Hi All-- Here goes for my first post from Africa.
First of all, all is well. Also, the internet is quite slow and somewhat costly, but just about everything else here (Arusha) is not either of those things. The trip so far has been... wonderful, joyful, miraculous and chaotic! The first flight to London I was on with Devon, Ashley, Sarah and Nathan (four fellow UCLA volunteers), and we had an emergency stop in Denver to fix a small electrical fire with one of the personal tv sets. Firemen in spacesuits came onboard to check it out, and this added a good two hours to that flight (we were not able to get off the plane).
London Heathrow went well, as did the flight from there to Nairobi with the four other volunteers who joined us.
In the Nairobi airport I met three Swedes! Who knew? A sign to me that it's home and we're all connected. One was a young woman f\visiting her sister who lives here, and the other was an older man and his wife who live in TZ six months out of the year. I talked to him about Sweden, what we're doing here, he gave me a heads up about some things as well as the nature of Arusha, Building with Books and such. He was on our shuttle from the airport to the place where we changed buses for the long ride to Tanzania, too. When we split up I gave him my blog address and web site of BWB because of his interest in building schools in TZ.
The several-hour ride down the Nairobi-Arusha road was also chaotic. The bus was very small for how many people were on it, and the road had an abundance of potholes, which we avoided by crossing over to the wrong (right) side of the road, dodging oncoming traffic or running other cars off the road (only once or so... it was fine). Along the road we saw many Maasai people in their mostly purple and red robes, sticks, cattle, goats and sheep.
I must cut out now. Time is running out.
More Later! I love you all.
Love. Carrie
