we're not watoto...

hihihi! Since my last post, I've been on a safari week at Tarangire and Lake Manyara national parks, wrapped up my homestay in Bangata, taken midterms, and spent a week at the Mozambai Forest Reserve for our tropical ecology course. Now, we've started to shift gears: instead of our host families or a safari camp crew feeding us, our Bangata mamas doing our laundry, and SIT organizing buses and hotels, we're learning how to get around Tanzania like grown-ups.

"Watoto" means children in Kiswahili. My Bangata mama always called me one of her watoto, serving me food, walking me to school, and giving me a potty for my room so I didn't have to leave the house and pee at night. Even after leaving Bangata for Tarangire and Mozambai, we didn't have to worry about buying bus tickets or food. We pitch our tents, wake up for tea and breakfast, have class from safari cars or under the canopy of a tropical forest, work on our readings and presentations, take naps, eat the enormous meals that our camp crew serves us, explore the savannah or forests or towns we stay in...basically, we don't have a lot to worry about. We're living on Africa time, with all of these opportunities to talk with students and our professors and to learn about the people, the wildlife, and the ecology of the places we visit.

Now, I'm living in the Usambara mountains in a town called Lushoto. It's smaller than Arusha, but is the center of the district, with a bank and government offices and some tourists that come to hike on their way to Dar Es Saalam, Zanzibar, or safaris. I'm staying in a guest house with another SIT student for the week, working on logistics for my Independent Study Project. In a month or so, I'll come back here to live for three weeks to study a few women's groups that produce briquettes (like green charcoal, made from corn husks, manure, newspaper) in the region. They have developed a sort of micro-finance loan system that funds their project, and I'm going to do all of these interviews, help make and sell these briquettes, and try to figure out how much money they're making, how they can get more materials or sell more briquettes...or something. Deforestation is a real serious problem up in these mountains, and all over Tanzania. People cut trees down for fuelwood or charcoal production, soil degrades, farmers cant grow things. So--thats what im learning about

I'm really looking forward to our upcoming adventures, but am most excited to be on my own in Lushoto. I have tons more to say, and 1 minute left on the computer. lots of love, becs