SylLy Acres

Whoops! I posted this back in September, but I accidentally made it a new page rather than a new post. Who knew blogs could be so complicated??  Anyway, a bit about our homeschooling here…

We have been in Dar for 2 months now! I just realized the other day that our time in Dar is more than half over. In 2 weeks, we will leave for a 6 week adventure up north and then we return for only 3 more weeks in Dar. We’ve had a great routine in Dar so I thought I’d write a bit about what we do here before we leave!

During the week, Jon is busy going to classes with the students, teaching is own class, or preparing for our trip North. He is keeping fairly busy with work here as well as work still back home at Luther. The girls and I also stay busy with school work in the morning and various activities after lunch.

We have mostly been focusing on math and African studies, including Swahili, during our mornings of homeschool. Doing school work gives us a nice anchor for our day and provides necessary structure. I have a few goals in mind of concepts I want them to learn (dividing decimals, adding fractions, etc) and we are meeting those goals through our morning work. Also, Lily is learning cursive, Sylvia is firming up her English skills and they both do a lot of reading!

The great thing about homeschooling here is that we have so many adventures where learning occurs outside of the house – going to the National Museum, touring Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, exchanging currency, cooking Tanzanian foods, and speaking a little bit of Swahili. I try to make room for all the learning that can be done beyond the books while we are here.

Our afternoons are usually filled with violin practice for Sylvia, special projects like mapping or drawing, trips to the local market, or swimming at the pool here on campus. Our days go by pretty quickly and by evening there is just enough time after supper to play a game of Hearts or Euchre.

So there is a little glimpse of what we do every day. And without further ado, here are a few photos of our school days.

At home, working on Swahili and a map of Tanzania.

We really like to study outside at one of the many study areas on campus. We often meet Jon between his classes. Our favorite place to study is by the cafe that sells the best samosas!

Walking to our study areas.

Recently, the girls created miniature parks for their doll and dog and then drew a map of the area. And took lots of fun photos.

We recently spent a morning at the Village Museum in Dar. It is a great museum and we really enjoyed our time there. The museum features a collection of dwellings that indigenous tribes all around Tanzania build. There are over 120 tribes in the country and we learned about many of them at this museum. They did not have examples from each tribe – otherwise we’d have been there all week! 🙂

We loved that we could go inside each one and look around. It was fun to imagine that we lived there…And here’s where the girls would sleep, and where I would sleep as the first wife…

Lily had fun reading the signs. At each house, we learned about the tribe’s location, social structure, what they ate and how they prepared it, unique traditions and how their dwellings reflected all those things.

Many houses had displays inside with items like cooking utensils and cookware, beds, farming and hunting equipment, musical instruments and items used in celebrations.

When we finished walking around, we watched a traditional dance show. I don’t remember what tribe these dancers were from but we really enjoyed the music and dancing.

A few weeks ago, one of our contacts at the university invited our family and all the students to her house for a meal. Paulina is the Dean of Students at UDSM and she has played a pivotal role in making sure we are well cared for here. She sets up our housing and the dorms for the students as well as their home stays, manages our guards and cleaner, facilitates transportation and excursions, teaches us how to cook, takes us shopping, and in general helps us all to feel at home here.

She invited us to her house so we could get out of the busy city and see another side of Dar. So we all piled in a dala dala, then the DART bus (rapid transit), another dala dala and then taxis to get to her house on the outskirts of town. Paulina and her husband Amani have a lovely home in a quiet neighborhood. We all really enjoyed our afternoon at their house.

Paulina’s house

Amazing food! She cooked all morning for us! And I’m jealous of her “summer” kitchen, on the right.

Paulina has a set of 3 year old twins at home. And a set of 13 year old twins off at boarding school!

We had fun playing with Amani Jr. and Amanda.

The gang!

We were escorted back to the DART station by Paulina’s children, her nephew and two young women who work for Paulina.

