Hey everybody!

So so sorry for the long gap! Can't really believe its been 6 weeks because it really has flown by.Stacey and I have now left Amani center and have started our 2 weeks of freedom before she flies back to England.

So where to begin…

I think the last time I wrote, the previous volunteers were visiting for one night and were then off to Zanzibar. That week we got invited to Amani awareness group performance. The previous volunteers had mentioned an awareness group but this was the first we'd heard of them. Turns out they are a group of traditional dancers and musicians who do sketches in neighboring villages in order to raise awareness for the Amani center and the disabled. So a massive bunch of us bundled into a truck, instruments and costumes and everything and helped set up the drums in the street. They truly are amazing! I've never seen someone shake their ass like that lol. Obviously we didn't really understand the role plays but they certainly gathered a crowd. I'll be trying to put up some videos once I'm back.

That evening I also went on a pikipiki (motorbike) for the first time. They use them as taxi's here. I didn't think I'd ever really go on one (here especially as most of the drivers are drunk) but at least it was a friend driving.It's crazy, you see mothers going on them with 3 kids plus the driver down the dirt tracks around here!

That weekend it was our turn to go to Zanzibar for my birthday J.

As Lattitude Global volunteering has a placement in Dar, we spent our first weekend off with Laura and Meg, 2 girls from Australia. In fact there are only 3 of us from England. The rest of the 16 of us are from down under. We went to south beach for the first time. It is an island 10 minutes boat ride for 5p from Dar with a whole load of white sand beaches. We spent the day roasting under the sun and had dinner with their host Mama at the house. However, the journey there wasn't uneventful! It rained the whole way there and we had a bit of trouble finding the ferry for Southbeach and ended going through the Dar es Salaam fish market by accident. You can imagine the delightful smells of 100 fish stools and yelling fisherman! The other girls were nearly sick from it.

We didn't do much that weekend, just a couple walks to the beach dinner out but their house and their host mama was so nice, it was good just to chill out in an actual house for once. Where we live is a hostel and I hadn't realised quite how much I was missing a good old sofa!

However, there was a ban the night we had dinner on the beach and we were making such idiots out of ourselves trying to copy the professional dancers on stage that we got invited up on stage to take over! (we were pretty noticeable being the only 4 wazungu on the dance floor)

Next day, Their host mama organised everything and we got up early for the ferry to Zanzibar J. Luckily our residence permits made everything a bit cheaper this time round.

Zanzibar was a totally different place this time. Although i knew that the last time i went had been off season, i had no idea that Stone town practically turned into a land of wazungus in season! It was crazy. We met up with Bianca in town as planned and she had already met a lot people, as well as kept spotting people she'd seen in Arusha or whatever (she had just got back form climing mount Kili). First plan was to go up north because we had heard it was a good place to be spending a birthday. The plan was to spend a couple nights there before heading east for our last couple night on the island.

But not before Stacey had found out she had run out of money. As the only cash points on the island are in Stone town, this was a bit of a problem! Luckily the receptionist from the hostel i stayed at last time remembered me and Bianca had just gone to the Zanzibar festival with him so he let us chill with him until Stace's bank was sorted out and we were on our way. Having not made it out of Stone town last time, I hadn't realised quite how little there is on Zanzibar once you're out of the main inhabited areas...as soon as you had walked out of the posh beach resorts and past a couple of very small restaurants, there was just dirt track and a couple of mud huts. I couldn't quite believe how little the wealth made from tourism HADN'T reached the locals of the island.

Once at Nungwi...we relaxed J. Unluckily this was the really touristy part of the island so we did our best to ignore the millions of calls of 'rafiki' from people trying to sell us things on the beach. However, our hut was literally on the beach and so we celebrated being re-united with Bianca with a few cocktails at the beachbarThere happended to be a small camp fire just down the beach from the bar so once we finshed our drink, we went to join in. At first, it just looked like a couple of rastas smoking round a fire, but after a while, a small crowd had gathered, both of mzungu and Maasai. Including a monkey! Someone had brought the drums and the guys on the master drum and the cutest little monkey falling asleep on his arm as he jammed away! Turned out it was a big celebration for an Italian couple because they were getting married. I was surprised to find out how many people on the island spoke Italian. Apparently the amount of tourists coming in from Italy is so much that a lot of the locals speak more Italian than English. Once the whole crowd was there, the drinks and the drums came out and we were being passed their drums and told to dance and sing along with them till the early hours of the morning.

