Trip to the Maasai Region & Gunge welcome celebration

We left Springsland and Moshi Sunday morning for the Maasai region.  I woke up at 3:30am.  Nervous? Excited? I wasn't sure which.  I loved the time in Moshi, the friendly staff at Springsland, spending time at TAFCOM, and now we were going somewhere completely new and different.

After tossing and turning for an hour, I got out of bed and went outside.  It was only 9:30 in CT.  I spent the next hour texting with my friend Karen and messaging with Brian. I started to feel tired again, and got my first mosquito bites sitting outside, so I went back into the room.  Tossed and turned for another hour before getting up to finish packing. It started pouring during breakfast.  This was a first! It gave me a chance to wear Dad's floppy hat! 

We all loaded the bus with all the bags of supplies that we were bringing to the 3 schools.  Our group included the 11 of us with Friends-Together including Bernard, and Kelly, Roger, and Usaif from Tanzacare.  We would drive the 3 hours to the hotel, then travel another hour out to the Gunge school.  Gunge is the first school that Tanzacare partnered with and the benefits have extended from the students at the school out into the community.

The ride to the hotel was only about 2 hours, not the 3 we were expecting.  We had paved roads!! And there was wifi on the bus, which was a surprise- it wasn't a very good signal, but still - wifi on a bus in the middle of nowhere Africa??

The mountain across the street from the Nzouri Hotel.  The hotel has nice rooms, with TVs (ours doesn't really work), AC, WIFI (yeah... that doesn't work either.  I'm typing this up using the app to upload when we get back to Springlands). The staff also have very limited English.

 

The mountains and scenery on the way to Gunge was beautiful. The roads were paved, but there was lots of construction.  they use rocks to deter people from riding on the closed roads.

We finally arrived at Gunge.  You could see the children all lined up in the drive way to greet the bus.  As we pulled closer, we could hear them singing!  "We are very happy to see you! Very, very, very, very glad to see you!" I don't know if it was because I was so tired, but I got really emotional  and 

had to work hard to keep from bursting into tears!

I don't think you can see the video above on a mobile device. I also uploaded them to YouTube:

http://youtu.be/9xZKTjpVTR0.    http://youtu.be/73ej3k_b0gw.   http://youtu.be/JYaiQYuDuWc

We all gathered in front of the school. This was an 

opportunity for us to meet everyone, but also for the whole community to get together to hear the latest budget reports etc. We were introduced to the head of the school, and 3 teachers (all male).

The budget report was read by the secretary, a woman named Agnes that introduced us to her baby, Roger, earlier.  Yes, Roger is named after Roger from Tanzacare.  That is how important Tanzacare is to this community!  

We each stood up, gave our names and where we were from.  Uslaif transulated everything, as this community is not fluent in English. It was funny as he asked the children an community to repeat our names and states as we introduced ourselves.  They had a lot of trouble with Connecticut.  Owen was whispering to me, "Just say New York!"

Kelly and Roger were presented with gifts from the community, purple wraps that were draped on them in the typical Maasai fashion.

The school has 4 classrooms, all similar to this one. The blackboard is an actual piece of slate.  There are desks, but they were outside to provide seating during the ceremony

Tanzacare raised the money to build the fourth classroomand add cement floors and roofs to the buildings.  They also finished the construction of the teacher's quarters behind the classrooms. Some of the teachers travel so far that they stay at the school during the week. The quarters are also sometimes used for volunteers.

One of the teachers painted the murals on the outside of the buildings.  After the ceremony, the Maasai women took us out to see the progress on their gardens.  We set out for a 5-10 minute walk that was actually closer to 45 minutes.  We saw lots of goats on the way!

                          http://youtu.be/E93Coh4F1YY

We saw the river where they get their water.  It's about a 20 minute walk from the school and the garden.  The water comes from Mt. Kilimanjaro.  We didn't see any crocodiles, but they are in there....

This is the start of the Massai women's small farm. All plowing is done by hand. In Tanzania all of the land is owned by the President, and leased by the people. Tanzania has only been independent from Britain since 1961. Bernard was incensed by this, exclaiming, "No, no, no! That is not right! Come to Uganda!" Everyone laughed. 

When we walked back to the school the kids were all playing on the soccer field.  Owen joined in.

A meal was prepared for us, cooked by the Maasai women. The food included rice, fried banana, goat meat, goat intestines, avocado, watermelon and juice.  Owen and I both had rice and watermelon and I had some avocado.  Others tried the meat, some unaware of what they were eating at first!

After dinner we got a tour of the teacher's quarters before heading back to the hotel. I also experienced a third world toilet. Enough said!