A few of my favorite things from our first full week in Tanzania...
Breakfast in Kisarawe is definitely the best meal of the day, consisting of some combination of...
Kitumbua- a fried rice fritter ball of goodness
Chapati- almost equally as delicious as kitumbua, essentially a fried thick tortilla
Chai tangaiwezi- ginger spiced tea that we like to squeeze a quarter of lime into
Mayai Spanish- "Spanish eggs," essentially an omelette with onions, tomato, and green peppers
Swahili/Kiswahili is a really interesting language, and really not too hard to learn the basic vocab. We've only been practicing for 4 days (not counting our weekend in Dar es Salaam, where most people speak English) and we can:
Order all our meals in Kiswahili (rice=wali, maharagwe=beans, somaki=fish, ugali=a kind of starchy flour paste, mboga=boiled greens, plus all the breakfast words from above)
Ask politely for additional items (I always use "naombe, limao", which means something like "please, lemon" for my tea)
Count from 1-10
Ask for pretty much all the fruits that are currently in season (mostly just bananas, avocados, mango, watermelon, tomatoes)
Casual (mambo, jambo, vipi, habari asuburi, etc.) and formal greetings (shikamoo)
Random words (broken =hari bika, fixed =utengeneza, hospital=hospitali) which are helpful when working in the hospitals
Transportation words (bus, taxi, these three wheeled motored rickshaws (called pasajes?), receiti/billi=receipt)
And words we've just picked up from talking to people, especially the kids like school=shule, cat=paca, dog=mbwa, and more!
One good rule of thumb is if you don't know the word, add an "i." because Kiswahili tends to have everything ending in a vowel sound. Also, emphasis is almost always placed on the second to last syllable, so Tanzania is actually TanZANia. This confuses some of our Tanzanian friends like Kaka because English doesn't really have a rhyme or reason... so we spent several hilarious conversations teaching him how to pronounce hippopotamus.
hippopoTAmus
hippoPOtamus
hippopotaMUS
HIPpopotamus
hipPOpotamus
We're growing our little Kisarawe family with Mama Fatuma, who keeps the study office tidy, Babu (grandpa), our trusty driver, and Kaka (big brother), who is the community outreach coordinator, and of course Wilson and Weston. Wilson accompanies us most days to the hospital, and he's really interested in helping so we're teaching him to be an engineer too!
We spent the first half of the day in Kisarawe Hospital... we fixed a ton of sphygmomanometers (blood pressure gauges) by taking apart the worn/leaky/uncalibrated ones and piecing the working parts back together, a couple stethoscopes, and HemoCue machine (reads hemoglobin levels). For some reason, everyone is super enthusiastic about getting their blood pressure taken, so I been having fun testing all the fixed blood pressure cuffs with a stethoscope on Wilson, Kaka, Babu, and Nathan.
Tonight we're actually back in Dar es Salaam to find some groceries and an ATM, because we're headed to Zanzibar this weekend. Shoutout to Dr. Dean for getting us a hotel with running water AND electricity! The red clay that's so prominent in Kisarawe and outlying villages has a distinct smell... so Katie, Nathan, and I have slowly been accumulating this particular scent, which is fine out in the villages, but we thought probably not so appropriate in the city.
We're getting dinner tonight in Dar, and I'm so excited for something besides rice and beans too! (I actually do really like the rice and beans in the village, it just gets monotonous). We missed lunch again today due to traveling, but I think Katie and I made the executive decision to try Ethiopian food tonight, based on a recommendation from one of Stephanie's friends who lives in the city center!
Cheers from TZ,
~Irene
