It’s almost our spring break here (time is going by really
fast now) and I feel like I’ve gotten into a pretty regular rhythm here so I
thought I’d put up a post of just some aspects of daily life here.
I’m staying at the university in Dar which is kind of a
different world from the rest of the city.
It’s a lot less hectic, really green, spacious and pretty safe, at least
during the day. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we have classes and on Tuesday
and Thursday everyone goes to their internships. The classes I’m taking are Development
Perspectives, African International Relations and Foreign Policy, Swahili,
History of East Africa and Internship class. It took about 3 weeks from when
classes were supposed to start to when they actually did. Now, classes are
going on pretty normally. However, we
sometimes do get the situation where professors just won’t show up and you have
to call them to ask them if they are coming or if we should reschedule
class.
As terrible as this might sound, it’s almost halfway through
the semester but I still don’t exactly feel like I’m in school mode and for the
few times we’ve had assignments so far, it’s been quite a battle to try and get
them done. All of our finals here are 60% of the grade and the other 40% is
usually a paper, presentation and maybe a smaller test. Apart from the other
CIEE students, we’re taking classes with some other students from the US, and
also students from Finland and Korea. There are also other international
students on campus but most of them are either on separate programs or taking
classes with the Tanzanian students here. The semester for the university here
is pretty different than ours and for the past 3 weeks they had their equivalent
of winter break. Because of this, the campus has been really empty since most
people went home. This week though most everyone is back.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays everyone in the program has their
own individual internships. For mine, I’m doing a research project for the
engineering school here. My project is on water quality of community water
supplies in areas in the outer perimeter of the city. So far, the main part of
my internship has been trying to jump a bunch of administrative hurdles just to
even do this project. I won’t get too
into it in this post but for the most part I think I have most of that behind
and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m actually taking samples and testing them
which is pretty exciting.
So I’m also living in the dorms on campus with a Tanzanian
roommate. I’ve had the room to myself the past couple weeks because she went
home for the break. The first couple weeks in the dorms were interesting. There
were constant water shortages and we always had to get water from the tank
outside and carry it up to our rooms for showers. There was a time when there was a huge
shortage of water on the entire campus for about a week. Even the tanks ran out of water. When the water runs out the worst thing probably
is the toilets get absolutely disgusting since there is nothing to flush
them. In the dorms, we have normal
toilets and on campus there are mainly squat toilets. When water runs out in the dorms, it’s
usually actually more sanitary to go to the squat toilets. However, when there
was no water on campus, even the squat toilets became disgusting and you always
seemed to get a nice whiff of sewage wherever you went. When most of the campus left for break, we’ve
had water the whole time so it’s been quite a luxury. Now, most students are coming back so we’ll
see how the water if we start getting shortages again or not.
Power is also another thing that’s quite unreliable here. It’s
gone out a couple of times on campus.
And now, since we’re going into the rainy season, it seems to be going
out more from the storms.
During the week, I don’t really venture out to explore the
city or anything, besides going to collect samples for my internship, mostly
because it’s such a hassle to get anywhere here. Getting anywhere usually takes about an hour
to an hour and a half. The thing is most places aren’t even that far away. Traffic
is just so bad here that most of the time we’re not even moving for 20 minutes
at a time.
So during class days, I guess here’s what a typical day for
me is. On MWF, my classes start at
8am. Getting up early here isn’t that
big of a deal since I feel like I get a good amount of sleep. Also, usually since about 6:30am the dorms
are already filled with sounds of crying babies, cleaning ladies yelling and
people blasting club music and I’m usually already awake by the time my alarm
goes off. On Monday and Wednesday, we gather around in a circle on the floor at
Jenny’s and learn some Swahili with our awesome teacher Paulo. We were told that we couldn’t hold our lessons
on campus because our teacher isn’t part of the university so we have to have
it at Jenny’s. Then we have a small break and I usually go to the café on
campus to get my daily hot milk with coffee and donut. After that, we go to where the rest of our
classes are, Room 15 to sweat (and maybe do a little bit of learning). For lunch
we usually go to one of the cafeterias and usually just get rice and beans (with
veggies and cabbage if I’m lucky). When
I go back to the dorms, I don’t really do too much, mostly just do some reading
and occasionally go for a run or attempt to hand wash some of my clothes. After it’s dark there’s really no where to go
on campus and it’s also not that smart to be walking around alone then so it
occasionally gets a bit boring at night.
During the weekend, though I try and get off campus as much
as possible since it’s almost impossible to do so during the week. A lot of our weekends so far have been
planned trips through CIEE. The weekends
we have off though are usually a combination of going to one of the beaches
here and trying to explore the city. Dar
is pretty massive or at least it seems like it since it takes so long to get
anywhere. Most of my adventuring about the city revolves around trying to find
a good place to get food and exploring the area around that. In general, Dar is
filled with amazing restaurants and full of good vegetarian options too. So far, I’ve tried a couple really good
Indian places, an Ethiopian restaurant, a couple surprisingly good Italian
places and this past weekend a Turkish place.
Anyways, this next week is spring break and I’m going to
attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro (6 more days)! I’m starting to psyche myself
out right now since it’s so close so wish me luck!
