The Ngorongoro Crater

For our final tourist sightseeing of the trip, we dusted off our work clothes and hopped into safari jeeps for the journey to the Ngorongoro Crater area. Looking on a map, the distance between Moshi and the park is a cool 300km; on dust covered, potholed roads, the journey took us nearly seven hours.

All that aside, we checked into our accommodation, had a very brief sleep and hit the park for an early sunrise safari the next morning. Along the way, the nomadic Maasai Mara people ambled along the road, herding their livestock through the green valleys. Fun fact: Ngorongoro is a Maasai word and translates roughly to the sound produced by a cowbell.

Onwards! The crater that houses the park is a geological wonder, the world's largest inactive, intact and unfilled volcanic caldera, 100 square miles wide. Think Santorini without the water and bigger. The park is part of the Northern Safari Circuit, and is one of four parks in Tanzania. If you weren't travelling with a group of say, 29 students, you might take the journey from Serengeti to Ngorongoro to Taragire to Lake Manyara National Park. I've added it to my to-travel list.

On our way into the crater, we traversed a road that wound in, down and around to the crater's floor, with a sharp drop into the crater itself on one side. This involved a rather dodgy experience with a jackknifed semi, the men who pushed it off to the side and its near-slide off the gaping ledge. But everyone lived to see another day and so we moved on.

First animal sighting, our only giraffe of the trip on the way down into the caldera:

The lack of tall trees keeps giraffes and, usually, elephants (but it was our lucky day!) away from the inner workings of the park. In fact, the landscape looked distinctly unlike our safari in South Africa; the land was green and swampy in places, with a huge pond where the hippos convened and a large area for birds of various feathers.

 Elephants!

 Zebras

 

 Wildebeest completing part of their great migration

Hippos lurking in the pond beneath. Fun fact: hippos kill more people every year on the African continent more than any other animal.

 Just to end the day right, we stealthily steered past these beauties having a lounge:

 

Not pictured: the rhinos we saw at a distance and the buffalo travelling in large herds. Four of the big five sighted, woo! We ended our day on safari with more stunning views before making the epic seven hour journey back to Moshi.

 

It was kind of the perfect day.

Kilimanjaro Base Camp

For our first full-day foray into the tourist world, we gathered the students into the mini buses and made our way to the foot of the epic Kilimanjaro. After several days of drinking our morning coffee in its shadow, we were all just a little bit excited.

There are several routes to climb 4,900 metres to the summit at 5,895 metres, some quicker and more adventurous than others. We opted for a gently sloping day trip of a walk, considering our time constraints and variable fitness of the group.

We stumbled at the first hurdle. In climbing the mountain, you have to check in all members of the group, including the names, birthdates, nationalities and passport numbers of all individuals, no small feat when you're travelling with the United Nations of student backgrounds.

Guides are required for all journeys and groups staying overnight were required to hire porters, whose kit was weighed on the way in and out of the park. My favourite group of walkers were the large group of women from Dar who were decked in colourful khanga and hijabs. Considering we passed them on the way up and then back on the way down, they weren't really going for a speedy summit.

The walk sloped gently up through the woods before taking slightly steeper turns up towards basecamp.

Some of our students struggled a bit but five hours after we started, we made our way to Mandara Hut at 2,720 metres. There was no view but the sun was shining and lunch tasted fantastic after the sweaty walk to the almost halfway point up Kili. Much of the group then made their way another 350 metres up to Maundi Crater. I stayed behind with the wanting a resters.

As I rested, I contemplated the human desire to conquer big peaks.  We saw, and smelled, many people making their way down after summiting. It seems like a great idea, a huge accomplishment but when you get to the higher altitudes, oxygen canisters and heavy-duty mountain gear is required. Snow falls year round at the peak. And there's a good chance that you get to the summit and the sky will be marred with clouds. Imagine that, you climb to nearly 6,000 metres and you don't even get a view.

For the moment, I'll stick to this Kilimanjaro taster. 

Tanzania: Materuni Waterfall and Coffee

After a day of hoisting planks of wood and pulling nails from said planks, a bit of a walk was in order.  We loaded up students into the mini-bus and made our way across winding dirt roads to the trail entrance to Materuni Waterfall. 

A sloping, sweaty walk through the woods (jungle? there were spiders and banana trees) yielded a stunning view of the waterfall and the pond that caught its spring-fed remains.

We walked for maybe an hour before plunging into the ice-cold, waist-high pond at the other end.

There was lots of yoga balancing on the rocks and nice moments of calm. Pictures don't do it justice, perhaps because the school camera did lots of the picture taking and sharing those pictures on a public forum is just not kosher.

