Arusha Loving

Wow, I can’t believe that I’ve already been in Tanzania for a month and have been voluntraveling for SEVEN months! It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long but at the same time it feels even longer; traveling is weird like that. Anywaaaaaaay, Briana and I arrived at our volunteer house last Wednesday after saying ‘see you later’ to my fam bam. We are living in a volunteer house that houses a maximum of 30 volunteers at a time, lots of other volunteers were arriving at the same time as us so Thursday was spent just getting settled into the house, meeting people, and washing our filthy clothing. Living in the volunteer house is an interesting experience, a mix between living in a freshman dorm and living in sorority house with some new features. Luckily, Briana and I have experience living in a big house with other people so we aren’t too out of our element. The house has western toilets and showers with hot water heaters (but we don’t think they work since neither of us have had a hot shower yet), WiFi which isn’t the best but is better than nothing, couches, a yard, and ‘mamas’ who take care of the upkeep and cook our meals for us. The house is situated in a suburb that’s west of the town center and is located on street full of local houses and local children! The children are always outside playing and they love when ‘mzungus’ or white people, join in their games and play with them. I am very happy about this since I absolutely love children but am not volunteering at a childcare placement this time around; I was hoping there would be local kiddos and so far I have not been disappointed. Last Friday we had our orientation with all of the other arriving volunteers and learned about Tanzanian Volunteer Experience (the local volunteer organization here) and figured out how to take the local transport, dalla dallas, into town (about a 30 minute ride). The closest hub to where we live is called Kilombero market and it is insane! It is packed full of dallas that are all trying to get you to get in their dalla. There are people selling all kinds of vegetables, clothing, shoes, and anything else you could want. The women are all wearing bright, patterned dresses and skirts and everyone wants to talk to us since we are mzungus. It’s very overwhelming but also very authentically Tanzanian and I love how exhilarating it is to go there. A short way away from the madness is ‘mzungu square’ which is full of cafés, coffee shops, ATMS and white people. It is not very authentically Tanzanian but the cafés are pretty good and they all have wifi so we go there to hang out anyway.

Last weekend a big group of volunteers organized a trip to a local Maasai village, we were all very excited since we didn’t book it through a company, it was just through the friend of a friend which meant that the village was not commercialized and we were going to get an authentic experience as opposed to a touristy one. And boy did we get an authentic experience! None of the Maasai spoke any English, except for our host thankfully, and a lot of them didn’t even know Swahili. They were as interested in us as we were in them with their draped fabrics and mounds of beads; some of them had probably never seen a white person before. We got to see a bunch of different homes, play with the children, watch a herd of cows go by, learn how to make a fire, and participate in a Maasai dance with the women. They decked us out in their traditional wrap clothing and put beads all over us and we danced and laughed and sang together. It was a very, very cool day and I don’t think many tourists get to see such an untouched Maasai village which made me feel so lucky.

Finally, Briana and I started our volunteer placement on Monday. We are volunteering at a local organization called Positive Love and we positively love it!! Positive Love is an HIV support organization that supports six women who are all HIV positive. The organization provides these women with training in how to make beaded jewelry, leather goods, and sewn goods. After a year of product training and receiving business and management training, the women are given a start up loan to sell their products. Positive Love also encourages the women to embrace who they are and love themselves, including their HIV status. Every weekday, the women, Grace, Welu, Veronica, Ruth, Margaret, and Flora, come to Positive Love and spend the day making their merchandise and learning how to make new designs. They enjoy each others company and share a meal that is provided by Positive Love and contains vegetables from the Positive Love garden. Now that Briana and I are here, we join them every day! We get to know them, learn their stories, encourage their work, and help to make the jewelry! WE LOVE WHAT WE ARE DOING! The women are all so wonderful and welcoming and we love spending all day with them chatting, laughing, and making jewelry. We have a lot of big plans for our three months with Positive Love and we are going to need YOUR help to realize some of them. Some of our goals are to start a daily English hour for the women to learn more English, to let our fellow volunteers know more about the organization and what they do, to convert an unfinished building on the property into a shop where the women can sell their products, and to run a Christmas campaign for our friends and family back home to buy Positive Love products (keep your eyes out, more information coming soon). We are very excited about our plans and are really looking forward to our next three months here in Arusha!

