The second week

Seriously I don’t even realize how fast the days pass by and its already a week. I feel like I just updated my blog. The week was pretty much similar to the previous week. We started with our Swahili lessons and ended with the engineering labs. We learned some new Swahili msamiati (vocabulary). We also built our power supplies, something like the portable chargers. It’s one of the things I learned back in my undergrad years but it was an experience to put it to practical use.

 My group members working during the labs

Swahili Classes

We visited a church with our homestay family. Our homestay family really loved our idea of coming to a church. It was my first church ritual and I appreciated all of it. There was this choir, which sang to some devotional Christian songs, and it was a delight to listen to them. One of the sections wanted us to introduce our self. We introduced our self in Swahili and they were really happy to hear us speak in Swahili.

The local church (kanisa)

Something different we did with the Swahili classes was actually implementing whatever we learnt by visiting a local market. We learned some words that could help us bargain like ghali sana (too expensive). Our teachers gave us around 2000 Tsh (around Rs. 70) and we were asked to buy anything we could. The market was no different than the market I had seen in India, but the bargaining was different. I realized bargaining is so easy when we do that in our native language but its really difficult in some new language. I managed to get some green leafy vegetables, about 4 brinjals and around 4 tomatoes in those Rs, 70 I had and still saved some Tsh 400 ( Rs. 10).

Some of the vegetables we bought from the market

The day at Mt. Meru was interesting and also a bit disappointing. Remember in my last post I mentioned about a device that took us a day to fix it.. Apparently that wasn’t the end. We tested it and it stopped working. We had to open up the device again and fix some other problems only to realize that it wont work because we did not have a replacement for one of the important parts of the device. So we had to leave it and couldn’t fix it. It took almost half our day to figure out that it wont work. It was really frustrating but we realized that that’s how its going to be in hospitals where we can fix some and some have to be left unused.

Oxygen Concentrator (did not work!)

The next half I worked on an automatic blood pressure machine that had a tilted screen. It was an easy fix and I just had to open it up, put the screen in place and voila it worked perfectly fine. After fixing that I opened a UPS power generator that wasn’t working to see if I could use the batteries for some other devices. When I opened it the batteries were covered with zinc oxide and while I was cleaning them I got it all over my face. I could taste it all my lips too and it was disgusting (apparently its not supposed to be inhaled or swallowed). The batteries were really drained and we thought of recharging them the next time with our self-made power supply.

That was the end of the week. We got back home early, as we had to pack for our Safari weekend. Had to get up really early the next day as, we were meeting at around 7 in the morning at TCDC. Our group consisted of about 27 people and we were divided in 4 jeeps for the safari. The safari was a two-day trip. The first day we visited the Ngorongoro conservation and the second day we visited the Tarangire national park.

 One of the safari jeeps

  

Born and brought up in India I had seen couple of safaris but I couldn’t compare it to them and was awestruck by their beauty. Just to give you all a little background, the Ngornogoro crater was formed from the volcanic eruptions from the surrounding mountains. It is 260 square kms wide (that’s vast) and about 610 meters deep. The land is mostly covered by grass and is dry, yet supports a whole lot of fauna. The view was breathtaking and the to see the diversity in the animals was like cherry on the cake. Vervet monkey, baboon, jackal, lion, zebras, warthog, African buffalo, wildebeest, impala, gazelles were the animals we got to see from a short distance. We had our lunch in the midst of the craters with hippos resting in the nearby lake (its dangerous!). We ended the safari at around 4 in the evening. It felt like heaven as we went up the crater and we realized the vastness of the crater (cannot describe it guys).

The Ngorongoro Crater (just half of it)

We rested at a campsite outside the park and they had set tents for us. But as my coordinator mentioned it was glamor camping as the only thing we did similar to camping was sleep in the tents. Otherwise everything was like staying in a lodge. The organizers served the meals, where the dinner was a four-course meal with fruits as desserts. Everyone stayed awake till midnight and enjoyed the beauty of night sky and stars shining above us, it was so mesmerizing and serene.

The tents

The next morning we started for the Tarangire national park, which was completely different than what, we saw the previous day. We saw almost completely different sets of animals including giraffes, loads of elephants (got around 300-400 pics just of the elephants) and also saw some really colorful birds. Again, we had lunch in the park and then after lunch started our journey back home.

Tarangire National Park

As promised I tried to keep the blog as small as possible. I will update you about this week and many more adventures in my next blog. Don’t forget to check the safari photos on facebook . Badaaye!!