The Sweetest Thing

Today, on Thanksgiving, I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to a little feller I'm thankful to have known for a few short weeks. Moody.

Named after Mohamed, my counterpart, Moody was quite the hotstepper.

He was a special friend of the chickens.

And he loved helping me with my crossword puzzles. (Here he is meditating on Thursday.)

Sadly, Moody succumbed to some mystery puppy sickness on Tuesday morning. Martin and I buried him in the garden with his cloth bone. 

Our two guard dogs, Simba and Chui (lion and leopard in Swahili), ran off about a week ago in search of some female companionship and have not yet returned. Martin thinks someone may be holding them against their will, but as yet there has been no ransom note. We all know I love a good mystery, but this one is beyond my capacity to solve. 

I brought home one of Moody's brothers yesterday for Martin to replace the lost guard dogs. Martin asked for a big dog, and the new puppy might not be as big as what he had in mind, but he will grow. He is hardier and heartier than Moody (the runt of seven) was and stands a good chance of making it to full-fledged vicious-to-strangers adulthood. Martin already loves him so much, he named him Nicole.

As my time here grows shorter, I am thankful that the dogs have brought Martin and I closer together. I have learned so many new vocabulary words in Swahili, like minyoo (worms), viroboto (fleas), kufa (to die), and others that are purely for the purpose of describing dogs, their maladies, and their actions. We have spent many a night making the universal throw-up noises that transcend language (the first time was after Moody pooped out a pink, tennis-ball-sized mesh of twine-like worms). And I have learned more about Martin as a compassionate person as I have seen him care for the little (and big) dogs. While we won't be able to discuss the ethics of international service learning projects or the plot of a Spanish soap opera on TV, we can laugh together and take care of each other and our pets. I am thankful to have a friend like him.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Superheroes on Safari

On Halloween weekend, my group took a wonderful trip to visit Oldupai Gorge, Shifting Sands, and Ngorongoro Crater. Here are a few highlights:

After a three hour drive from Arusha, we stopped to look out over the crater on our way over the rim.

After a visit to the Oldupai Gorge museum to learn about the Australopithecus and Homo Habilis who were discovered there, we hiked down into the gorge to see the site of some of the excavations. The Gorge is also where a set of footprints were found preserved in a layer of hardened ash. As so many finds are made, the footprints were discovered when a couple of archaeologists were fooling around throwing dung balls at each other and one of the archaeologists fell on a piece of ground that was harder than the others. They dug and found a remarkable set of three people's footprints along with an ancestor of the horse. You never know what will come out of a good old fashioned dung ball fight.


Our next stop was the Shifting Sands. An incredible dune of black magnetic sand in the middle of a flat, dry piece of land that is blown 17 meters per year. There are markers leading up to it showing where it used to sit since the 1970s.

Here we are celebrating the shifting of the sands:

And again:

The next day was Halloween, so we decided to be practical and wear our costumes on Safari to the crater. What better way to keep ourselves safe from the animals than disguised as superheroes and ninjas?

   

We ran into some other Americans on safari:

And then it was time to go see the animals.

After the safari, we returned to our campsite for pumpkin carving, tent-to-tent trick-or-treating, and s'mores around a campfire.

That night I heard chomping around my tent and then suddenly it went quiet. I thought maybe whatever was chomping saw a lion, but the next morning a couple of my interns said they looked out during the night and said they saw three zebras sleeping in a circle around my tent. What an entourage!


It was a great trip and a nice break midway through the program. The interns are back in their villages and next weekend we are off to climb Mount Meru.