it's official: we're moving to Tanzania!

Justin and I will both be working on a HIV prevention project through the university. He'll be full-time, I'll be part-time while I finish my PhD. The project is slated to last 4 years, though it will likely go longer.

It's very exciting for both of us, though not so much for Juma. He's very sad to leave his great friends and wonderful school, naturally. But we have found a great English-speaking international school for him, which I am sure is filled with wonderful friends for him.

We will be in Iringa, which is the same city we lived in last summer. We'll be in the very same house, in fact, and have the same address:

PO Box 1441
Iringa, Tanzania

So we are packing up the house, and will spend about 10 days in Utah for the holidays before we go. 2012 in Tanzania!

how did my life get like this?!?!

love

Juma: Mom, I love you. So much. I don't know why, I just do.
Sarah: Well, it is hard-wired in your DNA to love your mother. You have to.
Juma: I know, but that's not it. I really just love you.

whoa, it's been a busy month

The blog doesn't say so, but it was a busy August. We still haven't gotten permission from the government and university to do the research that we were supposed to do this summer, but we had lots of other tasks, like visiting organizations and government officials, and furnishing the project house. Here are some events and pictures from August:

Three times we drove (Justin drove, we were passengers) south to visit other towns in the region for work. Njombe is a large town, far enough away that we had to stay overnight. Once, we broke up the trip and stayed on a farm in between Iringa and Njombe.

Lucky us, the staff made a mistake and upgraded us to a luxury cabin.



We took the day off and hiked around the farm, stopping to see their crops, cattle, and lakes.




On one of the trips to Njombe, we stayed with some new-found Danish friends, on their farm. They had tons of fowl, goats, sheep, and cows




as well as a bunch of pigs. These little piglets were just 4 days old.




Njombe has a club that was once the British colonial club, complete with a library of old books and a snooker table. It's a bit like pool, but the table is huge.



Part of our work-related travels were documented in a Tanzanian newspaper!






Back at home, we put our fireplace to use. Yes, it is cold enough in Iringa to have fires!




Juma roasted hot dogs over the fire, and invented a new dish: chocolate hot dogs. He claims it was good. Later, Justin has a metal worker make a grill for the fire, so we can cook lots of yummy stuff.




Since we moved into an unfurnished house, Justin has been having a carpenter build us furniture (Iringa region produces timber). Here's a view of the empty dining room



and now with our 8-chair table.



We also bought some tables that are serving as work desks for now in our once-empty living room. (We still don't have couches or anything.)






We also had beds made, then fancy mosquito nets.




Right now, we are in Zanzibar for the end of our trip. We got to see the new baby boy of our friends we met last year. Meet Nuh (Arabic version of Noah).

address

We have a PO Box in Iringa now!

Beckham
PO Box 1441
Iringa, Tanzania

We also have a six-bedroom house (hint, hint...come visit).





and a temporary car until we can get something with a little less...character.

9 years old!

Happy Birthday, Juma! You have brought so much fun into our lives, and you are such a great kid to hang out with. You love to do so many things:

You are a board game champion,




you have a great imagination and love pretending to be different characters (here, a 19th century Hehe chief),




you are the best at being a silly head,




a great rock hunter,




a cave explorer,



iPad gamer,




an excellent rock climber,




and a budding biologist.



Happy Birthday, buddy!

another cutie picture of little Sarah

She is now in Pemba with her mom, meeting her grandparents for the first time. They are, of course, thrilled.

adventures in Iringa

Ok, not really adventures. More like life.


We found nice craft shop/cafe in Iringa where all the artisans and cafe employees are either deaf or disabled. A lot people like them don't get a chance to prove their abilities in Tanzania, so this place is really great and reducing the stigma. They make really great stuff, too. Here, Justin and Juma play chess while we wait for our food. Juma won!




Juma got a toy bow and arrow and Justin fashioned a quiver for him. After a couple days of practice, Juma is a great shot.






Just 20 kilometers south of Iringa, there is a Stone Age (lower paleolithic) site full of stone tools 100,000 years old. We got to actually pick up and handle the roughly-made spearheads, knives, and wedges. Amazing.



