The final countdown

As crazy as it is, I only have two weeks left here in Tanzania! So what have I been up to in my last month in this country? Seeing new places, making positive changes at Positive Love, meeting more Compassion kids and hanging out with the people I’ve met here. Last week Briana and I made our way to the city of Mwanza which is on the shores of Lake Victoria. Our reason for going was that we had our last two sponsor visits to attend, one with a child I sponsor, and one with a child that is sponsored by a lady at my church and asked us to visit on her behalf. Our visits were on Monday and Tuesday but we arrived in Mwanza on Saturday in order to sightsee and enjoy our time near Lake Victoria. The hotel we stayed in was about a mile from the lake and they organized a hike for us that took us down to the lake and up through all of the giant rocks and boulders which give Mwanza its nickname of Rock City. The hike was really nice and the views of the lake were beautiful, we got to see some local fishermen pulling in their nets and said hi to the many children who enjoyed following us around. On Monday it was time for this first visit with my sponsor child, Veronica. I was a bit nervous for this visit because my letter writing relationships have always been a bit stronger with the boys I sponsor than with the girls for some reason. I have also only been sponsoring Vero for three years so we haven’t had quite as long of a relationship. I needn’t have worried though because from the first hug, to the games of jump rope, to the exchanging of gifts, to the last hug, we had a wonderful visit together. Vero is a singer just like Alpha and sings in her local choir, she also really loves sports and loves playing all kinds of outdoor sports games with her three sisters. Her mother and grandmother were both very excited to have me in the house and were so welcoming. We played games together, shared stories, and enjoyed a nice lunch together before saying goodbye. It was a wonderful visit and I’m so glad we got to meet one another, I think it will really strengthen our letter writing relationship! The next day we made the long trip to the city of Shirati to meet Rachel. Rachel is sponsored by the deacon of my church, a woman who I’ve known my whole life and asked me to visit her sponsored child on her behalf the moment she heard that I was going to Tanzania. Again, I was a bit nervous for this visit as I wasn’t sure what it would be like to meet a child who I had never had any communication with but again I needn’t have worried. The visit with Rachel was just as special as the visits with my sponsored children had been, she is an extremely sweet girl who also likes to sing and participates in the tailoring program at her center and is very good at sewing. She has a very big extended family full of women, but in her immediate family she is the youngest and the only daughter, she has five older brothers! Her mother was so incredibly happy to have us there that she was on the verge of tears most of the time we were there. Rachel showed me the collection of letters that she has from Beth and it is clear that they have a wonderful relationship with one another. It was great to spend the day with Rachel and her family and I can’t wait to get home and give Beth and first hand account of the day. As much as I have loved having the opportunity to have these visits, they are a bit stressful and require a lot of energy and planning so I am relieved that they are over. I definitely want to return and visit again someday and hopefully I will be able to visit all of the children I sponsor all over the world in the future.

After returning from our trip we tallied up the total from our Positive Love Christmas campaign and discussed the next steps for the shop and the women. I’m sure you’re wondering how much we raised, our total was $2300! I am overwhelmed by the amount of support that our friends and family showed during this campaign and cannot thank you all enough! The next step in getting the shop ready to go was getting furniture. In Tanzania there are no ikea stores so we had to hire a carpenter and tell him exactly what we wanted him to build for us which we did. Our shop now has shelves, tables, purse trees, and a cashier desk! The women were so excited the day that the furniture arrived and so were Briana and I, it looks amazing! We are so proud and excited of what we have been able to accomplish in our three months here! At Positive Love every day we have been busy filling all of our online orders and spending time with women, as I write this I only have seven more days at Positive Love which is very sad. I have loved every place I have volunteered on this trip, but the women at Positive Love have become some of my very close friends and I will really miss spending every day with them.

