Non-Program Day

Today was our first non-program day so we went to a village and they told us about their marriage traditions and they showed up some of their houses. Some of the girls were able to wear traditional wedding skirts and the rest of us wore a drape. Then we did some tribal dancing which was pretty cool. We also went into town and walked around the market. I purchased some fabric so I can have a skirt and a headband made my the tailor that live next to camp, I’m super pumped about it. The locals swarmed us with merchandise trying to get us so buy some but they just didn’t have anything that I really wanted.

Later we want to a restaurant called Happy Days which is run by people from south Africa and they serve American food and beer. So all of us sat down for some cheese burgers and some good old African beer. We tried Tuskers, Kilimanjaro, and Safari beer, all of them were pretty good and we were just happy because it was cold. So after we got back from happy days I decided the tipsy state of mind I was in was not appropriate to write my paper so I did laundry instead. Which was honestly a disaster. Most people can do their laundry in one bucket, not me I needed two. It was not the greatest experience and I think I might just have one of the locals do it for me for now on. My wife skills are next to nothing.

In town there is also a medical center called Fame Medics and it is run by a husband and wife from the states. They came to Africa one year to climb mount Kili and the husband got really bad altitude sickness and he told his wife if he survived they were going to come back and open a clinic to help people, long behold here they are. The clinic is amazing, they have a pharmacy and right now they are building an inpatient ward. They have volunteer doctors come in to do eye checks and things like that periodically for the locals. What is really nice is they have lower prices for the locals and us, but of coarse they have to charge tourists more which only makes sense. So we all feel super safe here knowing the American clinic is only ten minutes away.

We have all been stressed about the fact that if we go on a walk we might end up in someones yard. Whitney has told us that if it happens just wave and say hi and they will just wave back. It’s not a big deal at all, she said they will just talk about it at dinner “so a white person walked through our yard today” , we all found that pretty amusing.  Tomorrow will be a long day of class and working on papers since I have pretty much taken the entire day off but everyone needs a break every once in a while.