Thursday, June 4, 2009

Thursday, June 4, 2009:

Beep Beep!!! I have never seen such overuse of the car horn while driving.  Drivers don’t slow down here, instead they just drive around whatever is blocking the road and beep in hopes that no one is on the other side of the road. Today I rode my first dala dala.  A dala dala is the local form of transportation (aside from walking) and it is a van that drives around and picks up people. Each van has a name on it that specifies the route it takes and it costs about 25cents.  These vans are literally packed to the brim. They barely stop to pick up passengers are already speeding up before the door is closed, that is if the door can even be closed. Usually the dala dala’s are packed so full that people are literally hanging out of the windows and doors while the van in driving.  This is especially problematic when people’s armpits are literally in your face, when people have been walking all day, it is over 80 degrees outside, and deodorant isn’t even sold in most of the stores here. I think you get the idea, it is often very smelly here, even when you aren’t sitting on a bus under people’s armpits and just standing somewhere and someone lifts up their arms. All in all, it is part of the charm...

Today I visited a feeding center today through an organization called Chemichemi. Chemichemi is a Swahili name meaning “spring water.” The organization was formed under Kivulini and now works independantly. They have feeding centers set up in rural communities  improve the health status of the community, children under five years old, and pregnant mothers through the use of indigenous plants as food and medicine. As we were driving to the feeding center we stopped at another location to drop something off and, as usual, a group of people surrounded the vehical to see what was going on.  I was sitting in the back of the car when a young boy about 4 years old walked up to the car and put his hand on his hips, as if posing, and his T-shirt that “51% of America really scares me” with a map of America and the red and blue states highlighted. I am sure that the boy had no idea what his shirt really meant, it was certianly a hand me down (people’s shirts here often say funny things because they don’t understand the meaning of them and many clothes here are second hand), but it couldn’t have been a more perfect political statement.

My wonderful and interesting day finished with a $1 sunset yoga class at a hotel outside of Mwanza, on the banks of Lake Victoria.  The yoga was followed by a delicious dinner of Tapalia and Nile Perch fish caught freshly from Lake Victoria that morning.  I definitely plan to continue the coming two times a week to yoga classes.