Jane & Steve - Africa ‘26

We had a beautiful  birthday yesterday  working with the RCP (Reaching Children’s Potential) program.  It started with teaching two lessons at the Makungo primary school, about 6 kilometers down a very muddy, bumpy from our RCP Center in Ipalamwa. The wanafunzi (students) speak only Swahili, and Grace, one of the young Tanzanian locals, accompanied us to help with Swahili. We worked with the kids on the alphabet, a few colors, and 5 new words in English via a game where they passed around that object in a circle and said the word. W e brought jumpropes and balls and played jumping and clapping games during recess, which was a big improvement over our first day when the kids were just running around the dirt yard or just hanging onto/grabbing and hugging us. The school has no playground, balls, swings or games, just a dirt yard.  We are learning that repetition is important to learning, so in o ur second lesson yesterday we had them write the new words and work more o...

  After a 1.5 hour flight from Nairobi to Dar Es Salam, a 50 minute bush flight from Dar, and over 3 hours on a very bumpy dirt road to Ipalamwa, we find ourselves in Tanzania’s remote Southern Highlands!     We are at our new home for two weeks - the Global Volunteers Health Clinic and base for Tanzanian staff and volunteers.   We are surrounded by a beautiful green rolling landscape, red dirt roads, and small simple villages. This could be one of the most productive farming areas in Tanzania, but tragically it is one of the poorest regions with the highest rates of childhood stunting. We are told that this is    due to lack of knowledge about nutrition and sanitation, lack of access to markets to sell produce, decimation by HIV/AIDS, and the fact that women (who are tasked with most of the farming responsibilities) are also burdened with very large families and all the domestic duties.  We are working with Global Volunteers Reaching Children’s Potent...

Back to the cacophony of cars, buses  and motorcycles, the muezzin calls, and the smoky smells of Nairobi! It is nice to have strong internet ( Steve needs to download thousands of hi-res photos), and we need to purchase some school supplies for our project in Ipalamwa, Tanzania. Our loyal Kenyan friend Samuel picked us up at the bush plane (Wilson) airport and helped us find stores that sell bulk pencils, notebooks, small games and books for the schools and villages in which we’ll be working.   After shopping, Samuel invited us to his home, about 8 miles northeast of the city center where we are staying. He said he wanted us to see his neighborhood, taste some “real” Kenyan food, and meet his wife and 2 small children. He mentioned that his son has not seen many mzungu (white people), and when we got to his neighborhood, indeed, the young kids streamed around us, very curious. We are quite a bit older, taller, and whiter than the people in the neighborhood in which they live....

  I feel like this trip, so far, has been blessed by African juju! Our time in the Masai Mara was mind-blowingly beautiful, the scenery, the Masai people, the wildlife sightings, and our safari camp overlooking the Sand River.   The Masai Mara is Kenya’s portion of the massive Serengeti ecosystem which extends down through much of Tanzania. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the incomparable plains of the Serengeti comprise 1.5 million hectares of savannah, riverine forests, and woodlands supporting over 2 million herbivores (so many ungulates!) and those herbivores in turn supporting a high concentration of predators, such as lions, cheetahs, leopards, jackals, and crocodiles. Imagine 2 million herbivores constantly grazing the savannah grasses - and the predators stalking them.  Our guide took us on a mini safari on the way to our bush flight back to Nairobi this morning. He spotted (with his “Masai eyes”, as he says) 3 lion cubs waiting together on the hilltop way above two...

Expansive green grasslands stretching to the horizon and beyond, bird songs providing an ongoing musical soundtrack, the equatorial sun warming our shoulders, and a landscape dotted with a broad array of herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores - the Masai Mara!  Pick a spot anywhere here and you will see animals. Perhaps herds of elephants, zebras, impala, topi, prides of lions, cheetah, kongoni, cerval cats, or any one of the variety of gazelles. And the birds, oh the gorgeous and bizarre birds here!  We’re at Enkewa Camp, where we do an early 6 AM safari with our lovely Masai guides. Morning safari  includes breakfast in the bush (coffee, sweet bread, fruit, egg sandwiches). When the sun starts getting too hot, we lunch back at the main lodge, have a rest, then an evening safari from 4 pm to sundown. Late dinner back at the lodge ends our day and finally we fall into our beds which have been   preheated with water bottles! The Masai Mara has to be one of the most ama...

Nairobi - it hit our jetlagged senses immediately with its African smells, grit, hyperactive traffic, modern buildings alongside gutters of trash, and 6 million people of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, British, German, etc, etc, origins. The new and old worlds come together in this swarming mass of humanity, commerce, and religions. (As I write this I hear the muezzin call from a nearby mosque.) The first thing that struck me about Kenya is the YOUTH! It appears to be a country of 20-somethings, greeting us with big smiles and “habari yako”. I even heard “shikamoo” several times, which, from my few weeks of cramming Swahili, I recognized as a greeting of respect young people give their elders. (Well … we ARE indeed over the age of average life expectancy here!) Despite our elder status, Steve and I realized today we are still enjoying  travelling in the same DIY manner we did in our 20s - figuring out a country’s mass transport, walking most everywhere, mingling with the locals a...