In the past week here in Tanzania I have been to a natural spring/pool in the middle of the desert, I have made tons of beaded jewelry, I have eaten at a delicious local BBQ restaurant in Arusha, I have climbed out of the window of a dalla with a broken door, I have played with my doggies, and I have gone without power for days at a time. Living and working in Africa is really a hard experience to describe. It’s hot, people harass me all the time and raise their prices because I’m white, every time I try to dry my laundry it rains, dogs barking and roosters crowing keep me up all night, and I am constantly dirty. Yet despite all of this, I can only look at my time here positively. I have made lasting friends with other volunteers, I have formed wonderful relationships with the women at my placement, I have bettered the lives of three sweet street dogs, I have had amazing visits with my Compassion kids, I have played tons of games with the neighborhood children, I have had conversations with a lot of random Africans, I have traveled outside of the part of Tanzania where I live, and I have shopped in the local markets where white people hardly ever venture. 

Here in Tanzania, the highs are high and the lows are low but they are different entirely to highs and lows in other places. There are things that I hope to never take for granted again, like the ability to drive myself where I want when I want, fixed prices that don’t have to be bargained lower, meat that doesn’t have bones in it, machines that wash and dry my clothes, being able to walk down the street without being yelled at every two minutes, and staying clean for more than 30 minutes after showering. What will I miss? So much. The friendliness of strangers, the locals who don’t harass me but try to help, the bright colored kangas that all the African women wear, the nonexistent rules of the road which get you places so much faster, the kids that just want a smile or a hello from a white person and their whole day will be made, the women at Positive Love, the dogs at Positive Love, the Italian café where Briana and I spend every Tuesday afternoon, and those are just to name a few. There’s a feeling that comes with living in Africa, especially when you really live here-taking the local transport, working with locals, and shopping in the local markets-that’s hard to explain even to myself, let alone to others. I have reached a point in my travels where I am yearning to be home but I also know that I will miss my life in Tanzania so much once I am back in the comfort zone of home. Three months here has felt like the blink of an eye and now that I’m down to the last two weeks I feel like I want to cry, tears of happiness to be going home and tears of sadness to be leaving the beautiful people of this country.  This will be my last international, African, and Tanzanian blog post; next time I post it will be to reflect on my journey as whole and will be coming from the USA. I have learned so much from Tanzania but I can tell it still has so much to teach me, I am confident that this is not my last trip to Tanzania and definitely not my last trip to Africa.

Thank you again to everyone who supported the Positive Love campaign and thank you to everyone who has prayed and sent me good thoughts over the last ten months. Please keep them up for the next two weeks and for my journey home, I appreciate you all more than I can say! Next time I write, I’ll be stateside! Have a great two weeks and GO BRONCOS.

LP

In kindness there is goodness, and in goodness there is magic

Hello friends and family! I want to use this blog post as an opportunity to talk about some small but important events and things that are part of my life here in Tanzania. Universal kindness is something I have witnessed overwhelmingly on this trip and here in Tanzania it has been no different. I believe that people are inherently good and that given the opportunity, most people and animals just want to show love and affection and want to receive it in return.

First of all I would like to introduce everyone to Mama and Baby. Baby and Mama are two female dogs that live on the street outside of the Positive Love lot. I met them in my second weekend in Arusha; Mama was heavily pregnant and Baby was very timid and had a horrible skin problem. The ladies at Positive Love always shooed the dogs away when they came near to us and told us that they were bad dogs. I couldn’t believe it, they seemed like such sweet dogs and almost all of the street dogs I’ve met on my world journey have just wanted to love and be loved. After our first weekend had come and gone, we came to Positive Love on Monday to find that Mama was no longer pregnant and that there were seven brand new puppies living in the bushes on the side of the road. I couldn’t just watch a new mama dog and a sick dog live out their sad street lives, so the next day I bought a big bag of dog food and started what would become a daily ritual of feeding the dogs and giving them water and lots of affection. As it turns out, they are two of the sweetest dogs ever! Sometimes they fight with each other for my attention and they are always waiting outside the door of Positive Love for when I will next come out and see them. Now its seven weeks later and there is only one puppy left with Mama, we hope and assume that the others were taken into people’s homes and have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise. The ladies at PL at first thought I was crazy to be feeding street dogs, in Africa many people have a fear of dogs which leads them to treat them poorly which leads the dogs to defensive behavior and just keeps going in a circle. Now the PL ladies help feed the dogs when I am not there and always make sure to save lunch scraps for them. A few have even come out with me and tentatively pet the dogs and been surprised at how sweet they are. The locals who walk by are also baffled by my behavior since they usually avoid and shoo away street dogs they come upon. They love to watch me feeding and playing and always want to why I’m feeding street dogs and why I’m not afraid of them. Baby’s skin condition has much improved with her regular dog food meal and Mama is gaining weight now that she doesn’t have seven puppies to constantly feed. They know who I am and they get so excited when I walk down the street, sometimes they can’t contain themselves and they start howling and barking. I know that they will be sad when I leave and that I can only feed them while I’m still here but it seems to me like feeding and loving dogs who have never been fed or loved is better than doing nothing, even if it is only temporary. I have considered bringing Baby home with me since we have developed a special relationship, but I’m afraid that the journey would be extremely traumatizing for her and there are no pet transport agencies anywhere in Tanzania to help me with the logistics. I can only hope that the PL ladies will continue to give the doggies food scraps and water once I leave. These dogs are a very important and very special part of my time in Tanzania and it makes the pain of missing my dogs a little bit less and brightens my day.

