Happy Birthday, Marlina!

It rained most of the night but we all stayed warm and dry in our lovely new tents.  Well, dry anyway.  Some of us are going to need to supplement our blanket game with some new Tanzanian coverings because our current selection doesn’t quite do it when a cold air mattress is underneath the whole sleeping situation.  The rain stopped in the morning and we actually saw some blue sky for the first time up here on the mountain.  All of the clouds didn’t go away and more gathered by lunchtime but we went a whole morning with no rain. Nice.

We did a bit of organizing of camp in the morning, but still not quite enough to make it home.  We’ll stay on it.  We repositioned some tents because a few of us found ourselves sliding down our air mattresses in the night and having to reposition more than once to stay on top of them. One whole tent found itself bunched together against a tent wall, as all of their beds had slid down the slight slope until they bumped into each other and came to rest.  We also put tarps under all of the tents, which we hadn’t done yesterday in our hurry to put the tents up in the rain. 

One of our local liaisons, Henry, came to camp and took us to the school where we will spend a lot of our time this month.  It’s a primary school with about 400 students in a rather small area.  They didn’t have class today because it is a national holiday that celebrates the revolution of Zanzibar.  So we had the school to ourselves to check out the new kitchen area that we will help build and to see the classrooms.  Our first impressions were that things were exceptionally dark but we hope that more windows open in the rooms than we could see. We will find out on Monday when we go there during school hours. 

We met some new friends there, including a student named Kelvin who was translating the school signage for us and helping us understand the subjects they study there.  We also met the school administrator and the lead teacher, Lavina, who came over with her infant daughter Davina.  We’ve been around quite a few people who speak a bit of English, which is a wonderful treat because our Swahili is HORRIBLE.  We are all trying to pick up some greetings and some short phrases but mostly we are just smiling and looking friendly.  Megan was smiling so hard and looking so friendly today that a woman came off her porch and asked if Megan could just stay here in Tanzania with her.  So, it appears that Megan has been adopted. 

We also met tons of kids along the path that we will walk every day.  One of them is named Nixon, which was a bit of a surprise. Another is named Happy.  We hope to get to know them over the next few days.  We can tell that one key to winning their affection might be chocolate, as it is one of the only English words they know.  Backpackers and hikers must have introduced them to M&Ms or something, so we will add to their obsession. 

Speaking of backpackers and hikers, we went to one of the gates of Kilimanjaro and watched as people finished their descent from the summit, having begun their ascent at the Marangu Gate, near where our group stayed in 2012.  We mostly saw the enormous loads of equipment that the sherpas were carrying and actually saw very few climbers who were not the locals who support other people’s expeditions.  We took a group picture at the gate, then headed toward camp to get ready for lunch. 

Of course, we couldn’t just go home and eat without complicating things somehow, so we stopped at another area nearby and emptied bags of sand into a pile to free up the bags for us to use them to carry other materials.  More specifically, we loaded the bags with some red gravel, which we carried toward our camp.  We didn’t carry it all the way in, because anytime we slipped on the trail, we dumped some gravel there to improve traction.  We made it almost to the gate of our camp in our traction improvement project and will return in the afternoon to carry more bags of gravel into camp to improve the passageways there. 

We gathered for lunch (pumpkin soup, rice and beans, and fruit) and also celebrated Marlina’s birthday.  We got her a card that said we hoped her birthday was “in tents.”  Tee hee.

We weren’t the only ones who came to her birthday party; we were also joined by two different kinds of monkeys in the trees just beyond our fence.  One kind was black and white and Megan described it this way: “It looked like a skunk but in monkey form.  And upside down.” The other kind was smaller than the black and white ones, with longer limbs and a long tail that helped that monkey to swing through the trees pretty much the way that cartoon monkeys do.   Matt observed that we were living out a reversal of the zoo; we were the ones behind the fences and the monkeys were coming to look at us. They all eventually started scrambling and jumping through the trees with all of us making noises that you might associate with a fireworks display.  Matt declared their acrobatics to be monkey parkour.

On our walks today we saw some funky bugs and insects and even a horned chameleon that changed from bright yellow to brown to green right while we were watching it move over different parts of the forest floor.  We saw some other parts of the trail that we want to improve and we got a list of camp improvements together to make some changes there too.  We are just finishing lunch now and will spend the rest of the afternoon close to home making some of our plans for our African home into reality.  We might add more text later and we will definitely try to post photos and videos this evening.  We predict that some of them will be true DIRT photos, as we have really sloppy shoes and really dirty feet no matter how hard we try to avoid both.  We’ll alert you to look at previous days when we get some photos and videos up.  Right now we need to get back to work!

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Afternoon update: We spoke too soon by bragging about our dry morning.  The afternoon brought a torrential downpour that doused our plans to do some work around the camp.  Instead, we had to scramble to cover items that were protected from the rains yesterday but that got wet when the massive shower this afternoon started to go sideways.  We were like lightning in our response, all moving as one while taking care of each individual item remarkably quickly.

It rained so hard, in fact, that about half of us decided to bust out our swimsuits and fast track the shower situation by capitalizing on the pouring rain. It worked.

After the cloudburst, the sky finally cleared and even made one of those "sun peeking out of the clouds" views that makes you think that an angel choir should be singing.  The night stayed clear and even gave us our first chance to turn off all of the lights around us and drink in the Tanzanian night sky with its millions of stars.  Before we did that we celebrated Marlina's birthday again with an actual cake and with great songs from our camp crew (some in Swahili).

The other thing we did before it got too dark was take out our drone and fly it high overhead to catch a glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro (or "the hill," as they call it here).  We can't quite see "the hill" from camp but our drone can.  Hopefully that footage will land in a video really soon.

We will keep finding our way here and figuring out our new rhythms.  We've faced some unexpected adversity and weathered it (literally) exceptionally well.  In fact, we find that we welcome the challenges that come, as those are the things we were preparing for in our retreats last fall.  Tomorrow we will get to work either on the school or on some reforestation that we will be doing throughout the month.  Tune in on Saturday to see which way things went!

 A lovely sunset in our new home after a large rainstorm.

 We’re exploring the school where we will be adding a new kitchen.

 We saw the first of what we hope is many monkey sightings today.

 Our hike took an unexpected turn today when we decided to take a shortcut

Our hike took an unexpected turn today when we decided to take a shortcut.

We made some friends on our hike to the base camp of Mount Kilimanjaro.

We made it to our final destination, Mweka! It was pouring rain and our van couldn’t drive to our campsite, so we walked! We hiked through this valley with our luggage, no one got hurt during this process.

We visited the local school in Mweka today to see some improvements that can be done. Sadly, it was a holiday today so we did not see any students. We did meet with one of the teachers and she showed us their workbook and classrooms.

While we were walking to school we came across kids who wanted to get their picture taken.

 Our first morning in Mweka. Maddie woke up and quickly took a picture of the sunrise over our tents.

On our way back from visiting the school we met three brothers working in the field alongside their grandmother (far back). 

We walked through the town of Moshi and children waved as we walked past.

 In the trees behind our campsite we saw monkeys jumping from tree to tree during our lunch.

We walked through the town of Moshi and children waved as we walked past.

 This was the first night we were able to see the stars at our campsite.  We turned off all the lights and were able to see so many more stars than we can at home. 

We visited the school to see where we would be working.  We are going to build a kitchen for the school of about 400 children.  Here is a picture of a few of the classrooms.