Hello!

This weekend was another good one. Saturday, I went to the market with Eva. When she told me we were going to the market, I thought it was the food market. Instead, we walked through a dirt path, past burning garbage to rows and rows of wooden shacks with "Western goods". There were some with just sheets, some with jeans, some with aprons one that said, "Feeling Foxy at forty." It was like a mall...kind of. In one area there were women sitting in piles of shoes just yelling in swahili what i think were prices really fast, like an auction. Saturday night, I had a very unusual experience and went to Miss Kilimanjaro. Of course it started 3 hours later than it was supposed. Here people say we are on TFT..or Tanzanian flex time which sometimes turns into TMT or Tanzanian maybe time. It was like Miss USA. It was outside at club Laliga, and the participants were, like in any pagaent, clones of each other. All were tall, thin and very relaxed, straight hair. There were also really strange performances in-between the time with contestants. There was a dance group that daggered!...Jamaican, very sexual, club dancing for those who don't know. Tanzanians love ass shaking. During the talent portion, some girls decided to do skits. One, I think was about a girl getting pregnant, but I can't be sure. Another, was about a woman and her drunken husband who beat her and took her money for alcohol. The audience laughed, but I'm pretty sure there was a serious message in there. Most of the other girls' "talents" were lip syncing. I was unaware this was a talent. There were a million other performances from Tanzanian singers and dancers. I half watched the competition but spent a lot of time at the bar watching the U.S. V. England game. Most people, not just Americans watched as well. World Cup is crazy here. Everywhere I am I hear the game being played from somewhere. The kids in my neighborhood stand around a really small TV outside and watch, with the chickens of course running nearby. It's kind of nice to be in a country that actually likes soccer.

Sunday morning I woke up very early for a mini, day safari in Arusha National Park. I went with a few volunteers from CCS. When we got to the park, after having paid the guide lots of shilangi, he asked us for money because the park's credit card machine was broken. We didn't have money left, so he went to go deal with that with one of the girls in our group of 4. The rest of us 3 waited in the land rover. He had left the car running, so we decided that we would help him save gas and would turn the car off. When he returned, he said, "What did you just do? It had very little charge." So, of course the car wouldn't start at the entrance to a National Park that was over an hour away from where all of us lived in Moshi. Some guys gave the car a push, and thank God, it worked! When we first entered the park, we saw about 5 giraffes. Giraffes in the wild are amazing. Throughout the day we saw a million of them...not literally....but a lot. We also saw zebras, baboons, warthogs, water buck, colubus monkeys, tropical birds, and unfortunately, just elephant poop but no actual elephants. Hopefully when I go on a larger safari I'll see them. A note about safaris though, most Tanzanians will never go on a safari and see animals like Giraffes since they don't have zoos either. It's pretty depressing to drive past the small villages on the outskirts of parks, like literally there are mud huts all the way up to the doors of Arusha National Park with children who will never get to simply pass through the gates.

At night, Vivian, the American woman who I learned about WEECE from, came over for dinner. It was great to see her and her friend, Cynthia. They both played mom and asked whether I'd gotten sick, made sure I was being safe with water, taking malaria pills, being safe at night, etc. That's all for now, as I'm a bit tired. More in a couple of days.