Last week, my colleague Mitch and I took a Matatu (Kenyan public transport van) up to Mombasa from Shimoni, where we’ve been working for the last month. From there, we took a bus to Voi, where we met our boss, Dipesh, for our last “civilized” meal, before going to live in the bush. We then drove with Dipesh to Kajire, the village where we’ll be living for the next couple of months. Kajire is right next to Tsavo National Park, the largest national park in Kenya

Upon arriving, the first thing anybody has to notice is the beautiful Taita Hills that cast their shadow over Kajire as the sun sets behind them. The second thing one notices is probably how incredibly nice and hospitable the people are. Upon arriving, the people we met led us down to a big cashew tree on their land, where they set up chairs and couches under the tree for our meeting.

We sat under the cashew tree for a couple hours, sipping on tea and speaking with the local committee that Dipesh got together to help us in setting up our Sukuma program. We talked about all the ways we will be able to work together with the community to improve people’s lives and provide great experiences for volunteers. One major topic of discussion was the homestays. Aside from how homestays will work when groups start arriving, we also had to talk about the much more important issue of where Mitch and I would live, and the terms of our stay (my opinion of “important” may be a bit biased). Basically, the arrangement is that until we leave, we will essentially be part of our respective (host) families. We fetch water, cook, grind maize, help with farming, all the normal things that a member of the family would be expected to help out with. We eat with the family, sleep in their place, hang out with the kids after school and help them with their homework. We do all this and still have plenty of time during the day to do our normal activities of getting the program started.

Living in a rural Kenyan village is tough in a few ways. There’s no running water in homes, so washing your hands, face, clothes, body, or anything else has to be done with a bucket and basin, and water has to be fetched every day from the communal taps in town. There’s no electricity, so you have to use kerosene lanterns for light, rechargeable battery life has to be cherished, and air conditioning is just out of the question. And obviously you can forget about internet, television, toilets that flush, and those kind of things. Honestly though, I’d be lying if I said you don’t forget about all that after only a few days. It doesn’t take long at all to just become one of the family, living like they do.

My new family is a big one, with a mother, father, grandmother, 3 sons, and two daughters, with another son and daughter living in other parts of the country. They all live in the same little compound, in several small houses, each with 2 bedrooms and a small sitting room. The kitchen and bathrooms are separate from the other little houses.

One of the coolest parts about my homestay has been getting to know the three sons of my new mom. One of them, Dalmus, is my roommate, so we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. On my second day in the village he asked me to help him build a new pen for his chickens, so together we built a huge pen almost the size of my room in just one morning. He then showed me how to use sisal fibers to weave ropes for his goats. Dalmus has been living in Mombasa on the coast doing odd jobs for over ten years and has just returned home a few months ago. He’s now doing large-scale (by local standards) chicken and goat farming, which is pretty new around here.

The other two sons, Kizaka and Lucas, are 19 and 16, and are still in secondary school, so I only see them in the evenings and weekends. They leave at 5:30 to walk to school every morning. On my first weekend in the village, they took Mitch and me on a 2 hour walk down the hill where they keep the cows to fetch milk. On the way back, we decided to climb a huge hill that we can see from our home. The view from the top was incredible.

Since arriving, I’ve helped out in the kitchen a few times, and so far I’ve learned how to cook chapatis, cassava, ugali (a dish made from maize), and cow peas. I’ve also helped with making maize flour and roasting cashew nuts. I hardly cook at home, but I really enjoy doing it here. People here just use a simple three stone fire and firewood that they light using embers from the last meal. Three stone fires waste a lot of energy, but the simplicity is charming. Plus, we might be able to work on fuel efficiency at some point.

Now, after staying Kajire for a little over a week, I’m leaving for a 2 week vacation, but soon I’ll be back to help set up our program and prepare for the arrival of our first volunteers.