The site is also full of beautiful sandstone pillars.

monkeys and bullfrogs and butterflies, oh my!

Iringa-Dar-Zanzibar

We finished up our short trip to Iringa, and took the looong car ride back to Dar es Salaam. We heard from various people that the car ride between Dar and Iringa is anywhere from 5 to 8 hours. It took us 10, door-to-door. Part of that was because we went into Morogoro town, partway between the two cities, to eat at a certain Indian restaurant that was recommended by someone on another project team. The food was fabulous, but they apparently had to prepare everything from scratch after we ordered it (actually, this is the norm for mid-priced restaurants in Tanzania; we should have known), so we were there for a while. The distance is about 500 kilometers, so we could make the trip in 5 hours...if there were absolutely no other cars or slow-moving transport trucks on the road, no construction, no pot-holed sections, no rain, and no stops. Which will never happen. Next time we go, which will be as soon as next week, we’ll call ahead to the Indian place to give our order, so it’ll be piping hot and ready when we reach the town.

Everyone kept telling how cold it is in Iringa, and giving their sympathies for having to endure such cold. To them, the heat of Dar is the default, the normal, so Iringa is not only cold, but too cold. But to me, the cool of Iringa is awesome, and Dar is far too hot and sweaty. The weather was downright pleasant in Iringa, and uncomfortable in Dar, even in the cool season that we’re in now.

We’re in a little bit of a waiting game on the project with some bureaucracy, so we decided to come to Zanzibar, our second home. It’s lovely to be back. We’ve already run across some people we know and visited a couple of our old haunts. We had a couple of meetings with people in the US today, so we conducted them via Skype from a rooftop restaurant while a great view of Stone Town and a lovely breeze, and then while having gelato at our favorite little Italian place just off the beach. Justin commented that it’s too bad we have to do work while we’re in Zanzibar; I said, “Yeah, but we’d be working anyway; might as well do it from Zanzibar!”

One our second day here in Zanzibar, we went to our oldest friend, Juma's, house. His wife gave birth to their first child in February. We'd been waiting almost 5 months to meet her. Since our Juma is named after big Juma, they named little Sarah after me!

meet Sarah Juma Hussein

Juma jumping (Iringa, Tanzania)

On the road to Iringa

karibu Iringa!

We are in Iringa town today, having made the long 8-hour drive down from Dar es Salaam, where we have been so far. We, along with two of our American colleagues, rented a car (rental cars come with drivers here) to come. We wanted to see Iringa for the first time--Justin and I had only stopped for 20 minutes at a truck stop outside of town once in 1999--and meet some of the officials we’d be working with. .

Iringa town is on a large hill in a region of low mountains (for someone who grew up in the Rockies, they are low; for Africa, they are certainly mountains). The site was originally chosen by the German colonists because it was on a high hill, both for defense and to stay away from mosquitoes. Everyone here claims there are no mosquitoes, and the hotel didn’t even originally provide a mosquito net for Juma, but when they say “there are no mosquitoes,” they mean “there are fewer mosquitoes here than elsewhere.” Which is still too many for us. We’ve done malaria three times in our family, and we’re not eager to do it again.

Anyway, the town is hilly, and has a nice view of surrounding valleys and mountains. It’s the cool season, and that actually means cool, not like in Zanzibar, where cool means it gets down to 75 at night. Here at night, it gets down to the 50s, which is cool enough to want a blanket, and a jacket in the evenings and mornings. I’ve had long-sleeves on all day, even outside, and while inside with no fan, and I haven’t sweated a bit! It’s astounding. The plants and trees are cooler-weather ones; they even grow peaches and pears in this region, and there is a noticeable lack of coconut palms.

The drive down here was long, but pleasant enough. Had the single-lane highway not been so full of slow-moving trucks the driver had to strategically pass up, we would have arrived a lot earlier. The road takes us right through Mikumi national park, and we spotted lots of animals standing very close to the road: several elephants, including a baby; zebras, giraffes, gazelles, baboons, and a monkey. I snapped a picture of the elephants with my phone, but without a zoom. Our coworkers got better pictures, I’ll try to get one from them. The road also takes us through all different topographies, from the coastal lowlands to the baobab tree forests, to sisal plantations, to areas with bright red dirt, to onion farms, to the mountains of the Rift Valley.

