bonus blog -- Tuesday -- just some random observations

Meant to get this out to you Monday night (your time), but we had a late start Tuesday am (our time, so sorry). Nothing urgent in this post, just some local color and musings...

Whereas we pronounce the name of this country tan zah NEE ah, Tanzanians don’t. They pronounce it TAH zah nia. It gets its name from combining Tanganyika (in Swahili "tanga" is sail and "nyika" is wilderness) with Zanibar.

Did you know there 65 million Tanzanians?

The Banjika school uniforms say on the back of the shirts: “Education brings peace and power.”

We have all learned that doing laundry by hand is hard.

A couple of nights ago it rained lightly, the red clay really clings in clumps on your shoes. You can see why there is a lot of brick making here. Much of school life is outside, so it is hard to keep the classroom floors clean on a wet day. 

The young girls in Tanzania wear their hair very short and don’t wear makeup or jewelry – as these are all seen as appropriate for adults only. And the boys also have very short hair. As a consequence, it is hard to tell the boys from the girls, especially in the younger kids.

I really like our commute to and from school. It is about a 12-minute walk for us (Sophia, Cole, Merrick, and Andrew live in my area; some in the Menlo group have just a two-minute walk to school, while others have a 20-minute walk), and the mornings are cool but not cold, and the afternoons are warm but not hot.  It is peaceful and the landscape, red clay roads juxtaposed to green growth, corn fields, and rolling hills with bigger mountains in the distance, is pretty. The colors are more muted in the overcast mornings, but -- not much air pollution here -- they really pop in the late afternoon light.  The walk to and from school is salubrious; it sure beats stressing over whether I will make the light at El Camino. On our walk to and from school we pass two elementary schools and a prison. I was a little unnerved the other day to have to walk right by 20 or so inmates using scythes to cut the grass along the road beside the prison. (There was one distracted armed guard). But, like most of the people, we pass along the road is you say, “Jambo,” they smile and reply in kind. I subsequently learned, you can be incarcerated for things that would not get you in trouble back in the US.  Because of the elementary schools, we see dozens of young kids (all unaccompanied by adults) along the way. And they are super engage with us with a huge smile and "hello," often a fist bump, and lots of giggles. They treat us like celebrities, and they are adorable.

While Buffie and John acquitted themselves very well in the 5K (special note to boys who never miss an opportunity to take off their shirts and tell us about their workout regimen and who did start out impressively fast: slow and steady wins the race), we are 48 hours post race and our quads and hamstrings are reminding us that we are not so young anymore.