So for the past week I’ve been on a bicycle trip around the island. I basically just planned a route, packed a tent and enough clothes for about three days, and set off. Sadly, my camera broke about four days before I left, so I won’t be able to show any pictures of what I saw.

My first stop was Tumbe, a fishing village on the north end of the island. I started along the familiar path to Konde, which I’ve travelled countless times now. Through Mtondoo Jeuri, along the edge of the rubber plantation, past the drying seaweed in Kijijini, weaving in and out of children outside the school in Jiwe Moja, past Makangali, and through the dark Ngezi Forest, to the bustling town of Konde.

The road to Konde is only a few kilometers, but it’s nothing but sand, so it takes a couple hours by bicycle. Sometimes there’s so much sand you just have to give up and walk for a while. So when I got to Konde, I felt it was time for lunch, so I stopped for a typical Pemba meal of rice ad fish before continuing on to Tumbe.

After about an hour and a half of riding, it started to pour. It’s rainy season here in East Africa, so these days, each day sees several hours of rain. Not wanting to get soaked, and eager for a rest anyway, I pulled over and took refuge by a closed shop with a roof outside. Mzungu’s (white people) attract a lot of attention here in any circumstance, but even more so when they’re on a bicycle, away from any hotel or tourist attraction, pulled over in a small village on the side of the road. So of course I had company after no time at all.

As I would find during the rest of the trip, young people here around my age (19) are just becoming confident with their English and are dying to practice with a real live white person. So soon I was talking with four or five young men, with an audience of about a dozen small children, older men, and mothers with babies. They asked me about America, tried to name as many American cities as they could, and asked if Chicago was still flooded from the hurricane.

Eventually they asked about what I was doing on Pemba and where I was going. When I told them I was going to Tumbe, one of them said “Do you know where Tumbe is?” I pointed in the direction I had been traveling for the last few hours. They all laughed and one said “You passed Tumbe 3 kilometers ago” Needless to say, I felt like an idiot. The rain was clearing up, so to avoid further embarrassment, I thanked them and got on my bike to turn back to Tumbe.

I’ve been to Tumbe before, so I knew how to get to the beach from town. Last time, I was driven there and came from the other direction, so don’t judge me too much from not being able to find a place I’ve already been to. Anyway, I got to the beach, and like before, it was full of fishermen coming in with the day’s catch and auctioneers selling off fish. It’s a really lively place, usually with 4 different simultaneous fish auctions, people buying squid and octopus, dhows being built, fishing boats of all sizes coming in, and countless others on the horizon.

Within ten minutes of arriving, I met someone who spoke good English and who agreed to show me around. His name was Abuu, and as I would find out later, he had just returned to Pemba after being away for 10 years. He had been studying business in England and had not come home once during his time away, and this was his first week back. I can’t imagine being away from home that long, not seeing family and friends for 10 years.

After talking with Abuu for about 30 seconds, he promptly asked if I wanted to swim to the island across from the beach. “Sure!” I said, but then realized he was joking when he started laughing at my enthusiasm. He did, however, want to go by boat, so we got a tiny canoe and a couple paddles and set off. I asked Abuu if the canoe belonged to him and he explained that people here share everything. As long as the canoe was returned, there was no problem. He also assured me that my backpack, tent, and bike would be safe on the beach. I believed him; Pemba is a really safe place.

It took us about 20 minutes to paddle over to the island. Abuu told me about school in England and how he had to work like forty hours a week to pay for his courses. He also told me a bit about Tumbe, its fishing economy, and how the auctions work. When we had arrived and tied up the canoe, Abuu’s expression had changed from his casual look on the boat. “You know, I own this island,” he said. “And I haven’t been here since I was a child.”

He told me about how his father had owned a huge amount of land and how when he died it was split up among his five sons. We headed for the interior of the island, which I was slowly realizing was much bigger than I thought from just looking at it. Abuu knew the island really well. He told me about how his family allows people to stay on the island and use it for growing cassava, and even lets people harvest their mango trees and sell the mangos. He said that unfortunately, people also cut them down without permission to make dugout canoes like the one we came on. He could even point to the spots where mango trees had once stood but now were gone. He also knew which farming plots belonged to whom and how long they had been farming on his island. I wondered how he could possibly know all this when he had been off the island for ten years, but he assured me that if I owned land, I would have the same knowledge of it.

