ATAinAfrica: February 2013

Wow, where do we start with this one? It is completely different here. A different life with different friends in a part of the world that is similar in climate to Colorado…actually beautiful more days in Tanzania. Let’s go over what our days are like:

We have screens, mosquito nets over every bed and bug spray but still about 1 out of 3 nights finds us awake in the middle of the night swatting at mosquitos with our sweet bug zapping tennis racket. So we wake very well rested 2 out of 3 nights and the other night, not as well rested, but a little jazzed about killing those little buzzing skeeters.

We wake up 3 days of the week around 5:45 to take kids to swim practice where Kathleen is helping to coach about 18 of the students, one of whom is the top breaststroke record holder in Tanzania (she lives here but goes to Dutch training camps during the summer). Mack and Zoe are swimming competitively on the team for the first time ever!

For breakfast we usually have Chai Bora tea with lots of sugar and milk from the cows that live on our farm (there are over 300 cows, 90 of which are milking cows, and they eat extremely well…alfalfa is grown along with corn and hay specifically for them). Deena, our “housegirl” (she is like a maid and helps around the house… although I think she is about 40 everyone calls their maids “housegirl”) brings us 1 liter of fresh milk every day. How fresh? Sometimes it is still warm from the cow and we boil our milk for about 10 minutes to address any bacteria. We buy all sorts of fruit 3-4 days a week. We buy the fruits and veggies from outdoor open air markets. It is similar to what we would call “farmer’s markets” at home. Everything is fresh and either perfectly ripe or almost perfectly ripe…to differentiate you tell the fruit seller “Today” (Leo) or “Tomorrow” (Kesho) and they pick out the fruit for you. Our usual staples: mangos, apple mangos (our favorite!), bananas, plantains, papayas, apples, oranges, passion fruit, limes, lemons, sweet melon, watermelon and avocados. Compared to Colorado THESE FRUITS ARE INCREDIBLE. The vegetables are the same – delicious! We bought a juicer and a blender because every day we eat enormous amounts of fruit. Kathleen and I are complete vegetarians (except when we have meat ;) and it is really fun cooking in our cute little kitchen. Deena does all of the dishes, laundry and tidies the house.

School for Mackie and Zoe goes from 7:45 – 2:30 but there are after school activities which last until 3:45 two days a week. Mack frequently rides his bike to school with the neighbors, an opportunity not really possible in Evergreen…particularly this time of year. We are within walking distance of TGT, a recreation center that has a leisure pool, workout room, tennis courts, squash courts, several soccer fields and a 5K running track. As one who knows Kathleen might imagine, she spends several mornings a week at there. She is also spending time holding babies at a local orphanage. I typically work most days in Arusha (population almost a million people live here if you take into consideration about a 20 km radius), traveling by bike usually which is about 40 kilometers round trip. It is actually quite a dangerous place to ride a bicycle within town because the drivers and motor cyclists are nuts. What is nuts? There are very few official rules of the road. People drive on the left, pass on the left or right, create as many lanes as they want… it is very chaotic and one must constantly look all around for cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, bicycles, goats, chickens, cows, and children! I try to be on the defensive when I ride a bike into town and obviously wear helmet and gloves. Many people have been riding daily for many years and have given good advice such as “Assume every car wants to hit you.” Kathleen is generally terrified of the driving and will not ride a bicycle into town either! She has been riding with an extremely competitive, mostly male bike group once a week. They ride outside of town so it is safer. They ride in a 20-40 person group, taking up a whole lane which adds to the safety. They actually take the road that goes to the Serengeti and it has a lot less traffic then downtown and she has been really challenged by them. It is something that she looks forward to very much along with the swim coaching.

Almost every day starts at around 70 degrees, goes up to 85 and then cools down with a nice breeze by the time we go to bed. We now have a garden with baby plants from our neighbors and expect to be eating from it a week from now. Most days are very sunny, although we are beginning to enter “rainy season” and we are not really sure what that will bring. Regardless, plants and vegetables grow like crazy here!

The people here are extremely friendly. Last time we lived in Il Boru which is very densely populated and when Kathleen would go running she would see hundreds of people, dozens of which were kids who would want to yell at her or run with her. Now we live on a 1000 acre coffee plantation/farm. Most of the people we see on the property work there so it is very different from running through villages. It is actually much more relaxing and beautiful. It is safe and secluded, complete with an electric fence and 24 hour security guards. Our location is actually quite idyllic, we just had 13 friends visit us from Colorado and I think every one of them would be quite happy living here. The place where we live is owned by a family that has been here since 1920 and they farm, make coffee (350 metric tons a year!), and run an excellent restaurant. They will make us dinner (for a fee) and will help us cater parties as well (so far we have thrown 1 party and had 1 dinner made for us).

We live very close to the school Zoe and Mack attend (Stephen has chosen to go to a boarding school 100 km from where we live. He comes home every weekend). They attend International School Moshi (ISM). The school is primarily expatriots. The kids have met children from all over the world. We have met many of the parents as well.

When the kids arrive back from school we give them some time on the computer and then have dinner and spend the rest of the evening together as a family. We are having dinner together easily 6 nights a week and after dinner we relax and play cards or just hang out. Homework from school seems more the exception that the rule. It is so nice. At the end of every evening I grab my laptop, open up Kindle and read from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which we have almost finished after a month and a half. This is the part I was most looking forward to, I have not been good back in Evergreen with just hanging out with my kids, playing games and reading stories, I am too busy and preoccupied. But here it has been so relaxing and so nice to be with them…embarrassingly I had fallen away from kissing my kids goodnight but I have gotten better here. It makes me so happy to bond with them so closely. It is one of the main reasons I wanted to come here.

Some people, even my wife, have said “why don’t you hang out with your kids more back in Evergreen, why do we need to go halfway across the world to do that ?!?” That’s a tough question. I think the reason is: Our lives our crazy! Everybody we know has crazy lives in the U.S. Everyone is doing stuff all day long…particularly those with kids. It should be easy to say “Just add one more thing to your schedule” but in the U.S. there is so much going on all day long. Over here, in Africa, it is easy to focus on relationships and family. I think that relationships seem much more valued in Africa. Family comes first and spending most of one’s time with family is just what everyone does.