Wrapping up in Tanzania!

FINAL 3 WEEK COUNT-DOWN IN TANZANIA

Students working hard on their final research papers under the fan at our home on  campu

Jim beginning to see the light at the end of the
 tunnel as program draws to a close

Two of our Tanzanian colleagues essential to success
 of the program: Paulina and Dr. Kessey

Students Heather and Joanne at the final poster session

Since our last blog post the Tanzanian ACM program has ended.  We now have the challenge of integrating our experiences into our lives back home.  Following the 6 weeks camping in the field we returned to Dar es Salaam for 3 weeks of relative calm.  The students lived with host families spread around campus and busily tried to pull all their data together into some semblance of coherence.  Jim was kept on his toes helping them with their statistics, sentence construction, and asking the bigger questions such as “how will this research of mine contribute to furthering our knowledge on this subject?”.  The effort all culminated in a final poster presentation where the proud students explained to their host family members and University staff and faculty what they’d been doing all this time in Tanzania.  It was a grand moment in celebration of a journey well-traveled.

Students heading off to the airport with too much luggage in auto-rickshaw!

Then came the packing up and departing scramble, leaving Jim and I sighing with relief, knowing we’d done our best to provide guidance and encouragement and structure to these 22 students in a world apart from anything any of us had known before.  They left eager for chocolate brownies, smoothies, and fresh vegetables that didn’t have to be cooked.  They knew it would be hard to explain to loved ones what they’d just experienced for the past several months but were very ready to launch back into the world of flush toilets, hot water out of a tap and friends and families gathering for Christmas holidays.

Hand-made tool used to steal Jim's computer and Carol's phone out of our home on last night of the program.

Our moment of delight and sense of well-being after waving goodbye to our students was short-lived.  At 3:30 AM Jim was roused out of bed by our night guard as a robber had just cut through a window screen and stolen Jim’s computer and my phone.  Luckily the robber couldn't get into the house because of sturdy bars on the windows and no one was hurt but our guard was quickly accused by the police of being the primary suspect in the robbery.  Apparently this is the norm: to blame the most available person, but fortunately Jim was able to stop that silliness and ensure our trustworthy guard’s freedom.  Being without a computer put a wrench in Jim’s plans to wrap up the final grading of student papers and course budget (my computer had met an untimely demise a few weeks earlier due to humidity and the well-intentioned but unfortunate efforts of a repair man).   The heat really began to wilt our enthusiasm for more travel in tropical Tanzania so we rather spontaneously agreed that a cooler, northern clime sounded perfect for some emotional decompression before meeting up with Tela in India.  Off to Greece we flew.  (See our next blog post for photos of this next leg of our journey).

Tanzania has been an amazing experience.  It’s hard to wrap it up into a few short sentences but we hope the photos give a sense of what we've been doing these past several months.  We think the students had a great adventure, intense at times as they adjusted to a culture so very different than their own in the states, yet full of the vibrancy and open welcome of a people with so little materially who gave so much.  The Tanzanian people embraced us, taught us and laughed with us as we explored their world.  The 25% of the country set aside as Natural Parks was breathtakingly beautiful. We reveled in the herds of free roaming elephants, the night time yipping of hyenas on the prowl and the pastoral grazing of giraffes. We felt privileged to spend intimate time with the Maasai people as they explained their ways of being in a rapidly changing environment.  We learned of past slavery and experienced a present-day Muslim community on Zanzibar Island which was powerful for all of us, breaking down stereotypes and offering new understandings of our shared humanity.  Seeing fossils that trace our early ancestry gave a new perspective on our lives in the present, so fleeting.   Tanzanians are proud of their country and have done an amazing job of uniting many tribes into a vision of a nation with compassion for one another, education for all and hope for the future.  We are so very grateful for the opportunity to share in their daily efforts to keep their country moving forward.