So what's the first thing to do as a 19 year old having your birthday on a gorgeous little tropical island off the edge of east Africa? We went swimming in the midnight sea of course. But before that, I hadn't realised that my friends had asked them to look out for midnight, so we had the whole camp fire crowd singing happy birthday and we had gave our congratulations to the happy couple before going on our way.

We had heard there was an aquarium further up the beach from the beach form us so on the 20th, we walked further up north right to the tip of the island. Turned out 'aquarium' meant a natural rock pool just inland, where they had placed 15 sea turtles and a whole load of tropical fish. It cost to get in and then you could pay extra to swim with them. As we managed to get a birthday discount, the guy there taught us how to feed them from our mouths and get them to pull us round the pool. The only other animal they had was a python who was asleep and apparently would be for the next week because he had just eaten! Once back from the aquarium, i went to go join Bianca on the beach...to find she had befriended several maasai. We passed the afternoon learning their traditional jumping dances and grunting songs! As they spoke very little English, it certainly tested out how much Swahili i had really learned so far! It's not every day you can come home saying you have fed and swam with giant turtles and learned a Maasai dance so it was certainly a birthday i will never forget!

For the evening, we walked to Kendwa, another village 20 minutes down the beach where we had heard there was a party. However, the only way to get there is along the beach and the tide, if you catch it at the wrong time, makes it impossible to pass. Especially as some of the more snooty resorts don't let you take refuge at the bottom of their steps. Luckily we didn't have to wade too deep but Bianca walked back with some girls we had met in our hostel and they ended up sitting with a hotel guard for 3 hours before they could continue! Stacey and I ended up getting a taxi back with about 10 other students staying in our hostel cos she had heard stories of muggings and was also afraid of the tide.

We watched the most beautiful sunset on the way there though and walked past several beach resorts of which i will never be able to afford! But i also got a bit of a surprise on the way...Jessica (the girl from safari who had helped me out so much) was at on the beach with her boyfriend, enjoying the last couple days before going back to California. It was lovely to see her and it meant she came down to the bar for a bit. The night started with a whole load of acrobatics by the staff whilst the rest was danced away J

Next day we got an early bus to Stone Town in order to get another one out to the east the same day. Stace and I ended up paying way too much and I had a yelling match with the bus driver for the whole journey trying to get our money back. I felt sorry for the other people on the bus! It certainly wasn't a normal introduction! I was so angry at how they think they can get away with anything here though. I think that's the very first time i've properly stood up for myself out here though so was kind of proud (despite still fuming) by the time we got off. Once we arrived, all our worried just floated away...it was that nice! I have never been to such a heavenly place in my life and the best thing was that there were so few tourists that there was absolutely no hassle of people trying to sell you things, just the cries of locals coming out at low tide to play football till dusk. It was amazing, once the tide was out the white sands stretched for miles and you could see the women going out bright and early in the mornings to plant seaweed for selling. We whiled away the afternoon sat way out to sea on a sand peninsular, i really don't remember the last time i was that relaxed so if you ever need to escape...i'd recommend that place any day! (though it will probably be overrun with tourists in a couple years). I kind of wanted to go back before i left Tanzania but it doesn't look like we will be able to, there's plenty more new things we're hoping to visit in Tanzania. The reason I was hoping to go back and take full advantage of this setting was because I got very ill that day and proceeded to spend the next 10 days in bed L. The 2nd day i was ill, we called a doctor out because i could barely move but all he could tell me is that i didn't have malaria and that i should be drinking lots of water...because i didn't know that already. Bianca is about to go off and study as a nurse and Stacey has just finished her health and social diploma...i think they could have told more than the doctor could! But anyway. The next day, i felt a tiny bit better and went to a nearby butterfly sanctuary with the girls. It wasn't big but it had been set up to prevent the locals from shooting the wildlife, instead, they could get tourism money by collecting these butterflies. After a long long sleep, i was craving food and assumed i was a lot better...big mistake. Our host had cooked me a vegetable curry, which of course, meant i was ill for another 8 days. We had to move out of where we had been staying because we had told the man we would only be staying 2 nights and he had new guests coming but there was no way i could have travelled back to Morogoro that day so i ended up running up and down those beaches to all the resorts, trying to find me and Stacey some decently priced accommodation. I spent the rest of the time on Zanzibar trying to not lose my patience with Stacey for going off with a guy the whole rest of the time we were there while i was feeling like rubbish but anyway. We managed to make it all the way back to Morogoro the next day and i was able to recover in my own bed. The day after we got back however, a school of 22 kids came to visit the amani center for a week and a half and were staying in the hostel with us. It was quite nice because it meant we could join in in their project of painting the amani main hall but it was certainly a big change from what stacey and i were used too...just us! Racheal got back from Arusha with her 181 mosquito nets too and had to bunk in with us. So that's what I've been doing most recently.