We left the island after about an hour (and another ten minutes of trying to find the boat). When we got back to the beach, Abuu introduced me to a man named Sharifu, who is a fish auctioneer, a very profitable profession. In order to gain the privilege of auctioning off other people’s fish (and taking a cut), a person must be able to be there for his fisherman, which means lending them money during a bad season so they have enough money to feed their family, or making sure they don’t get ripped off, etc. Almost immediately after meeting me, Sharifu invited me to stay at his home for the night. I told him I could just camp on the beach, but he said (in Swahili) that that was ridiculous and that he would give me food and a place to stay for the night. I had been looking forward to feeling all independent with my tent and stuff, but this was nice too.

The three of us went back to Sharifu’s newly built house so I could drop off my things before continuing on to the football grounds, where the local Tumbe team had a game against the neighboring village. Along the way, Abuu pointed out all of the areas where there used to be trees but are now bare. The need for firewood and wood for construction has led to the complete destruction of any forests Tumbe used to have. These days, people have to walk several kilometers to fetch firewood. I could see genuine sadness in Abuu’s face. The football game was indeed an exciting one. Tumbe’s team, made up of mostly players under the age of 17, edged out their much more full grown competitors, one to zero. Go Tumbe!

We went back to Sharifu’s house for some fish and cassava, an archetypal Pemba dinner. After eating, Abuu took me around the village and showed me his home and others, taking breaks to observe Tumbe’s odd nightlife. After a while, those several hours of biking cought up with me and I was just too tired to stay awake any longer, so I went back to Sharifu’s place and hit the sack. I would never have thought that it was possible to sleep so well on a concrete floor.

I had definitely prepared myself for some awkwardness. The last home stay I trialed consisted of me getting dinner and someone watching me eat it, and in a different room than the family (whom I never really met) then going to bed at like 7:30 after sitting in awkward silence for a good 20 minutes. So, I wasn’t that bothered when we ended up sitting in my temporary bedroom for around half an hour making small talk in simple Swahili.

Soon though, to my relief, it was time to start cooking dinner. Even though Juma is a cook by profession, his wife Chumbu does all the cooking, which is traditional here. I just sort of shadowed her for the whole cooking process. We peeled and cut cassava and then boiled it in coconut milk, we fried and boiled fish, we boiled rice, and we made tea. It all made for a pretty delicious meal.

Juma’s house isn’t actually completed, which is very common here. People have to build brick by brick, and sometimes they have to wait awhile till they have enough money for the next brick. We ate on a mat in the middle of the incomplete part, which was basically just four half-complete walls with a dirt floor and no ceiling. It was actually really nice eating by candle light under the stars.

Traditional Swahili meals are eaten by hand out of communal plates or bowls in the center, so that’s how we ate last night. It’s how pretty much everyone here eats every night. After we had stuffed ourselves with all that fish and starchy goodness, we just laid down on the mat that had just served as our dinner table and looked up at the stars while we let our stomachs do their thing. We all went to bed around 9.

When I woke up this morning, I saw Juma’s brother next to my bed painting. I hadn’t realized it, but he’s a painter and I had been sleeping in his studio. He explained to me that some of the women in the village that make different handicrafts give them to him and he returns them painted with different designs. Then the women sell the handicrafts to tourists. He showed me some of his stuff and it’s pretty nice.

Chumbu had already started cooking breakfast, but I watched her make the last of the mkate ya maji, which literally means water bread, but is more like crepes. We also had tea and baked maandazis with homey. After breakfast Juma and I went into the village center to mingle and play a game that the locals play. After about an hour, we went to his friend’s land, where there are coconut trees. Juma got his nephew to climb one and cut us down some tasty coconuts. We sat in his friend’s cassava crops drinking coconut milk and eating coconut for while, and then went back home to help cook lunch.