While I am loving my time in Tanzania so far, traveling for this long is definitely taking its toll on me. I am realizing just how much I love fall and football season in Colorado and it is hard for me to be missing it. It also a bit exhausting for me to live in house with so many people, I feel like it drains my energy really quickly and the house doesn’t have a lot of space for privacy. Thankfully the positives outweigh the negatives so far so I think it will be a really great three months here. I love the country and its people and every time I’m thrown into the local culture, be it with the neighborhood kids or at the crazy Kilombero market, I can’t help but marvel at my blessings in life. On that note, I have some big news to share with everyone; I have decided to end my trip with Tanzania and not continue onto Ghana, meaning that I will be coming home at the end of November! I have not made this decision lightly and it comes after months of thinking, deliberating, and praying. I have gained so much from this experience and have had such a wonderful time, but I am burnt out and don’t feel that it would be the right decision to continue volunteering and traveling if my heart is not 100% in it. I feel good that this is the right decision for me right now and am relieved to have made a decision about something that I have been thinking about for so long.

Thank you everyone for the continued support, good thoughts, and payers, I have needed them!! Please continue to give me your support for the next three months here in Tanzania since my trip is not over yet! I can’t wait to share Positive Love with you all even more and to continue sharing this journey with all of you!

Until next time and GO BRONCOS!

LP

Powers on Safari

Wow, I still can’t believe that we all summited Kilimanjaro and made it down alive. After saying goodbye to our guides we all headed straight for the showers! Eight days on a dirty mountain, hiking, will make you appreciate a nice, hot, soapy, shower like nothing else. After showers and a yummy dinner, which was mainly eaten in silence as we all took advantage of having WiFi for the first time in over a week, we headed to bed to get a good night’s sleep before our early morning safari pick up! We were doing a five day safari with Kandoo and couldn’t wait to get started. On day one we headed to Lake Manyara national park for our first encounter with the wildlife that Africa has to offer! Within moments of getting out of the car at the entrance gate, a monkey jumped in through the popped roof and stole a banana out of one of our lunchboxes! We banged on the windows and chased it away but we had to keep an eye on the car after that. It was a fun start to a day driving through the park and seeing all the wildlife. Lake Manyara NP has the largest baboon population in the entire world, so we saw tons of these oddly human like monkeys on the side of the road and in the trees. Throughout the day we saw elephants, including babies, giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, flamingos, and impalas. It was a wonderful introduction and starting point for our safari and we were so excited for the days to come! Our lodging that night was Country Lodge and boy was it luxurious by regular standards but especially after having lived in tents for the last week. The staff was wonderful and we really enjoyed our brief time there! 

The next day we got up early and headed out for THE SERENGETI! As you probably know, the Serengeti is famous for the wildebeest migration and for having one of the highest densities of big cats in the world. Our first day was absolutely incredible! We saw tons of giraffes, zebras, impalas, and gazelles. We saw tons of elephants, including a herd that walked across the road right in front of our jeep and gave us a really close up encounter. We saw over FIFTY lions, most of them just lounging in the shade under trees, but we did encounter one male lion who wasn’t very happy to see us and even did a bit of a growl which was exhilarating and terrifying, and we saw two ‘honeymooning’ lions who decided to consummate their marriage in front of all the watching tourists. We also saw a LEOPARD. A leopard people. I love leopards. It was high in a tree and hard to see but I did see it and it was completely amazing. To say that this was an AMAZING and unforgettable day in the African Serengeti would be very much of an understatement. 

The awesomeness continued when we arrived at our accommodation for the night, Serengeti Heritage luxury tented camp which is an entirely tented camp right smack dab in the middle of the Serengeti. These tents couldn’t have been more different than our mountain tents. First of all, they were huge! Briana and I each had a queen size bed, and our tent had a bathroom complete with toilet, shower, and sink. The first night we arrived at camp there were two giraffes hanging out a few hundred yards from our tents and we learned that security at the camp was in the form of two Maasai warriors who guarded us from wild hyenas and other predators throughout the night. When we woke up the next morning, it was to a huge herd of zebra crossing the plain right in front of our camp! This was a beyond awesome experience and was probably one the most unique experiences I have ever had and may ever have. 