You just never know when you might see a cow. 🙂

At the DART terminal. Yes, we are on the “edge” of town, but there are still so many people!

I want to add a few things to the post Sylvia and Lily wrote about our house. We have a very nice large house and we feel pretty fortunate to have such great accommodations while in Dar. There are many things about our house that are similar to our house back in Decorah, which helped the transition to this new place. These include:

• living spaces large enough to accommodate our 10 students for dinner, game nights and class
• a kitchen with a fridge, microwave and stove
• a large bathroom with a washing machine
• 4 bedrooms! We use 2 as bedrooms, one as an office and one as storage

But there are a few differences, too.

For example, we hang our laundry outside in Decorah, but we never have this problem.

We have a large back yard (which is rare in Dar!). And although our yard in Decorah is much bigger, we don’t have adorable mongooses running around there.

In Iowa, we have a better system for disposing of our trash. This pile is at the edge of our yard so that when we look at the evening sunset, we see our garbage. Sometimes we take our bags to a cement container down the road, but often, our garbage is taken to this pile by our housekeeper, Agatha. (By the way, that’s another difference between here and there – no housekeeper!!)

As Sylvia and Lily pointed out, we have bars on our windows and doors. In Iowa, we don’t even have keys to lock our doors. Here, we have to lock all doors every time we leave. We have guards that stay here 24/7. All the houses on our street have bars and most have guards, too. We are very aware of theft in this neighborhood and take necessary precautions.

Other differences without photos:

• We sleep under mosquito nets every night.
• There are geckos living in the house that eat mosquitos! And, they are adorable. We have a big resident living behind a book shelf. We’ve named him Gary Jerry Jeffery Jeremy Gecko.
• We have running water but it is rain water which comes from a big catchment basin. We have to pump our water from the basin up to a another container on the top of the house. We frequently run out of water so we have to open the pipe valve and flip on the electric pump for a few minutes.
• We don’t drink the water out of the faucet unless we boil the water first.
• When we want hot water, we have to turn on an electric water heater which then heats a tank with water for our showers (no hot water in the kitchen – we use boiled water from the hot pot).
• Occasional power outages.
• Cooking on a combo gas and electric stove (2 electric and 2 gas burners).
• No source of heat other than the sun. 🙂
• The windows are made of long glass horizontal rectangles that swivel open to allow for lots of air flow.
• Like in Malta, we have 240 outlets, and each individual outlet can turn off or on above the plug in.

Overall, we like this house and we have made it our home while in Dar. When we leave for a day or weekend, we always comment how nice it is to be back home. 🙂

Many of our posts have been about the beautiful beaches we’ve explored. But we’ve also had fun adventures out and about in Dar es Salaam. We live in a quiet neighborhood on the university campus and most things we need are only a few minutes away by dala dala. But we like to step out beyond our little area when we can.

First, these dala dala things: they are the main mode of public transportation in Dar. The buses follow certain routes and you pay 400 tsh ($.20) no matter where you get off on that route. To switch to another dala dala on a different route, you pay another 400 tsh. We can usually find a seat on the bus, but sometimes we have to squeeze in and stand in the hot and crowded bus, bumping along. It’s a fun adventure!

Since most people don’t have cars, they rely on the dalas for transport. But traffic can be so bad at times, a simple trip a few km away can take up to an hour. In the past few years, boda bodas (motorcycles) and bajajis (3 wheeled taxis) have been on the rise since they can weave in and out of traffic a little more (and thus are not as safe!). This photo gives you a little sense of the traffic.

One day we went to the National Museum with the students. We walked through a fascinating exhibit on the human bones that have been found in Tanzania and what life was like on the African savannah for our ancestors. We also viewed an interesting exhibit about the East African slave trade.

Walking along the streets of downtown Dar.

Part of the fish market in Kivukoni, downtown Dar.