The school's cook and guide meant that rach and Stace went out most nights and so i started feeling really guilty for not doing anything for the amani center. They started staying in bed till 1 p.m so i started doing day care myself. Even the teachers tend to wonder in and out of the classroom. however, there's only so much of that one can take! It's really hard to know what to do 20 disabled children stuck in one room when the only stimulation is ripped books, broken jigsaws and colouring-in pictures that already have several scribbles all over them. So if you feel you know of anything that would help entertain and stimulate these children in the mornings...please don't hesitate to tell me or feel free to send it to the centre because i felt like these kids need something but as i have absolutely no experience with disabled children what so ever, i just didn't know where to start.

That week, Rach took me to a school she and her fellow volunteers used to teach at when she was here. It was a church run private school and was a secondary school that ran in the afternoons when she was here. However, when we turned up, although they accepted the idea of having a 'student teacher' teaching their kids, there was only 4 classes, all of which ran in the morning during day care and all of whom were between the ages 3-6. They didn't ask if i had had any experience with kids or anything, they literally assumed i meant full-time and asked me to start on Monday. As i wanted to do something more (it really felt like we weren't contributing anything to the center), i said i'd come teach 2 times a week despite the fact that i'd be missing amani day-care and i'd have either Rach or Stace as an assistant. The school from England being there really made me notice how little we were contributing to the center as they had done more work in the last 2 days by stripping down the whole of the main hall and starting to re-paint it again than we had in the whole 2 month we had been there.

Once i turned up on Tuesday, (rather pissed off as the girls had promised to assist me for my first time but had come back too late the night before to get up in time...exactly what i needed for my nerves) it turned out they had expected me to teach the whole morning of class, not just English! I finished teaching my hour of English and then the teacher came up to me and said 'ok, now is maths'! i mean i like teaching but that, i wasn't going to do.To get to the school, we had to walk through the grounds of a public school and my gosh do those kids get excited when they see wazungu! They were hanging out of their classroom doorframe (no door) shouting 'good morning teacher' whether it be morning of evening J. The kids at my school (St. Vincent's) just seemed petrified of us until you brought out games of some sort. I hadn't realised that in order to be an English teacher in Tanzania, you have to have learned your script first! I turned up during assembly on the first day and was placed in front of all the kids sat on the steps in the courtyard. Of course i said goodmorning and they chanted back but what i didn't know was that my next line was 'how are you?' and so they carried on anyway...'we are fine thank you teacher!' it was all i could do to stop myself from bursting out laughing in front of all the teachers and students cos they clearly had no clue what they were saying. They even said some of their prayers in English, whether they do it every day or the teachers had made the purely for my benefit, i have no idea. The other lines I should have learned were 'you may sit down now students' at which they all replied 'we are sitting down now teacher' and each would ask if they could 'come in now teacher' if they had asked to go to the toilet.

