(Monday, July 6, 2009)

We’ve been here for barely a day and it feels like so much longer. I can hardly believe I left home just over a week ago. There are thirty of us here at the base right now, and most of us have just arrived. There are several teachers, a veterinarian, lots of college kids, a couple kids and their parents, and then the volunteers who have been here for a few weeks and who we all look to when we don’t know what’s going on or what we should be doing. And in just a few weeks, those volunteers will be us.

This first weekend was really relaxed. We arrived, did a tour of the home base, walked into town, and got everything unpacked in time for dinner. The food here is AMAZING. I’d take a picture to show you all, but when it’s on my plate, all I can think about is how much I want to eat it. After dinner we took a taxi over to the Watering Hole, a local bar that’s geared mostly toward foreigners and expats in Moshi. It was the Fourth of July, so anyone who came in wearing an Obama kanga got a free shot. I did not have a kanga on hand, sad to say. But I did get a margarita, because I knew that’s what Dad would probably be making, and it tasted exactly like his recipe. For the first time so far, I felt just a little bit homesick.

p.s. “Jambo!” basically means “Hello!”, and right now that’s the extent of my Swahili vocabulary. But we’ll have lessons for the next couple weeks, covering basic stuff like greetings, which are really important in the Tanzanian culture. At least I can hope to lose that deer in the headlights whenever someone talks to me.