From there, we made our way back to the trailhead and over to a local coffee experience. Tanzania happens to be located in the African part of the Bean Belt, a world region between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Tanzanian coffee is some of the best in the world and we learned about the process from growth to cup. Students were privy to a production, from roasting the beans to grinding them using a gigantic mortar and pestle to taking slow sips. The sales pitch at the end was almost non-essential. We bought coffee by the tens of bags.

A Journey to Tanzania: Moshi

At the end of the 2017-2018 school year, I was successful in achieving a promoted post. As the CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) Coordinator, a major part of my role is planning the Grade 11 service trip to Tanzania during the February half term break.

This involved a lot of headache: conversations with the PTA; trips to the Tanzanian High Commission; being logistical commander to the 30 students preparing, fundraising and attending the trip. Planning started in September and by February, after several small snafus (a student who had a severe allergic reaction to the malaria tablets the morning of the flight, parents concerned about the terror threat, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork) the 29-student, 4-teacher group made our way to the airport.

Our first hurdle was an immense one. We flew Air Kenya from London to Nairobi and then from Nairobi to Moshi. Our connecting flight, the latter one, had been cancelled and our group had been rebooked onto two separate flights: one at 8am and one at 5pm and the teachers had all been booked onto the later flight. After two hours at the counter, three phone calls to school and an incredibly kind Air Kenya staff member, we all got bumped onto the earlier flight. It seems simple but it was a hell of a lot more stressful than this.

Perhaps because of the initial stress, and perhaps because travel with teenagers is not without its drama, the outward journey was a bit hairy. First, 15-minutes into the flight one of the students decided it was a good time to break up with his girlfriend, literally on the airplane. By the end of the flight, he was with someone else. This caused knock-on drama for the rest of the trip. Next, when we arrived in Nairobi, I decided to leave my brain and all of the paperwork, including our baggage claim tags, on the plane. This ensured that I got a free tour of the wider Nairobi airport, including the back workings of the luggage processing and handling. Because that wasn't enough, I then proceeded to lose the baggage claim tags while going back through security and had to have another lovely Air Kenya official re-print them all. Honestly, hot mess.

Fortunately, a majority of the trip's drama seemed to take place at the airport (more drama upon the return involving a student leaving a passport on the plane, me losing and eventually finding my Fitbit, and an unfortunate digestive incident with a milkshake...). But hopping on our little propeller plane to Moshi yielded a beautiful view of Africa's tallest peak:

And when we eventually arrived at our accommodation, a short walk from the primary school we would be working at for the week, Kilimanjaro sat up pretty. It's the best way view for a morning coffee.

Once the actual service part of our trip started, issues ironed themselves out nicely. The group made its way to a local primary school where we became construction dogsbodies: painting walls, breaking up and laying cement, fixing furniture, etc. 

Teachers and students at the school itself were very welcoming. They've had a lot of international support and were quite used to foreigners invading their space with construction tasks. The volunteering itself definitely brings up questions around sustainability, many of which I still have. But where possible, we tried to support the local community--we hired roofers who were local contractors and brought fundraising money to buy supplies with local businesses. Definitely imperfect but something I'll work on for next year's trip. 

The school building was one typical to local climates; all classrooms faced into a central courtyard and windows were not covered. 

Little grammatical gems like this also lined the outer walls.

And students had the opportunity to get into classrooms and practise some teaching skills, see how challenging it really is. With class sizes of 40-50, it was an eye-opening experience. Various other experiences over the week really made our students check their privilege; walking to the local spring to collect water, a 30-minute round trip walk away for instance, really made them consider their daily £10 spend on lunches. 

It also made going into the city quite powerful. We took a small group of students into Moshi centre to buy grain with part of our fundraising money. Central Moshi is hardly huge but there is an international school if anyone is keen:

The money spent on grain ensured that the school's grain silo would be full and able to provide school lunches for all students for the academic year. At the start of the week, the Headteacher wanted to thank us for last year's contribution; ensuring school lunches for all had seen a significant increase in students' exam results. And parents in the local community who were financially able to continued to contribute to the school lunch fund.

The hundreds of kilos of grain arrived at school few hours later where staff and students alike formed a gigantic bucket brigade to fill the silo. Surplus grain went into a storage classroom and spilled grain was scooped up into buckets and made its way back into the bags. Nothing was left to waste.

At the end of our five days of volunteering, the school thanked us with a whole-school assembly. This involved lots of singing, dancing and clapping. I'd like to believe that it reminded my students that we're not all that different. And although I still have questions about how we turn this trip into something less Voluntouristy, it was clear to see that many of our actions did leave a positive impact.