Frustration

Library

Campus

Restaurant food

Outside our dorm

After having spent almost a week on campus without starting our project, we decided to take the daladala (minibus) in to town yesterday, as both of us desperately wanted to eat something else than rice and beans. We had a lovely meal, rice, naturally, a great meat stew, chips and meat skewers. It felt liberating to leave campus, if only for a couple of hours as it has become clear that whenever something good happens, we are enormously grateful as many problems can and do occur during the same day. What usually brings out the most frustration, is when we have carried our heavy bags in the heat to the library for a day of surfing the Internet, and either the guard won't let us in, or the Internet is simply not working. It is interesting but sometimes a bit hard to realise how important Internet is when being so far away from family and friends. 

Ordering food is also one of the daily activities that can be exhausting. For lunch we usually take the same thing, however, today we decided to try something new, which turned out to be quite an effort. I asked the ladies serving the food if the ugali contained wheat. Not very surprisingly, they just laughed at me, in fact, so much one of them almost fell of the chair she was standing on. It didn't seem to matter that I translated wheat to the Swahili word, ngano, they kept laughing and I kept pointing and making signs, but for no good. As I realised they didn't understand me, I gave up and went back to our table all sweaty and tired.  After several attempts to explain what food we wanted, a kind man asked if we needed help and finally, after 20 minutes, we got the food that we wanted and didn't even care when we realised that it, unfortunately, wasn't as good as we had thought. In fact, we were rather happy to have tried something new.

Despite some annoying parts of the days, we are not only frustrated with things happening here. Today the water decided to work and we can, after almost a week, use water 'normally'. It also rained for the first time, that is, if you can call it rain, it went on for about 5 minutes and hardly left any signs of it.

Realising that the access to Internet is limited, we actually bought mobile Internet enabling us to surf in our room, which we have done all day today, planning safari and holiday on Zanzibar.

In general, we are enjoying Africa and learn new exciting and important things every day.