Lunch was pretty much the same meal as dinner last night. It’s pretty much all the people here eat, with the exception of potatoes and sweet potatoes. After lunch we just lazed about until it was time for Juma’s next shift at the lodge. I thanked his family and we walked back to the lodge together.

We drove to the forest, which was a bit of a relief after walking for over two hours last time. When we had walked, we didn’t even go in far enough to get to the forest reserve office, so it was the first time I had seen it.

When we got there, we agreed to go on a short walk that would take about an hour, and left with our guide. He gave us lots of interesting information, including part of the forest’s history. He took us to what was left of an old saw mill that was burned down after independence to make room for conservation efforts. He showed us about 20 different tree species and told us the local, common, and latin names for each, along with local uses. Many were used for medicinal purposes.

When we got out of the forest, we found ourselves in a shamba with clove trees on one side and cassava crops on the other. Our guide picked a few leaves from one of the clove trees, crumpled them up, and gave one to each of us. I’ve had stuff with cloves in it before, but that smell was amazing. I was sniffing that leaf the whole walk back.

I spent the rest of the day with the Scandanavians, who are leaving tomorrow. We stayed up late arguing about music and the record industry At dinner, Idi asked me if I wanted to go to with him to Chake Chake, the main town on the island, so we’ll be going in the car that’s taking the Scandanavians to the airport tomorrow.

It turned out Mbana was sort of a bad teacher, so it actaully really helped having so many people there. I thought it wouldn’t be so bad having a teacher who couldn’t speak English, since I learned in my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class to teach English without speaking a word of the pupils’ language, but it was a real problem. Basically, he would say a word and then describe in Swahili what the word meant. I don’t know nearly enough of the language for this to be remotely useful. He then moved on to more pointing to objects and naming them in Swahili, like yesterday, and I would write them down with the English translation. I probably could have gotten the same education from a Swahili-English dictionary. Obviously, I wasn’t too upset, since I was asking for lessons from somebody who had probably never taught in his life, not to mention I was paying less than two dollars an hour. Luckily, the people around us new a bit of English and could tell me more about a certain word, and would even get me to practice using it talking to them in Swahili. Realistically, I think I learned about fifteen new words and got some practice speaking. I was pretty satisfied.

I returned in time for lunch and ate with the Scandanavians. We had talked last night about going to Ngezi Forest, the big forest on the northwestern peninsula of the island, close to the lodge. We decided to go after lunch. We couldn’t get three bikes so we had to walk, which took a little over an hour. We passed by four villages on the way there, and also passed by a rubber plantation, which consisted of a huge plot covered by rows of rubber trees, each with stripped bark, a little bowl at the bottom, and a stick or something to govern flow of the stream into the bowl. I hear that the plantation is owned by some big business but employs local people.

By the time we got to the forest, we were exhausted, so we decided not to walk one of the actual trails, but just wander around instead. Within 10 minutes we saw so much life in the forest. At the base of one tree, all within only one square foot or so, there were several huge snails, five or six dung beetles doing their thing, a giant millipede on the trunk of the tree, and Vervet monkeys in the trees over our heads.

That millipede was probably about nine inches long when not coiled up. Huge, right? Oh, and when I say dung beetles “doing their thing,” I mean rolling up balls of poo. Anyway, we were only in the forest for about 45 minutes, and we spend most of the time looking at all the cool stuff on the ground. We also saw some hornbills, more Vervet monkeys and a cool buffalo spider repairing its web.

On the way back, we were passed by a car heading towards the lodge. They pulled over and asked us if we wanted a ride, so we, completely exhausted from all the walking, gladly accepted. The car had come from Chake Chake, the main town on the island, to pick up Tana from the airport. He’s the dive instructor that the others said I would meet. He’s from the Canary Islands, and I just can’t get over his accent. Anyway, he had just been at the big international music festival in Zanzibar where they play a mix between reggae, folk music and and Swahili music. It sounded really cool to me.

