Heidinafrica’s Blog

Here are some of the people I spoke about regularly in the blog this past 3 months.  I will keep adding photos and do let me know if I put too many in any single post.

This is Irene.  She is standing in one of the corridors at the school.  Notice she does NOT have on a uniform, like all the students must wear, and that she has long hair (extension, which are VERY common).  She was pretty excited to not have to be like the students anymore!  In fact – PANTS – wow!  But jeans were never  what I would have wanted to wear – far too hot!

This is Philorian and his family in their home in Ifakara at the Diocese compound.  His wife Rachel is a last year nursing student and he has one son, Leslie.  Just gotta add – doesn’t it look like Philorian is about to answer his cell phone?!  The cell (or sim they call it) is one of his favorite pieces of equipment and he uses it ALOT!

This is Aida in our kitchen preparing mboga, vegetables.  As one of my daughers said, she looks like a beautiful Africa woman – and she is!

This is Freda, our cook during the week.  She is sitting on a little stool that has a rounded metal scraper attached used to shred the coconut out of its shell.  She made great meals!  She is sitting in the more-oft used kitchen, the little outdoor area just outside the kitchen door.  In the background, in front of her “car” (that’s a bicycle in most of TZ!) is the little charcoall burning stove used to cook almost all of our meals.

And this is Charlie, the gardner/technician, doing what he frequently was doing, thrashing the grass, this time in the courtyard of the house (only this photo was poised, not caught while he was actually doing it or you would see grass flying!).  There aren’t any lawn mowers.  He tried a push mower that the school has, but it didn’t work very well on the grass around the house. 

Those are some of the amazing people I was surrounded by during my Tanzanian stay!  More again soon!