MIS Tanzania Projects 2013 - Day 1 & 2

Sitting down and looking through 20some photos on Picasa, I realize I have to verbalize (in reader-friendly format) some of my reflections. “Whoa!” is a good starting place.

I arrived in Tanzania 15 days ago and it’s been a non-stop 15 days since touch-down. It has been an incredible experience. It has taught me much about myself. It has changed the way I look at the world, as most of my travel experiences do, but this time in a much more extravagant way. It has put me in contact with a loving, passionate and influential group of students and adults who, in some way, became my temporary family for 15 days.

I’ll recap my experiences as individual blogs for each day…I know I can write too much so I’ll go day by blog!

Day 1 and 2 – Arrival and First Full Day in Africa!

I left Starnberg at an early hour (very early…3:30am) on Friday, June 28th to meet the students, their parents and other teachers…chaperone/projects coordinator/trip leader. We then arrive at Kilimanjaro International Airport around 7:30pm to be greeted by one of eight Maasai leaders in Tanzania, Dr. Ole Kunney. I met him before at MIS when he came to visit and this man seems like a pretty big deal…probably because he is! He greets all of us with a giant bear hug and then we wait to pass through immigration for an hour, collect bags and begin our journey to International School of Moshi (ISM) on this big open-air converted dump truck. Upon arrival, we’re again greeted but this time with pizza and orange juice…and room assignments for the next 10ish days. Bed was also high on my priority list and even though springs dug into me, I slept like a champ that night. Holy cow…I’m in Africa…!

The next morning we wake up, head to breakfast at a much earlier hour than I’d ever even consider on a Saturday…the first Saturday at the end of the school year…but hey! We saw Afzal there, who I quickly met at the airport when he greeted us, and enjoyed a nice meal…the cafeteria at ISM was one of the best continuous food experiences I’ve ever had in my life…and headed off to the first “project” of the trip.

So, I feel I need to back up a bit and here’s a good place to do it. I’m chaperoning a school-related (though not completely ‘school’) trip to Tanzania. I knew I wanted to do at/with MIS before I even started working here. How it works is that there’s a yearly trip to Tanzania planned by a trip leader, projects that are ‘seen to’ and planned by a trip coordinator and chaperoned by two other members of staff. Students write letters of application, have interviews and are selected to join a group of like-minded students. They then spend the school year raising funds, collecting donations and preparing for this end-of-year trip to help out those in need, experience some pretty amazing volunteer work and exude some awesome humanitarian skills. Fortunately, I was chosen as a trip chaperone!

We rolled into Neema Orphanage between 9 and 9:30 in the morning. We were welcomed by a couple of sisters (the Catholic kind) and a number of children mostly under the age of 3. There was also a group of four girls there from the States who had connections to the orphanage through their their church and who were doing a nice thing in helping out at the orphanage for 3 or 4 weeks of their summer break. It took about 1 minute (no joke), for a kid to make a move to someone from our group’s legs. These kids were SUCH a delight. They would ask your name, say hello, smile with you, want to be picked up, cuddled, still smile with you, play with your camera…just be kids! Despite not having parents, these kids has an amazing lady (Sister Hazel) and a group of staff there to help take care of all (25) of these children. What we did for this project was donate clothes and toys; the students had gathered baby clothes donations during the school year. I was very familiar with this project as I spent quite some time folding, packing, and labeling these clothes before the trip had started. Also, in a discussion with my department colleague, I learned that the idea of donating clothes in Africa is starting to be frowned upon; we should be giving them the education and tools they need to resource the making of their own clothes. Nonetheless, the clothes were very welcomed – there were a lot of them! – and you could see that these clothes would go to good use. A group of three MIS students gave a little thank you speech and officially donated the clothes, we did some handshaking but the best part of it all was the children. It was the interactions I saw the students having with the little ones, the interaction I was having with the little ones and the smiles on their faces all the while. We stayed around until 1 or 1:30, had some difficult goodbyes and headed back to ISM for lunch. First project: done! I thought it was pretty easy and would have enjoyed staying longer, but after our longish flight the day before, we were tired. After lunch, we head into the city of Moshi to exchange money and just look around. From what we see, it's a friendly little place but then again, we only see a couple of streets of it...we find out later it's not like that everywhere in the city. After an hour or so exploring around, we head back to ISM for a little down time. 

At 6ish, we sat down to dinner, with Afzal, and we realized now that we were going to be completely spoiled with delicious food for the duration of our stay at ISM...this is very good news! It didn’t matter what was going to be there, it would be delicious and the students were realizing this too. The evening was given to the students to mingle and chill out and I bonded with Mr. Joshi, Mr. Arnoldt, Mr. Huber and Afzal in his apartment. Afzal - This man is a legend at ISM and with anyone who's ever met him through the MIS Tanzania Projects. He organizes everything for the Moshi leg of the trip (which is 12 days total), he’ll do anything to accommodate you and he’s just known to be such a nice guy. He organizes many other excursions for visiting schools programs as well so someone reading this, may know him if they've ever been on a school trip to Tanzania.  

...The group of us gets to chat, share stories about past experiences in Tanzania (and elsewhere) and it was a nice wrap to the day.

First impressions of Tanzania in daylight - plants for sale in Moshi

Some of our students still not sure what to do with all these kids...

This was this guy's pose...I have a few photos of him doing it...very original! :)

Try and tell me this doesn't melt your heart!

The boy walking away had a serious connection with a couple of kids...including this one...who cried when he realized Titus was going away from him!

Instant love :)

The donations all laid out...proud moment for me of these MIS students!

Sister Hazel and two of her darlings.

Downtown Moshi...that's a big beer can!

Meat stall in Moshi Market

Hustle and bustle of the market

Our first glimpse of Mt. Kilimanjaro...amazing right?