Secondly, I would like to introduce you all to the group of boys in our neighborhood who have become wonderful friends. There are an ever increasing number of neighborhood children who come to our house to play but the main group of boys are Freeman, Benedict, Baraka, Abdi, and Asumani. The boys come over every day after school and do ‘class’ with the volunteers here. Some teach English, some teach math, some color, and some just play and interact. A couple of Saturdays ago, the boys came into our compound uninvited and very secretive, when we came out to see what was happening, we found that they had set up a party for us! They brought tablecloths and dishes from their homes and filled them with candies and snacks and fruit that they had bought with money that they had been saving for weeks in order to do this for us. Many of the volunteers, myself included, were almost brought to tears. These boys, who live in poverty and have next to nothing, saved their money for WEEKS to throw a party for the volunteers who teach them and play with them. We had an amazing day with all of the neighborhood children, making origami, coloring pictures, playing football, doing cushion gymnastics and enjoying the snacks. It was probably one of the most touching and amazing days I have had on this journey and possibly in my lifetime. These boys are truly something special.

Finally, last weekend I had a wonderful experience at a local organization here in Arusha. The organization is called Shanga and it is an organization that employs Tanzanians that have disabilities and are therefore unable to find work anywhere else. They learn different craft making skills and using as much recycled material as possible they make beaded jewelry, they weave throw rugs and blankets, they blow amazing glass products, they recycle metal and make metal crafts, and some learn to tailor and sew and make amazing clothing and pillowcases to name a few. The location in Arusha is both a factory and a shop. When we arrived, we got a free tour of the factory and got to see all of the different people working and making the crafts. Some of them are deaf, some are paralyzed, some have lost appendages but all of them are smiling and waving and working hard to create the most beautiful products! Then we were taken to the shop where we could buy all of the products, everything in there is so amazing, I almost bought out the whole store! It is a beautiful location and such a wonderful organization. Not only are they saving people by employing those with disabilities, but they are also contributing to saving the planet by using recycled material whenever possible and on top of that, a portion of some of their products also goes to wildlife conservation efforts. Talk about inspiring. One of my dreams is to start my own nonprofit or NGO, maybe something like this is in my future! Can you imagine if every city had a place like that!?

Things like these are what make traveling so far and for so long worth it. There are some amazing people in this world and to see that kindness can be found everywhere, in even the most unlikely of places, is such an uplifting and inspiring thing. I hope that all of you try to find kindness in your everyday lives, I’m sure it is there but it is often easy to overlook. I tend to let negative things take up more of my energy and my thoughts, but I’m trying to change that and overlook the negative and find the positive in everything I do, in everyone I meet, and in every place I go and I hope that you do too! My positive outlook has definitely been put to the test this past week, its been a hard week just dealing with the logistics of living in Africa and I also recieved the very disappointing news that I did not get the internship with Compassion. It came down to me and another candidate and they went with the other person. I'm pretty upset about it and now I'm a bit lost as to what my next steps will be when I get home. Prayers and good thoughts are VERY appreciated at this point. If the Broncos can come back after two losses, so can I! Thanks for reading everyone!!

LP