One Saturday, we took a dala dala to the Masaki peninsula, the wealthy area of town where ex-pats and diplomats live. We ate a good (but expensive!) lunch at the Hilton Hotel, went to the shopping mall, hung out in a bookstore, drank cappuccinos, and ate local, organic chocolate for a treat. The girls liked our American outing. 🙂 And we still got our water fix!

We decided to take a bajaji home to save us a little time. Our driver was very kind and safe. I only had to close my eyes a couple times when he swerved out into oncoming traffic. 🙂

We look forward to more adventures out and about in Dar. Stay tuned!

By Sylvia and Lily

Here are a few photos of our house. We thought you all needed to see some more pictures of where we are staying.

This is a picture of us in front of our house.

We like pretending to try to break into our house.

This is a picture of our living room with us in it. One thing we like about our living room is the memory foam couches because we don’t sink into them.

Here is a picture of daddy in our dinning room. We do most of our school work in our dining room.

This is our kitchen. Me, daddy and Andrew (our house guard) are making choroko for dinner.

These are our stairs. We took a picture of them because we think they are really cool. I call them xylophone stairs because when you run up them quickly, they each make a different hollow noise.

Here’s a picture of our upstairs hallway and me. At one end is the bathroom and at the other is a storage room. In the middle there are 2 bedrooms – one is ours and the other one is mommy ‘s and daddy’s.

This is our bedroom. We have to sleep under bug nets every night. Lily’s side is the messy one.

This is me on one of the three balconies. There is a balcony door in each bedroom and 2 in the hall.

Here are some monkeys climbing on the bars of our windows. We like seeing the monkeys everywhere.

If you read Bison’s post, then you know that we spent 2 days in Bagamoyo last weekend. Bison really likes historical ruins (according to Lily) so Bagamoyo was a perfect place for him. Here he is getting ready to go out with us:

I also like historical ruins and especially the stories that go with them. I am finding Tanzania’s history to be so interesting. From the early Arab settlers to the Portuguese, German and British influences, Tanzania has seen many changes in the relatively recent past. Bagamoyo showcases many of these events.

One of the most interesting things about Bagamoyo is that it was the center of a huge slave trade in East Africa. Because it is close to Zanzibar, it became the main port of the East Africa coast, and through the port came ivory and slaves. Over 1.5 million slaves were exported. About a quarter went to Arabia, India and Persia, but most stayed in Zanzibar or on the coast working on spice farms, and coconut and rice plantations. Bagamoyo means “lay down your heart”, referring to the slaves who marched from the interior: they could finally rest after their journey, but also, it was the last time they may ever see their homeland again.

Tombs from the early settlers of Bagamoyo – African traders and explorers from the  interior (late 1700s-early 1800s).

Germany occupied Tanzania as part of German East Africa from 1885-1919. These are German tombs in Bagamoyo, from the late 1800s.

Bagamoyo is right on the Indian Ocean, so of course it has a lovely beach.

These vessels make nightly trips to Zanzibar, carrying goods such as cooking oil, tomatoes and charcoal from the mainland to the island.

As we were leaving the beach, we noticed a large truck full of cattle that were going to be loaded onto these boats to take to Zanzibar. The cows were going to be used (sacrificed) in the upcoming Eid al-Adha celebration. Zanzibar is mostly Muslim and Eid al-Adha is a very important holiday, celebrating Abraham’s sacrifice.

The next day, we visited some older ruins about 5 km south of Bagamoyo. The settlement, Kaole, was a Persian community, and flourished in the 14th and 15th centuries. The ruins contain the oldest known mosque in Eastern Africa (Bison had his picture take with the mosque).

More graves. The building on the left is a special prayer hut that people still use today (burning incense and breaking coconuts, although it strongly discouraged).

Most of what is left of Kaole is a burial ground. The tall structures are tombs for the iman and his wife.

We also learned some natural history. Here we are learning about the ebony tree. We also learned about Neem trees and the mangrove swamps.

And here we are learning about little snails that live in the mangrove forests. They are collected by the hundreds, cooked and then sold as food. (We did not try any!)