Day three was another day spent entirely in the Serengeti and was just as awesome as the first day! We saw lots of giraffes up close, saw a female lion getting ready for the hunt, elephants bathing, splashing, and slipping around in muddy rivers, and spent a long time watching a hilarious group of hippos all laying on top of each other in a filthy river. We saw another leopard lounging in a tree and came upon two cheetahs lounging under a tree. We even caught a quick glimpse of a serval trotting across the road with his lunch in his mouth. We had another night in our great camp and then headed out of the Serengeti the next day to head to Ngorongoro Crater national park. On our way out of the Serengeti, we saw two cheetahs very close to the road, faces bloody as they were busy finishing their breakfast, it was a great goodbye from the Serengeti.  Our entrance to the crater was similarly awesome as we saw a lioness finishing off a zebra and dragging it back across to the plains to who knows where. The crater has almost all of the same animals as the Serengeti but couldn’t be a more different landscape. The Serengeti is dry, brown, and barren; the crater is green, lush and filled with trees and water; if I had to choose where to live as an animal, the crater would have my vote. We saw huge herds of zebra and wildebeest, lots more lions lounging and scoping out their next meal, and hyenas prowling the outskirts of everything looking creepy. 

We finished our day and headed back to Country Lodge for our last night together. By this point we had all been together for a lot of consecutive time and we were starting to get on each other’s nerves, I had started to think that I was ready to get back to traveling on my own, but when that last night came, I found myself feeling very sad that my family was leaving and knew that I was going to miss them a lot. Our last day on safari and together was spent in Tarangire national park. It was a very enjoyable day and started with a fascinating yet upsetting display of the circle of life when we came upon five adolescent lions tearing apart a wildebeest that unfortunately was taking a long time to die. It was fascinating to watch, but I think we all wished that the wildebeest had been properly killed before being eaten. You would think that after four days of game viewing it would become less exciting, but it never did! Every giraffe, elephant, and lion was just as exciting as the last one and we had a great safari! Finally, it was time to head to the airport. We got all of our luggage squared away and then whiled away the hours until Briana and I got picked up by playing Uno, using the free WiFi, and just enjoying our last moments together. Finally, our pick up came and it was time for goodbyes. This was really hard and I cried some more, but it was really nice to Briana with me, it made things easier. Then all of sudden my family was in the airport and Briana and I were in a taxi on our way to our volunteer accommodation in Arusha. Everyone arrived where they were supposed to with no problems and Briana and I are settling in here, where we will be for the next three months. Stay tuned for my first blog post about our accommodation and our volunteer placement which will follow in the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading as always and thank you for all the prayers and warm wishes that people sent during my family’s visit. It was a wonderful reunion and we had a great time together. Please continue to send prayers and good thoughts for this next three month stint as Africa is pretty different than South America and I am starting to feel a bit travel weary. Hopefully once volunteering starts tomorrow things will start to feel a bit more settled. I would also like to share with all of you that I have applied for an internship with Compassion International for Spring 2017. As many of you know, I sponsor six kids through Compassion and working for them has been a dream of mine since my first mission trip in 2008. I will find out in October whether I have gotten an interview and will know about the position by the end of October if I do get chosen to interview. Prayers and good thoughts for this internship would be HUGELY appreciated as this is a really special opportunity for me and something I want to do very much. Thank you all for your support, it means the world to me!!

Until next time,

LP

Hakuna Matata Kilimanjaro

I don’t even know how to start this momentous blog post! This post will detail the Powers family and Briana Black’s crazy trip up to the roof of Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, so get ready for a long one packed with adventure! The safari adventure will have its own post after this one so look out for that one too! Here we go!

