East Africa Around

Dear Readers,

We have just returned to Iringa sick with fever and exhaustion, but elated and in awe of all we’ve seen and learned after a month of travel throughout East Africa. Our original plan for July was to work in a Congolese refugee camp in Western Tanzania, but we were denied the entry permit by a surly government official who was unmoved by our charming personalities:-)

This sudden blow to our plans left us wondering what to do with the rest of the month, so we decided to take our grand tour of East Africa’s 5 countries, which we had been planning for next spring. In the coming weeks we will try to edit our journals into coherent narratives to share with all of you. Here’s a quick preview:

We traveled in a giant circle beginning and ending in Dar Es Salaam, covering some 3000 kilometers in 23 days, and spending a total of 130 hours on African buses, the insides of which we never want to see again in our lifetime. We learned how to greet in 3 new languages: Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and Luganda, and used our Kiswahili everywhere we went.

We read the US State Department warnings about travel to Burundi, but decided to go anyway and were well rewarded - the most dangerous thing that happened to us was not rebel attacks, but comically inept thieves following us around the market of Bujumbura.

We saw the physical and emotional scars of the Rwandan people 14 years after the genocide, which the glimmering modern buildings of a rebuilt Kigali cannot hide. We scaled an 11,000 foot volcano thick with jungle vegetation, and in so doing became intimately acquainted with mud.

We saw the most incredible live performance of African music and dance by the Ugandan National Dance Troupe, and were surrounded by music day and night throughout our stay in vibrant Kampala.

We experienced a Nairobi that few tourists ever see, staying with friends in a humble suburb and visiting a second-hand clothing market deep within a labyrinth of the dirtiest, muddiest, most trash-strewn streets we’ve ever seen.

All these sights, sounds, smells, tastes and conversations have given us a new understanding of Tanzania, or “T-Zed,” as other East Africans call it, in its regional context. Tired though we are, the trip was the perfect way to culminate our first year in Africa. Stay tuned for more…