Here's the obligatory picture in front of a baobab tree. Their fruits are going into a yummy candy.

different

I can’t even remember what we did Friday and Saturday. I’m pretty sure there was another long meeting in a conference room, and some lazing around the hotel while trying to ignore the loud sounds of construction from the building sites on two sides of the hotel. Also some eating out at fancy restaurants (fancy for us in Tanzania, but pretty normal as far as our American choices would go) with our colleagues.

Again, the key theme on this trip is difference. The busy city, the interactions with more Americans and highly-educated Tanzanians in offices than regular Tanzanians in the neighborhoods, the rides in hired cars, the quality of accommodations.

In previous trips, especially before Juma was born but also after, we looked for the cheapest possible hotels. Not even hotels, but hostels and guesthouses. We paid 10 dollars a night, tops, per person, often as little as 2 or 3 dollars. They were generally just in the hustle and bustle of the city, and could be close to loud traffic. One was right above a city bus stop, with honking and yelling going all hours of the day and night. Those kinds of places have horribly uncomfortable, lumpy, thin mattresses, questionable sheets, dirty mosquito nets with holes in them, and shared bathrooms. Which could be quite scary at times, and usually had mosquito screens on the windows, but they were inevitably full of holes and being bitten in unreachable places on my back while showering was a given. There would be no question about not using the tap water to brush your teeth, because one look at that sink and faucet screamed, “Stay away!”

On this trip, though, we’ve had rather nice accommodations, will comfortable beds, nice mosquito nets, and pleasant gardens surrounding the hotel within a gated compound. The room we are in now is super spacious, with a separate nook as a dressing room, a desk in one corner, and a sectioned-off area that serves as both sitting room and Juma’s room. The staff are (overly?) attentive and nice, and there is even a trampoline on the grounds (the owners have small children). We have accidentally used the tap water on our toothbrushes, tricked into a false sense of security by its shiny cleanliness (Juma reports he has not--phew). We are quite pleased with it, and it’s someplace to be comfortable in, and not just put up with. My only complaint is that the supposed free wireless has been spotty or completely inaccessible. I’m writing these blog posts offline, to upload later...

Dear Jet lag,

I am jet lag.

Jet lag I am.

Do you like awake-at-1-am?


Jet lag I am, oh, jet lag I am,

I do not like that jet lag I am.


Would you like some in your bed?

Or would you like the couch instead?


No, I would not like it in my bed.

We do not have a couch instead.

I do not like you, jet lag I am.

I do not like awake-at-1-am.


Would you, could you, with a barking dog?

(Who wants to be sleeping like a log?)


No, I would not, could not with a barking doggy,

His bark is making me quite groggy,

I do not like you, jet lag I am.

I do not like awake-at-1-am.



Would you like to hear a goat,

A hellish bleating from its throat?

Try it, try it, and you may!

Try it, and you may, I say!




I do not like the bleating goat,

And that, jet lag, is my last vote!

I do not like you, jet lag I am!

I do not like awake-at-1-am!

day 2. is it only day 2?

After a fairly good night's sleep our first night here, we got up bright and early for an 8:30 meeting. We don't have child care arrangements for Juma yet, so we had to bring him along to two meetings yesterday and one today. At the first meeting yesterday, we had to be on the guest list and go through crazy security. Juma wasn't on the guest list, so that caused a hullabaloo, but we eventually got in. We hooked up Juma with a book to read, and he sat in the corner while we did our thing.

This trip it totally different from any of our previous trips. Not only are we on the mainland instead of the islands, but we are working top-down with lots of organizations and government officials instead of at the grassroots, talking to villagers and hanging out at local shops. We're going from hotel to taxi to air-conditioned conference room to taxi to another air-conditioned conference room. We ate at restaurants that cost just as much as they do in the US. We have an actual budget with real money. We have incomes and job titles, and I handed out more business cards in the past two days than I ever have in total.

It's like we're grownups or something.

As we waited for a taxi today after a meeting, Juma put on an impromptu concert for our colleagues (from my department at school).