August 17th: Briana and I arrived at Kilimanjaro International Airport after a night of three flights from Cape Town. We met our pick up guy from Kandoo Adventures and headed to the Stella Maris lodge in Moshi to sleep off the day, prepare our things and get ready for the arrival of MY FAMILY that night. Needless to say I was in a pretty high state of anticipation all day and waiting outside of the airport I couldn’t stand still or be silent due to my high level of excitement. It took my family forever to get off the plane and clear immigration but finally (!) they came through the doors. I didn’t think I would cry, but I definitely did! Seeing my family after six months of international travel was a wonderful wonderful thing.

August 18th: We all woke up late and enjoyed a nice morning at Stella Maris. If you ever find yourself in Moshi, Tanzania, this is the place to stay! The rooms are nice, the beds are comfy, the common areas are lovely, there is WiFi and delicious food, and the staff are absolutely wonderful! They gave out lots of hugs and welcomed us so thoroughly! Plus, all of the money that the lodge generates supports a primary school that is attached to it. If you have the chance, stay there, we couldn’t recommend it more. We used the day to pack and prepare all of our gear for the upcoming trek. Then after eating lunch at local restaurant, we got a tour of the local markets in Moshi. It was really cool to see how the locals live and also fun to say hi to everyone as we walked by. This was my mom’s first time in a developing country and she was overwhelmed and awed, it was really fun to see her experience all of it! That night we had our trek briefing and got to meet our lead guide, Richard, for the first time. We loved him from the start and when he told us that he had summited Kilimanjaro over 200 times, we felt confident that we were in good hands. One more sleep and then it was time to start The Trek.

August 19th, Day one of The Trek: We were picked up at Stella Maris by Richard and our two assistant guides, Elias and Baraka along with most of our 21 porters. Our bags were weighed, our pictures were taken and off we went! We had a long drive to the main gate but we enjoyed watching Tanzania flash by outside the windows. Our hike today was only about three hours but it was steep and hot through the jungle. We saw lots of beautiful flowers and lots of monkeys. It was a dusty day and even though it hadn’t been a long hiking day, we were tired and very dirty by the time got to our camp. Just like on the Inca Trail, the super human porters had everything set up and ready for our arrival; sleeping tents, dining tent, and most importantly, toilet tent! That night we were in Big Tree Camp with a lot of other groups so there was lots of singing and talking all night.

August 20th, Day Two: Day two was a long, steep, and DUSTY day. It was hot and sunny and we all struggled a bit on the on the really steep parts, my mom and I straggled a bit in the back but overall everyone did a good job. Our camp that night was Shira One camp and there was still a fair amount of other people sharing the campsite with us. During the hike that day we had gotten to know our guides better and realized that all three of them were AWESOME! Richard was a great leader who always reminded us ‘hakuna matata Kilimanjaro’, Elias was always cracking jokes and making a high pitched giggle, and Baraka liked to answer all our questions and was good at sticking with mom when she fell behind. We also had a great waiter porter, Lenny who we enjoyed laughing and practicing Swahili with. Our chef, Reggie, was amazing and we enjoyed every bite of the food he made for us. That night at camp we were officially introduced to our whole crew of 21 porters and in turn introduced ourselves. It was the beginning of our mountain family life and it was great! That night we taught Lenny and our toilet porter, Johnny how to play Uno and we had a lot of fun playing many games together.

August 21st, Day Three: This day was on a pretty easy trail all day long, but that did not mean that we had an easy time of it. Briana and I both woke up with stomach problems that made hiking a pretty unenjoyable activity and the altitude was starting to make breathing a bit more difficult. Betsy had a pretty bad headache at lunch as well, so to say that we struggled this day would be somewhat of an understatement. Luckily it wasn’t a long day and when we arrived at camp we played a rousing game of Smart Ass which made everyone feel much better. Since we were climbing so much in altitude, that afternoon we had an acclimatization climb up to a nearby ridge. The hike was straight up and difficult, but we had a fun time joking and talking with our guides so it actually ended up being pretty enjoyable. As we were coming back to the camp from the hike, I decided to show off and scale a rock wall… it didn’t work and I had to jump down. When I landed I landed wrong and twisted my ankle pretty bad. It was an extremely embarrassing and stupid thing to have done and I was worried that I had just decreased my chances of reaching the summit. Our camp that night, Moir Huts, was in a rocky, rather desolate valley and there were only two other groups sharing the camp. The trail we had chosen was known for solitude and we were quickly becoming a solitary group.

