Hamjambo all from Tanzania,
After a long haul across two continents and the Atlantic, I finally made it to beautiful East Africa. I’m starting to catch up on rest, but have mostly been relying on excitement to fuel me through my days. Despite it being only a week since I left Colorado, I am starting to feel at home here already. However, I still miss my original home quite a bit: the people, the variety of vegetables, the extra-long twin mattress (my tall body also has trouble remaining comfortably inside of the mosquito net), and the ability to communicate freely. The language barrier is quite a struggle, but we started Kiswahili classes on Monday, so things are looking up! Despite my picky complaints, I’m still having an incredible time! Tanzania is a wonderful place, full of big hearts, monkeys (whose frequency matches that of squirrels back in the States), vines for swinging (yes, it can be done), and passion fruit flavored Fanta. Most of our time up to this point has been spent on campus (which is a jungle of trees—so big and so green!), so I still know very little about other residents of Dar es Salaam but I look forward to exploring the markets and the local culture more as we become more able to communicate in Kiswahili.
More than anything, I’m simply excited to be here. The semester just began and considering how much I’ve learned already, how close I feel to the group, and the crazy adventure that lies ahead, I can’t wait!
On the first leg of my journey, my flight from Denver to Washington D.C., I sat next to a rambunctious family of five heading home from a long weekend visit with family. Although our conversation started out casual, it slowly grew into an interesting dialogue on opportunity, discovery, development, and East Africa in general, something that this bank investor father from Virginia seemed to know quite a bit about. Throughout the flight, in between exclamations from his young boys, he increasingly began to share genuine excitement for the experience that awaited me in Tanzania, a learning opportunity that neither he nor his wife had ever had the opportunity to experience. Walking off the plane onward to my next leg, he told me good luck and that he hoped someday his boys would be able to have an experience like mine someday in the future, growth beyond the book. Saying this, he inspired a great gratitude to be felt within me. Not to get too cheesy, but what an incredible first encounter to have on a trip that I should feel very grateful to be a part of—what an encounter to have while in route to one of the poorest nations in the world, where deep gratefulness and humility will be forever impressed upon my mind and lifestyles! It seemed like the perfect start to my adventure: a humbling reminder of how to both take advantage of beautiful opportunities and do good with the knowledge learned abroad. Not many get the chance to experience something so special.
Gratefully,
Brendan
P.S. Karibu (welcome) to my blog, for the entire semester, I will be living and learning in Tanzania. I will be studying at the University of Dar es Salaam before moving to the northern part of the country to do research in Tarangire National Park (near Arusha). It’s hard to find the time (or the urge) to get online with so much here to explore but I will hopefully be writing once every couple of weeks to share the really good stories. Hope all is well back in the States! Kwa heri!
