On the beach

27/07/2011
Early morning again - although our departure times have been significantly better than my "early mornings" in Central America.
We left the chaos of Dar for the island ferry that mum had mentioned when talking about Kipapeo, but at the neighbouring resort - Sunrise Beach.
It seemed perfectly set and very Westernised, alhtough the tents we were staying in were incredibly shabby with the windows ripped and a number of holes in mosquito nets.
Our door wouldn't even lock!

The biggest downer on the day was that it was raining.  It wasn't the end of the world for the majority of us who had been in Zanzibar, but I felt sorry for people like Mica and Karina who'd only just arrived.

Training was fairly useful, a talk on health and safety, but the biggest downer was we lost Lucy and Pippa to another project as they only had two volunteers.
I potentially think that they have a better deal, but the biggest thing for me was losing two strong Swahili speakers and I know most of my group can muster a couple of words.

I do agree with their reasoning - if it were me I'd definitely be making that decision.
I think I was disappointed to lose them and to not have a full team of volunteers.

In the afternoon we visited a centre for street children; a set up similar to CENIT in Ecuador where children follow an education programme.
There is a programme for school returners and there are skills classes such as carpentry and sewing.
They use their jewellery sales to help raise money for the centre and also an acrobatics performance group which travels around providing shows.

As we watched the gymnastics display, I was reminded of seeing some casual gymnastics on a Zanzibar beach and realising how good these kids are - some doing moves that are performed in olympic routines.
If they were given proper support / training they could compete at top level.  It's crazy.

Read has supported the centre providing books for a library and you can see what a difference it has made to their level of education. It was really refreshing to see.
I had a really bad nights' sleep - I used to love the sound of the waves, but I felt really unsafe and they sounded aggressive and all I could see was images of Tsunamis.

28/07/2011

Today was windy, rainy and cold.
The only positive from this was that we spent an intensive day of training so we weren't missing out on sunshine.
Training was really useful, although I am slightly confused why this information couldn't have been given to us prior to this point.

There are certain aspects such as our school list and library information that we obviously wouldn't know, but the training we did for pre-distribution and distribution and even for the library refurbishment could definitely be done in the London trainings.
That way you can plan way more and even bring more materials with you if necessary.

The regional guides would have been useful too so that we could plan our route much more in advance.

When we were on the beach we were regularly interrupted (chatted to by a "Masaai warrior" - he'd obviously got a bit lost if he was in Dar, but as Sam pointed out, a lot of the Masaai adopt this position now for varying points in their lives so that they can make a living, before returning to their traditional way of life).
He was incredibly enthusiastic and it was weird how his songs sounded like a number of the children's songs in my dissertation. The tone range was a lot greater than that of the children's songs, which maybe explains the difference in style.

In the evening we held a quiz - a Tanzanian quiz and one of our own. I love my amazing knowledge of Africa. We totally rocked the Tanzania quiz!
We were a little less good at the quiz set bt everyone else, possibly because the questions were so directly related to each person and each group.
All in all, it was a fun evening, but I was looking forward to getting to the region finally.