August 22nd, Day Four: This day was my favorite day by far and I think a lot of the other people in the group would agree. (Also, my ankle gave me zero problems after the first twist, yay!) It was our longest day up to that point (12 km) but it was cool and cloudy and we were hiking through piles of volcanic rocks and fields of the everlasting flowers that somehow thrive in that high altitude environment. The trail was a gradual up and down pattern so we had lots of time to acclimate to the elevation and chat with our guides. The porters were especially impressive that day as we saw them going straight up rocky scree trails with giant bags on their backs or balanced on their heads, they really are an amazing group of guys. That night Pofu camp was in a cool, rocky area surrounded by seas of clouds below us and great views of Kilimanjaro above us and we were the only group there which was pretty cool.
August 23^rd: Day Five: There was a beautiful sunset this morning over our camp, the seas of clouds below us made for some really amazing views. Our hike that day was easy and so short that it took us by surprise. We arrived at Third Cave camp around 11:30am and had to figure out how to keep ourselves occupied until dinner and bedtime. So what did we do? We played Uno for at least FOUR hours. Lenny joined us after a while, and then Johnny too, and then Baraka too! It was really fun to play with all those guys and we were especially happy to be in a warm tent when a hailstorm came through and pounded the camp with rain and hail all afternoon. We were very happy not to be hiking in the hail and we enjoyed taking pictures of it from inside the tent. It was pretty weird actually and once it was over it looked like it had snowed! That night after dinner we watched the night skies for shooting stars, we were all alone high on a mountain in the middle of nowhere so they weren’t very hard to find. It was another great day on Kilimanjaro with our wonderful mountain family and we were content as we settled in for our last full night’s sleep before the summit assault the following night.

August 24th, Day Five: Today’s sunrise was just as beautiful as the day before and we had a cold, short but very steep hike to tackle for the day. On our way up the hill, Richard shouted that he could see some animals. We all looked closer and realized that they were eland or pofu in Swahili. Pofu are really big antelope type animals and they are the only animals that come to that altitude but they are rarely seen. Richard could barely contain his excitement, after being a guide for twelve years and summiting Kill over two hundred times, this was the very first time he had ever seen pofu. It was great to be a part of this very exciting moment for him and he grabbed my camera and took off to get a closer shot. When he caught up to us later he was grinning from ear to ear and said that he had gotten so close that if he’d had a knife, we would have been eating pofu for dinner! After a torturous climb to our camp, School Huts, we ate some lunch and then were instructed to go to our tents and try to sleep until dinner. Briana had been hit with altitude sickness on the way up and right after lunch, she threw up. Not a good sign but Richard wasn’t worried and told her to rest and drink water, hakuna matata Kilimanjaro. After a short nap, we had a carb filled dinner that was meant to get us through the assault on the summit later that night. After dinner it was straight back to bed to try to squeeze in as much sleep as possible before our 11pm wake up call.