That weekend, the majority of us Lattitude lot tried to meet up for the first time since getting to our placements. Stacey didn't come cos she wasn't feeling well. Neither was i but I decided that going to Dar and getting a proper malaria test done would be a good idea anyway and it would be nice to meet up with some other people and find out a bit more about their placements. They were all staying at a friend's house. It turned out this was a close friend of the headmaster's from the international school in Morogoro and has since become a very close friend. The bus journey there was not a good once seeing as i chose the wrong bus company to go with which stopped everywhere. So instead of taking 3 hours, we took 5 and it was dark by the time i got there. However, the journey was made interesting by being given the cutest little baby girl to look after and the women next to me hearing my Swahili and pretending to the boys who sell stuff through the window that they were stupid and 'how could they not tell that i was albino, not mzungu'! It was hilarious! She heard me speak a tiny bit of Swahili and assumed i spoke really well so we spent the rest of the journey giggling about it. I didn't realise quite how common it was but there are a lot of albinos here.

That night was a really good night out and after most people had either gone to bed or we had left them at the club to carry on dancing till daylight, Said (the friend's place we were staying at) and I went to go watch the sunrise at the beach, which was 1 minutes drive away. By the time we came back, it was pretty much time to get the bus back to Morogoro. I thought i'd be having an early night after doing an all nighter but the night i got back to Morogoro turned out to be an eventful one too. It was the schools last night at amani center and so all the kids wanted to go out for a drink and weren't allowed. As they were 15-17 and already knew where the bar was, there was o point trying to stop them. So instead, Rachael gave them her phone number in case something happened. They weren't back late but they came back 2 people less than they had gone with and those who had returned looked rather shaken as they couldn't find the missing 2. We were just about to tell the teachers when they both came back on the same pikipiki, very drunk with no concerns whatsoever! It turned out that the cook and the guide (the 2 people Rach and Stace had been hanging out with for the last week) had seen them coming back and suggested they went to the pub together without telling anyone. And instead of answering when we called them 16 times in 15 minutes, they had decided that that was too risky as they might get in trouble and so had sent to the 2 girls back on a pikipiki and hidden! Rachael had even run up and down in every single pub in our area looking for the girls and they had seen her coming and disappeared into the toilets! I couldn't quite believe these were too full grown men once we had found out the whole storey seeing as most pikipiki drivers are drunk as it is but the that they hadn't even bothered to check if the girls had got home safely and had taken them out without telling anyone in the first place. The poor kids were so scared about their classmates.

After all the drama...i came home to our room to find i had a visitor. I had left a bucket of washing to soak for a couple hours. Only now it was a couple of soaking clothes plus a desperate rat! So i took him down stairs and freed him in the courtyard J we knew we had rats because i had changed down to the bottom bunk after finding numerous rat droppings on my top bunk when we came home from Zanzibar and had been too ill to change the sheets but i hadn't expected to find one in my wash bucket!

After the school left, 2 new physiotherapists showed up, Pippa and Jessica. That night we met a couple of Said's friends too, one of whom is the head of the primary part of the international school and has become like one of the family!

That weekend, we met a few more of Said's friends who all turned out to be ex-pats working in Morogoro tobacco company so we spent our first weekend with expats and having running water for once. Was good to get away for a while cos we didn't go home once that weekend but it certainly didn't feel like we were in Africa anymore.for example, about the only time we went out of the house was to drop in at the garage and go for a spin in Said's buggy cart! It felt really odd driving back into reality after that weekend. By this time, Stacey had befriended a local band and has gone out with them every night since, watching them till they finish work wherever they may be playing.So by the end of the weekend it felt like she had been living a different life to the rest of us cos she hadn't spent the weekend with us.

I got my very first set of post that week! It turned out that Ester, the woman who collects Amani's post from the post office had thought all my post was hers despite her spelling her name differently and it all having my surname and an English stamp on it! But anyway, i finally got a camera battery and my birthday card plus 3 weeks' worth of newspapers! So im afraid all of my photos taken after safari will only be dated from Tuesday 10th august. The next day, Rach and I had been given a contact for the mosquito nets. Rachael had come out having raised all this money for mosquito nets and was now panicking that she hadn't got rid of a single one and didn't know where to start. So i promised i'd help her as much as possible, which started by meeting up with a local who did a lot of work with charities and would know people in the area that would actually use them rather than selling them on.

The rest of our my time at Amani center has been either wandering around the local villages distributing nets to houses shown to us by Baba Omari, a teacher and father of one of the children at Amani center or helping out in Physio playing with the children or trying to make a website for the amani center. Which, if any of you know me, is the most ridiculous thing i've promised to do in a while considering how much i hate computers!