I love the baobab trees! They are so amazing. Right now they are losing their leaves to reduce the amount of water they lose through their leaves.

We walked back to Bagamoyo on the beach.

It was fun to watch the tide come in and walk in bare feet!

Hello everybody! I have always wanted to write a blog post. And when I saw that we were going to be visiting Bagamoyo, I thought this would be a perfect time. Lily agreed to take me along and help me with the typing.

There was a really long daladala ride to get there. I slept through that and most of the rest of the day.

So, the next day, when we went to visit some ruins, I was very well rested. Here are some pictures that Lily and her mom took of me for my blog post.

I started out the morning reading the paper and drinking some coffee.

And then we were off to the Kaole Ruins (pronounced kah-oh-lay). Here are some of my favorite pictures of the ruins with me in them.

When we were done looking at the ruins, we took a nice walk along a shady path by the ocean. We found a Sausage Tree. I loved the fruits so much I made Lily tell her mom to get a picture of me on one. 

Bye for now!

Bison

By Lily and Sylvia

The money in Tanzania is called Tanzanian Shillings. Today’s exchange rate is 2,189.15 tsh (Tanzanian Shillings) to $1.00. It changes every day so we use the simpler version of 2,000 tsh to $1.00.

Here is the exchange rate we use while doing conversions. These are all of the bills and coins:

• 10,000 tsh = $5.00
• 5,000 tsh = $2.50
• 2,000 tsh = $1.00
• 1,000 tsh = $.50
• 500 tsh = $.25
• 200 tsh = $.10
• 100 tsh = $.05
• 50 tsh = $.02

Here are pictures of both sides of the money.

There are paper bills and coins. The highest bill is 10,000 tsh. It is the one we use the most.

Here are a few recent shopping lists.

• 4 potatoes, 6 tomatoes, 2 avocados, 2 mangoes, 4 bananas, bag of green beans, 2 carrots and 1 lemon: 10,500 tsh = $5.25.
• 2 loaves of bread and 6 eggs: 3,800 tsh = $1.90
• About 1 lb of ground beef: 6,900 tsh = $3.45
• 5 mL of fresh milk (about 1 quart): 1,200 tsh = $.60

Things that we eat at the cafeteria (they are pretty big portions, so we often share 3 dishes between the 4 of us)

• Chips mayai (french fries and eggs): 1,800 tsh = $.90
• Wali na harangue (rice and beans; Sylvia’s favorite): 1,000 tsh = $.50
• Chipsi na kuku (french fries and chicken): 1,500 tsh = $.55
• Wali na rosti and ndizi (rice with meat and bananas; Mama’s favorite): 1,900 tsh = $.95

Transportation

• Daladala ride one way (public transportation): 400 tsh = $.20
• Private taxi to downtown: 25,000 tsh = $12.50
• Bajaji ride (3 wheeled scooter) across town: 15,000 tsh = $7.50

(Rachel’s note: When I go shopping, I carry about 100,000 tsh which is a huge wad of cash for me! But it’s only about $50.00. And since nearly everything here is paid for in cash, I have to carry around a lot of cash all the time.)

By Sylvia

On Sunday we took a trip to Bongoyo, a small island near Dar es Salaam. The island is part of the Dar es Salaam Marine Reserve. There are no people living on the island.

We took a small boat from the mainland to the island. It was low tide when we took off so we had to wade out quite a ways to get on the boat.

Mama took the first boat so she was on the island waiting for us.

Some of our students taught one of the Tanzanian students how to swim.

Our food was hot off the grill!

This is what mommy and daddy had for lunch!

We played a fun informal game of volleyball with people from 6 different countries!

We had lots of fun looking at all the hermit crabs. It looked like the ground was moving, there were so many!

As we were walking along the beach, we saw this giant jellyfish! (Editors note: Jon has big feet, so this gives you an idea of how big the jellyfish was!)