We got back to the lodge and went for a swim. After dinner, Tana took the Scandanavians and me to Pango Watoro, the cave on the beach right by the lodge. He told us the whole legend about a spirit who haunts the cave and about how slaves used to hide there after running away from their Arab owners. Right at the entrance he also pointed and said “that’s where the beast attacked me,” and I thought he was just going along with the legend or something, talking about some beast, but then i realized that through his accent he was saying “that’s where the bees attacked me.” Turns out he had gotten stung like 15 times and I was laughing because I thought he was still telling ghost stories.

After the cave we just sat on the beach while Tana told us more about the island for the rest of the night.

Anyway, I was with Ranjit and these two guys who will be responsible for making the place look real nice, with an African look and everything. We drove down to just north of Shimoni, where there’s a lodge that Ranjit’s friend owns. Kenya’s tourism has been suffering pretty badly because of all the violence, so we had the whole place to ourselves. We had a few drinks and went to bed at a half-decent hour. This morning we all woke up around five thirty to leave for Pemba. It only took us a few minutes to get to Shimoni, where I had spent a lot of my time with GVI. It’s where most of their terrestrial activities are usually based, although for my expedition we spent a lot of time at other forests doing a census of the Colobus monkeys in the area. Anyway, we had breakfast in Shimoni and wasted little time before boarding this boat:

It was pretty baller. There’s a kitchen, two bathrooms, three bedrooms, and plenty of room to relax. Unfortunately, I get sea sick pretty easily, so I spent most of the five-hour boat ride in bed. At about one in the afternoon, we arrived at the Manta Reef Lodge [HYPERLINK], where I’ll be staying while I’m here. The place is really nice.

I had time to just relax and check out the place while the others made plans for their underwater thing. We ate a late lunch (which was absolutely delicious), and I met some of the hotel staff, including Yusuf, the hotel manager, and Diego, one of the diving instructors. I’m told I’ll meet the other diving instructor Tana tomorrow. After lunch, I basically just started wandering around the area. I passed by the village nearest to the lodge, Mtondoo Jeuri, and was greeted by some Pembian youths (I don’t know if they’re called Pembians, but I’m gonna say Pembians for now). I kept walking and ran into two Mzee’s (Swahili word of respect for old guys), Mbana and Faki, who started talking to me in Swahili. I know very little, which I learned from some language CDs and from spending time in Kenya, but I was able to understand their simple questions like where I came from and how long I would be here. When they realized I kind of sucked at Swahili, one of them, Mbana, decided that I needed lessons immediately. He started just pointing to things around us, telling me the swahili words for them. We started walking together back the way I had come from, still pointing to and naming things along the way. I told him that if he wanted to teach me for an hour tomorrow, I would pay him 2000 shillings (about a buck eighty), which is quite a lot for people here. He agreed and we’re meeting tomorrow morning at 9:30. It’s probably not the best way to go about getting a tutor, but I figured it would be good to get to know someone in one of the villages.

We arrived back in Mtondoo Jeuri, where the two men were going to get medicine. I was definitely expecting pills or something, but the medicine was just a root that they started chewing on. Mbana introduced me to some people in the village, and after about half an hour I walked back to the lodge to move into my room. My room is with the staff housing, on the top floor, which I share with the huge water tank that supplies water to the entire lodge. It’s got pretty much all I need: a bed, a bathroom, and a weird, uncomfortable couch-type thing that I can throw stuff on instead of on the floor.

After the long and strenuous task of moving my stuff in (sticking my backpack and suitcase in there), I felt like I needed a swim, so I went down to the pool. At the pool, Matthew, one of the underwater hotel developers, introduced me to two girls going to school in Norway and doing a study tour in Tanzania. Their names are Sarah and Elizabeth.

