papaya, bananas and wild mushrooms. His best customers are the foreigners, ex-pats and wazungus (white people) as the Tanzanians don’t know the fruit and are often afraid to try new things; they stick to what they know.
Polly met Mustafa while buying strawberries from him in Dar and one day she gave him a lift to Morogoro. Ever since, they have been friends and she has been bringing visitors to visit him, but she told me most guests make it as far as his house, after that they are too tired to keep hiking up to his shamba (farm). Jonah, Frank and I pushed on and were rewarded with lots of fresh fruit, amazing views, new friends, and sore legs. Mustafa does well selling his sweet berries and has since sold us a few plants and trees for the school and we hope to get more once our soil improves. The mountains get a lot of rain and cooler weather, so his gardens flourish. There are many natural springs there as well, making irrigation much easier. In one of the pictures, you can see a man has made a small pond from a fresh spring coming out of the side of the mountain. He stocked the pond with fish-smart guy! In the mountains they are rich!
The climb was super challenging and our bodies ached for days. Frank had never been up into the mountains and had no idea of what was going on up in the clouds.
For New Years we went to a pizza place-they had a brick wood-fired oven, which was slightly falling apart, but was still decent. We each ordered a pizza. After that we drove out to the school where we saw a slight lunar eclipse on the full moon. In the opposite direction we were also entertained by a lightning storm dancing high in the clouds up in the mountains. We brought sodas out to Frank and his family but they were fast asleep by the time we showed up at 10:30! On New Year’s Day Frank took us to his relatives’ house a few miles away and we shared some early morning beer-rough- and then took the rest of the day off! Since then we have been working hard, weeding the gardens, planting new seeds, trying to stay motivated in the heat!
We have been getting lots of rain-finally-making watering much easier. We have lots of new beds started and big plans for the New Year. My mama arrives tomorrow, so we will head to Dar in the morning and then we are all off to Zanzibar, even though they have been without power for weeks due to an old cable that finally snapped. It will weeks before it is repaired, but I figure the island will still be a nice place to take her.
I hope you all had a wonderful New Year and that you staying warm.
Much love,
Lindsey