We went to visit one of the other placements at Kilombaro sugar schools the weekend of the 14th . That was where Stacey and I were originally placed. The area is beautiful and their work seems pretty intense with teaching 3 schools! But they are were living in an ex-pat community with all the foreign workers at the sugar factories there. They seem to really enjoy their placement but i'm pretty glad we were given an opportunity to live with a community fully amerced in the local lifestyle. Once we got back at the end of the weekend, the whole of Morogoro was out of power for the first time since we had arrived. We were pretty lucky to have had electricity in the first place so it wasn't too bad.

As Ramadan started a couple weeks ago, we were invited round to Tamsin's house to Break-fast with her. We ended up having a lovely evening of eating too much food and hanging out with the teachers of the international school weirdly enough!

That weekend we went to Kipopeo beach, another of the Dar south-beaches, for one of the Lattitude's birthdays. You can stay in these huts called Bantas which are right on the beach, ready for a swim with breakfast J

We Stace and i left the others there to go and meet up with Rach and the Physio girls back on the mainland so that we could have a weekend together in dar before they went home.

When we got back for the week of work, the Amani truck had arrived from Japan! The amani center used to have a lot more kids coming to the day care apparently/ but the truck has been broken for over 2 years now and so it has taken that long to raise enough money to get another one and get it through customs and all the legal documents required. It went to Mvomero (the other amani center) so get christened and it was only put to work for the first time last week. I also found out that mama Bakhita has managed to raise enough money to get electricity going to the Mvomero center. Apparently the work started 2 weeks ago!

The following week, we all had to say an early goodbye. The migration officers had turned up at amani center demanding passports and visa off the physio girls (and later came back and tried to get mine and Stacey's) and were told that they didn't have the right visa and would therefore have to pay a 100 dollar fine. Bahati, the Amani Physiotherapist managed to get them off the fine but they were forced to leave straight away or they would have to cough up. When they came back the second time, they made me really really angry because it is all such a money game. We happened to be having the 2 girls from dar visiting us at the time and they tried to claim that they should be carrying every single document with them even thought they were only here for half a day! Luckily they couldn't do anything because Stace and I have the right visas but i can't wait to get back to a land where police actually means something more than the next drunkard trying to scam money off you because of your skin colour.

Thursday that week, we met the girls in town and went to the general hospital in town to see if they could make use of any of the mosquito nets (though not many were left now!). We has been told about a boy who had been thought dead after falling into a fire and needed transport to Dar for surgery but sadly we didn't get to see him that day and luckily, the next time we came back with the nets, he had been removed to a hospital in Dar.

My last weekend at amani center was spent visint another placemtn between us and dar. Waamuzi is another boarding school and it was one of the first times i've noticed how men and women are treated differently here. There are 3 lattitude girls and one boy at that placement but the only person that their host mother talks to or tells plans to is the boy. We all wanted to get pikipiki's to town to get some things doe the evening but she stopped him from going, as though, as the man, it was his duty to guard the house or something. It was really odd. Other than that, she was a lovely host and we all got a big welcome ceremony from the school where the kids did some songs and dances and even a couple of drama sketches! However, the party had to break up early due to lack of electricity but it was quite an experience all the same! Anyway, apart from that, it's a nice enough school and they live on campus. But again, as the school is in the middle of nowhere and all the children who go to the school have to be reasonably well off in order to go to the school in the first place, again they are not quite amerced into a community. It sounds like we were really lucky to have found our placement as it appears most of them asked to be put into a type of community set-up too but it didn't work out.

Once back in Morogoro, the goodbyes really had to begin and we rounded up our stuff, finished giving out stiff we had brought out with us to the amani center and surrounding schools (i had a bit of a panic that i had given my credit card away to one of the schools by accident, in one of the boxes) and we started to say goodbye to the staff. Although we didn't live ion the same building and didn't eat with the teachers as expected, we had still grown very fond of our environment and the village had certainly got used to us. We ended up going down the street to say goodbye to our local fruit stalls, phone credit stools etc etc.