I know what you’re thinking: Nathan, that isn’t a swimming pool, that’s an airplane cockpit. I know, but I didn’t have a camera at the pool, so I’d appreciate it if you’d ease up off my back about it. Anyway, we talked for a while and I found out they were freshmen in college (or the Norwegian equivalent) taking a development studies course and doing a six week study tour in different parts of Tanzania. They’ve just finished the study tour and are taking six days to relax on Pemba, now as legit tourists. Elizabeth (left) is from Norway and Sarah (right) is from Sweden. They’ll be here till Monday morning. I joined them for dinner and then after a quick word with Ranjit (my boss, in case you forgot), we went down to the beach and talked about funny cultural differences between Americans and Scandanavians late into the night (like 12:30; I have low standards for “late into the night” when I’ve woken up at 5:30 in the morning). Anyway, it was a good first day.

We passed by Mtondoo Jeuri, where Idi has a house, a small shop, and one cow. I’m starting to realize that most people here have several ways of making money. We also passed through another village, Kijijini, and Jiwe Moja, where we stopped to see the primary school. Unfortunately, a teacher there said I needed a letter from the ministry in Chake Chake to look around the school, so we continued to the next village, Makangale. I might try to get that letter in the future, but not any time soon, since I’m on a tourist visa and apparently the Tanzanian government gets pretty serious about volunteer and work visas.

We took the road that goes through Ngezi Forest. all the way to Konde, the big town of the area. Along the way we picked up some sugar cane from the side of the road for a mid-journey snack and continued on our way. We got stopped at a police checkpoint on the road when we got out of the forest, where they were stopping everyone on bikes to check they had working brakes and bells. They pulled Idi over, and I was worried he was going to have to bribe them (just because that’s how things work here), but he was just laughing the whole time while they made him sign papers and stuff. He later explained that he was friends with one of the two policemen, who had to go through the all the motions just so the other one wouldn’t ask questions. He thought it was hilarious. When we got to Konde, we stopped for some water and to look around a bit, and then started heading back.

On the way back, we took a short walk through Kijijini to see people drying the seaweed they farm there. I asked why other villages don’t also farm seaweed, and Idi just said they chose not to. There seems to be little reason for why different villages engage in different means of generating income.

We got back at around 3 having missed breakfast and absolutely starving. I ended up eating some dry granola in my room.

After dinner tonight, Tana, the Scandanavians and I played a two on two game of football on the beach (the soccer kind) and then went for a refreshing swim.

The first thing we did was drop off the girls at the airport. It was kind of sad saying goodbye since they’ve been my companions for the last five days. We exchanged contact information and everything, so hopefully we’ll be in touch. We dropped other people at different spots in town, and then Idi and I were the last to get dropped off. He showed me around a bit and then we went to go visit some of his family who live in Machomanne, a part of Chake Chake. The name means “four eyes,” but I have no idea why it was called that. We stopped by his uncle’s house, but he wasn’t home, so we moved on to his aunt’s house. She welcomed us in and served us fresh-squeezed passion fruit juice. I think she was surprised to see Idi with a mzungu (white person). We were joined by Idi’s sister, who of course was happy to see Idi. We took a walk with her and she and Idi caught up. I listened as they spoke Swahili far too fast for me to understand. We also talked for a bit in simple Swahili and broken english about whether American pop music or Tanzanian “Bongo Flava” is better, and then said goodbye.

Idi and I got lunch and then went to the Chake Chake market, where you can find pretty much anything that can be found at all on the island. For example, more bananas than you would ever need.

And that’s just one stall of many.

We didn’t have time to do much else because the car was going back to the lodge, so we got picked up on the side of the road and headed back. By the time we had arrived back at the lodge and unloaded the car, I was completely exhausted from a lack of sleep last night, waking up early, and walking around all day in Chake Chake, so I took a shower and went right to bed without even thinking about dinner.