5th Day in Moshi

By Carolyn

We’re on our 5^th day in Moshi and all is really good. We think we made a great decision to come here as it seems to be all that we were hoping for.  At 125,000 people Moshi is not a big city,  and we live in a sleepy neighborhood 2 miles outside the center of town. The sights and smells are familiar in that they remind us of prior travels. From the women walking with full baskets on their heads to children walking to school in their uniforms, the roosters crowing in the morning, the guard dogs barking at night, and just the wonderful peaceful feel that is so unlike big Seattle.

Mary

Keith and I won’t be working here, so we have all the time in the world to clean and cook and whatever else, and we never had a cleaning person in Seattle, but as all of you travelers know, it’s important to support local people by employing them. Mary has cleaned for residents in this house for years including the prior family, here from Maine, who highly recommended we keep Mary. She’s a single mom of 3 teenagers, who greatly needs the work, lives nearby, and more importantly, she’s just wonderful and we are already so glad to know her. She speaks some English and patiently teaches us Swahili.  Our first day, she went with us to town to navigate all the places for our initial purchases, and she helped us understand our new home – how electricity works, the water heater for showers, the many locks for our back door, front door and front gate.  Yesterday she played tour guide and took us on a long walk around Shantytown. We already love Mary.

School
Ian’s school seems to be just what we hoped for and more. School starts Monday (yes, Ian got shorted a month of summer vacation) but today we got to meet his teacher, Miss Sarah, and had a little tour. The school serves 400 students, both boarders and day schoolers, but seems much smaller than that. Ian will have 20 kids in his class, same as at home. Miss Sarah is British and has taught in international schools in Uganda, Romania and now here as of last year.  The campus is on 50 acres with a pool, horse stables, large field for soccer and rugby, and a somewhat run-down looking playground (though Ian thinks it's great). The classrooms are all one story and open to the outside. Ian’s excited that they get 60 minutes for PE, twice per week, one day of which is swimming. We’re excited that Ian will likely get more swimming practice here and will be able to swim more than 1 length of the pool when he leaves. The school uniform is simply the school t-shirt in a variety of colors, and kids are required to wear a baseball cap when outside for sun protection. The library is filled with books - many are quite old, perhaps from when the school opened 30 years ago, but there are plenty of newer ones that Ian is familiar with and excited about. We had to drag him out of there!  The curriculum is international baccalaureate for all grades K-12 so it should be good quality. Every staff person we have met has been super friendly and welcoming, same with the families we have met.

Ian
Ian is currently playing at his new friend Arthur’s house, where he also spent much of yesterday. Arthur’s family is from Germany and has lived here a couple years. They run a beautiful lodge on the foothills of Kilimanjaro, catering to those who’ll climb Kili. Apparently in Ian’s 5^th grade class there are not many boys who are not boarders, so Arthur is super excited to have Ian here. I don’t think we’ll see much of Ian as they get along great, we didn’t bring much to play with and Arthur’s house has everything and lots of outdoor space.  Keith is very excited because they have a very nice foosball table, and Arthur's father has a library of probably over 400 history and travel books.

Ian has a great attitude about being here, even with his lack of regular sleep and upset stomach. Tanzania is 10 hours different from Seattle so we each struggle with the jet lag effect, lying awake for several hours in the middle of the night. I'm sure we have puffy bags under our eyes in the photo above, so don't enlarge it. This is why we arrived a week before school was to start.  The malaria pills we were advised to take made Ian nauseous the first two days he took them, so we called it quits. Most people here do not take the malaria prevention pills because while malaria exists, it’s very rare (just a few known cases around here) that it’s not worth the short and long term effects. We’ll do as everyone else and just watch for any signs of malaria (fever mostly) and treat if quickly if we see it. The treatment is quite inexpensive and takes just 5 days for recovery.

No power
We woke today to no electricity, our second time experiencing this in our 5 days, apparently it's quite common and could continue to go off during the daytime for the next month due to some upgrades. It usually comes back on around 7pm. So, we now know to charge everything up while we have the electricity and deal with the outages. It’s not hard, this laptop lasts long enough, and who needs lights on during the day? Fortunately our house has solar lights in each room, which provide dim light which is better than nothing if the outage lasts into the evening. We avoid opening the fridge, don’t store meat, and were advised to not keep much in the freezer. The school has a large generator so it shouldn’t be much problem there either. 

We’re here to live differently, so this is one of the many things we kind of enjoy getting used to.