SUMMIT NIGHT: Well there we were, the night that the last nine months of preparation and five days of hiking had gone into. At 11pm we woke up and started putting on all the clothes that we had prepared specifically for this night. Layers upon layers, ski jackets, gloves, balaclavas and anything else that might help us stay warm. We filled our water bottles with the necessary three liters, drank some tea to get us going and started our ascent. It was pitch black, it was freezing, Briana had already thrown up twice more, and the trail was STEEP. After about two hours we reached Hans Meyer Cave where we took a much needed break. We had thought that the trail up to that point was hard, but it was nothing, NOTHING compared to what came after. The hike after that was literally straight up a sheer, scree wall. When I looked up, I could see the headlamps of the people ahead and they appeared to be at a ninety degree angle up from where I was. However, I started out great. I think my three months living at high altitude in Cusco really helped me a lot because for the first half of the climb I felt really good and was even dancing along to my music. The same could not be said for Briana who continued to throw up and each time she did almost toppled down the mountain. Mom fell back about a quarter of the way in and stayed behind with Elias the whole time. At about the half way point I too was hit with the difficulty of the hike. From then on, there is really no other way to describe the summit other than saying that it was hell. Straight up torture. I was freezing, I couldn’t breathe, I felt nauseated, my body was exhausted, and my best friend kept puking behind me. For three more hours, this torture continued. We saw people descending, we saw people with oxygen tanks, and we saw people hiking in jeans, but we kept going. Every time I looked up, the headlamps looked the same distance away; every time I looked down, I felt like we hadn’t moved. Somehow, finally, miraculously, WE ARRIVED AT GILLMAN’S POINT. It was such a relief and such and emotional moment, many of us were on the verge of tears. Ten minutes behind us came mom, we had all made it to the crater rim within ten minutes of each other and just in time for the sunrise. At this point I have to give the biggest shout out in the world to our guides. They kept a slow pace, they took breaks when we needed them, they carried our backpacks, they opened our frozen water bottles, they hand fed us snacks that we couldn’t maneuver, and the whole time they kept up a constant stream of encouragement and smiles. Without Richard and Baraka, Betsy, Dan, my dad and I wouldn’t have made it, without Elias, my mom wouldn’t have made it, and without our summit porter Emmanuel, Briana wouldn’t have made it. Good guides are very important on Kili and ours were the best! We took some pictures, rested a bit, and Briana threw up again but our climb wasn’t over yet. Kili is a crater and we had only reached the rim, we still had about two hours of hiking before making it to Uhuru Peak, the highest point on Kili and in Africa. Briana and mom wanted to quit at this point and no one could blame them, but neither could any of us let them quit when we were so close to the end. It took some bullying and some guilt tripping but eventually we all headed off for the peak and after two hours of lesser torture, but still torture….WE MADE IT. All six of us, who had started on this Kilimanjaro journey back in November 2015 reached Uhuru Peak at 8:05am on Thursday August 25th. We took all the necessary pictures, reveled in our success, and then hurried to get the hell off that mountain. Just kidding. But not really. Well kind of.

August 25th, Day Six: It was a long, steep, descent after reaching the peak and it destroyed our toes and knees. There was a fair bit of ‘screeing’ which was fun but other than that it was a pretty rough and exhausted descent. Before reaching our lunch camp, we were surprised by a group of our porters waiting for us with congratulations and juice. It was a great surprise and a great example of the wonderfulness of our porters. After hiking down, down, down, we made it to our last camp, Mweka Huts, and had a long, deep, great nights sleep.

August 26th, Day Seven, the last day of The Trek: Today was Dan’s birthday! After our usual yummy breakfast, our wonderful chef, Reggie, surrounded by a singing group of porters, brought Dan a homemade cake! The porters sang a never-ending song of happy birthday and we all clapped and sang along. Dan pretended not to enjoy it, but he so did. After eating our cake, we shared the leftovers with the porters and then it was time for goodbye songs and the tipping ceremony. Our wonderful guides and porters stood together and sang us songs about Kilimanjaro and congratulations and we all danced and had a great time. After the songs, we expressed our appreciation and gratitude to our guides and porters and handed out tips and lots of hugs. We said our final goodbyes and headed down the last part of our trail. The hike was through beautiful jungle on lovely flower and monkey lined paths and we enjoyed talking and laughing with our guides the whole way down. When we reached the bottom, we signed out, piled into our van, and said goodbye to Kilimanjaro. It was so surreal that after all the planning and preparation, it was over. We drove back to Moshi and all had a wonderful lunch together, our guides really felt like family by that point and we knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye. After walking us to our hotel, handing out our certificates, and taking our final pictures it was time for us to say goodbye. It was sad and we will miss them all so much! Luckily, we are going to stay in touch and since Briana and I will be living here for three more months, we hope we will be able to see them again!

So there it is folks, the recap of the hardest physical and mental challenge we have ever faced. It was an amazing experience and one that I don’t think any of us will ever forget. Finally, a huge THANK YOU to everyone at home that was praying for us and supporting us, we have no doubt that it helped us make it through. The adventure didn’t end with Uhuru, so make sure you read the next blog post all about our Tanzanian Safari!

Asante Sana

Hakuna Matata Kilimanjaro

LP