I won't say i'm going to miss the Amani center immensely but i will certainly miss our little village of Chamwino and our home town of Morogoro! We had our little leaving ceremony on the Monday night and the physio girls (who had been staying elsewhere in the bid M) came back for the ceremony. We each got given a kanga each and we had to sing as always. We actually made up a song to the tune of 'London's burning' and made a round out of it! Hopefully no one their recognised it but i think Mama bakhita has been to England enough times to know the tune cos she had a bit of a grin on her face whenwe brok into song onstage! This experience has even made me learn the national anthem, of which i had no clue before lol. After food and dancing wrapped up, it was time for packing. We bought all the amani staff and youth drinks for the evening. It's incredible how much the idea of given one soda or one beer casn light up someone's face. They really do appreciate it here and to buy drinks for the whole ceremony of about 60+ only cost us about 5 pound each.

On Rachael's last night in town, i promise did actually stay with her and Stace till the end of the night when the band finished (i usually got bored half-way through) and we all piled into the back of the truck (i.e the whole band, 2 waitresses plus Stacey, Rachael and I) to go to the chakula place (food stalls) and have our dinner together at 1 on the morning. It wasn't long before one of the band members heard i could speak French and tried to speak to me in French instead of Swahili or English. It turned out, he was from the Congo. The only thing is, whenever anyone speaks French to me out here, they seem to have such a strong accent i can barely understand them! I tried to have a decent conversation with him but after a while it became obvious that it was going to be the same old conversation we have with every man that tries to talk to us(as wazungu) so i gave up eventually. Other than that, it really was a good night and probably one of the last like it.

We've also been fasting on the occasional day to try and understand what it's really like. It seems like 50% of Tanzania are fasting so we thought we'd try it out and understand what some of our friends are going through. The no water from 5-6.30 is the toughest bit about it but i just can't imaginbe how some of these people do it! Staying inside and doing your washing and things is fair enough but some of them get up before its even light and cannot eat again till sunset. One day Baba Omari took us to 3 villages so far away that it took us 45 minutes just to get there, let alone visit every house and distribute the nets, in the boiling hot sun. Luckily the thought hadn't even occurred to me to fast at this point so Rach and got got home and drank about 2l of water each! But baba Omari is fasting for the whole 29days...that man is a saint. He didn't even have to do it, dropping nets off all over Morogoro region isn't his job but he did it anyway as a favour to Rachael.

The Wednesday before leaving Amani center, we got a lovely wake-up call of mama Bakhita walking into our room at 9 am demanding a 20 page draft of the website. I kind of flipped, panicked and got angry at the same time. It was all a bit much as i had been keeping her updated on its progress all this time and had certainly never mentioned it being ready by that Wednesday! Turns out she had boasted about it to all the amani officials back in England and all over the world and now they needed to proof. Well i wont lie, im not a professional, having been at amani center for only 3 months, there's not much i know about that either and i also didn't have unlimited access to a computer. Far from it...so you try and whip up a website from that! So we did our best and gave her what we had on Friday when we said our goodbyes. So if any of you know anyone who is prepared to create a website for charity, please let me know! I will give you all the information i have and any contacts that may have more. Your help would be greatly appreciated because the amani center is an Ngo that needs all the publicity it can get. It does already have some websites, but none of which are worth having really! So please get in contact if you think you can help in any way.

So that Thursday night, we got all packed, lugged our stuff to Tamsin's house at the international school where we would be staying for the next couple days and got up early the next morning for final goodbyes. I never thought i'd say it but im going to miss the tiny cries of 'mzungu!!!!!' everytime i walk down the street to get some breakfast and i will certainly miss the whole pysio department, kids, mothers and Bahati and Tobias, the only physio and his assistant in the while of the Morogoro region (i.e HUGE area). That last night out really showed us how much we settled in cos it felt like we knew everyone in the bar! But it just made it that much sadder to leave L

We didn't make it to Mpwapwa again, which is where we were supposed to be saying goodbye to some friends from the very first weekend we had with the Amani center but we have the next couple weeks of travelling planned before Stace flies back to England a couple days before i do. We are basing ourselves at Said's house in Dar so until we have more adventures to write about...

toodle pips!

Really sorry for the essay!!

p.s can't wait to see you all again...WOOPWOOP!!! lotds of love

xxxxx