Break Time

It's been an incredibly busy month at FAME: lots of patients, lots of volunteers, the first birth in the new labor ward, the first Caesarean section, many ambulance transports, and grant deadlines all piled on top of each other.


Then last weekend, I took my first days off in a month or so to do a one-last-trip with a friend who is leaving Tanzania to go back to England.

We decided to do a motorcycle trip to Lake Natron via Monduli.

The first challenge was getting the motorcycles in good shape. I recently traded my newish Toyo 150cc and a bundle of cash for a Honda XLR 250 that's long on character and mileage. It's the same model year as I am: 1990. I've spent the past month in and out of different motorcycle shops trying to get it ready for the trip. I had the carburetor cleaned and adjusted, the valves adjusted, the fork seals replaced, the turn signals and horn replaced and rewired, the choke and speedometer cables replaced, I adjusted and lubricated the clutch and throttle cables, replaced the clutch lever, replaced the oil seal on the shift lever, and had passenger footpegs and a skidplate custom made. Then she just needed a wash to look as good as she probably has in decades.

I used to feel like I needed a hunchback assistant and a bolt of lightning to start the thing in the morning, but now it fires up every morning on the first kick.

The night before our trip, we loaded everything up so that we would be completely ready to leave early in the morning. Here is everything loaded in the garage/living room.

At this point, the sharp-eyed reader may note that the front tire looks low on the XLR. This is because the tube had a puncture that we didn't notice until we got back at 10:00 that night. Fortunately I had purchased a spare tube the day before. Unfortunately neither of us had replaced a tube on a motorcycle before, and it took a long time to figure it out, and of course we put a hole in the new tube in the process. The second time took much less time, but still by the time we finished patching it was already 1:00 in the morning, which did not bode well for our crack of dawn start.

We finally got out the door at 8:00ish,  and stopped for a pre-trip portrait at the Lake Manyara overlook.

From there is was a two hour zip on pavement to Monduli. We had to stop and wait for the presidential motorcade. The presidents of Tanzania and the Congo were coincidentally also traveling to Monduli that day for the opening of a new military academy. We were first in line to go after the motorcade so we had the highway to ourselves going into Monduli. We had a brief stop there to fuel up and eat some chips mayai (a sort of potato omelet), then we were off the paved road for the rest of the trip.

We had a lovely winding journey through the mountains behind Monduli that dropped through a very steep, switch-back laden road down to the basin behind Mount Kitumbeine. I think we saw three cars (in one caravan) the whole way. Then we had a rocky, twisty road through mixed savanna and forest. Not many animals to be seen aside from innumerable antelope, just a few ostriches, giraffes and the occasional zebra.

We were chased for most of the day by a huge thunderstorm coming up from the Southeast and a dust storm from the Southwest. We finally sloughed into the dust storm right by a Maasai village where they were having some sort of gathering-- thousands of brightly dressed Maasai with their shukas being whipped by wind and dust in a strange half light. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees, and we started hitting mud pits in the road from recent rainfall. I drove through one, and the bottom dropped out. I was halfway submerged, but the bike kept running and motored out the other side.

We began to worry about running out of fuel about midday. We knew we had enough to get to Natron, but not back, and we hadn't seen anything like village where they might have gas. We had seen a village on the satellite imagery, but we weren't sure that the road we were on would take us through it.

We finally found the village about 3:30 in the afternoon and sure enough there was someone to sell us gas out of old water bottles. That was when the storm finally caught up to us. We pulled the bikes onto someone's covered porch and hunkered down with some Maasai kids to wait it out.

What a storm. You couldn't see five feet through the rain. It was like being under the ocean but louder. We worried a few times that the tin roof would blow off. But there was nothing to be done except share out some of our precious peanuts with the other people sharing the shelter.

After if finally blew itself out, we took a walking tour of the village of Kitumbeine. A stroll through the village quickly showed the damage: downed trees, mud slides, and roofs blown off houses. 

The road had turned into a raging torrent of water, so we decided to spend the night in Kitumbeine and press on the next morning. I'll try to get the rest of the trip posted soon, but here's a preview:

Telling Stories to Save Lives

My sister, Hannah, is raising money to make a new video for FAME. She has been working as a film maker in LA, and now she is planning to take a few months off to make the trip out to Karatu.

We have a lovely video about FAME, but it's sadly outdated. It was made before we had our laboratory, our hospital, our surgical center, or our maternity ward (which had it's first birth last week by the way), all of which we want people to know about.

If you want to learn more about the film she's planning or make a contribution to the crowdfunding push, check out her page on Indigogo (link below):

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sharing-stories-to-save-lives

Catching Up

Apologies for the delay between posting. It's been a bit busy around here.

In September I spent two weeks in Arusha attending a Swahili course, which was enormously helpful. The truth is, my language skills had plateaued for a period of about three months after I moved out of the place I was living with the Tanzanian family and finished the introductory textbook I was studying from. Still I felt inordinately proud of my ability to carry on a basic conversation, so long as the subject matter didn't deviate far from travel logistics, soccer, and motorcycles.

Ah, how little I knew about how little I knew. The first day in the classroom was a real eye-opener for how clueless I was when it came to advanced grammar. Someone once told me that Swahili was an easy language to learn because the grammar was so simple. I don't think I've ever been so thoroughly misinformed in my life. Perhaps people have that impression in the US because so few people from the US progress farther than learning the basic tenses, which are fairly straightforward. But underneath that superficial impression lies a complex set of verb-based structures that allow an extreme precision of meaning and subtlety of expression using a startlingly concise vocabulary. And all of it had gone straight over my head for the past year.

I enjoyed the course immensely and feel that I gained a much better foundation to move forward. The school, MS-TCDC, also had a lovely campus and a very talented teaching staff. The accommodations were very nice too, but the room and board fees were just shy of highway robbery, so I stayed with the parents of a friend of a friend in Arusha and commuted by Dala Dala every day. The last part of the commute was a nice walk with a view of the volcano, Mount Meru.

I also found another chameleon. I was surprised again by how terrified people are of the little critters. Still not entirely sure why.

Also, I saw something interesting while taking a walk around the perimeter of the school. Someone was growing some sort of edible greens on farms right in the middle of the river. They had built stone walkways all across the river to tend to the crop. I don't think I've ever seen that sort of riverine aquaculture before. It made for a nice place to take a stroll, so long as someone wasn't trying to go the opposite way on the same set of rocks.