Karibu tena Zanzibar!

I spent an extra day in Dar enjoying my sweet hotel with air conditioning (!), a rooftop restaurant, bar, and swimming pool, gym, a room with a view of the harbour, a Bongo Flava video shoot, individual packets of Africafe in my room, and blazing internet (well, for Africa anyway) I took the ferry to Zanzibar on Wednesday

My accommodations in Zanzibar are pretty basic - very local - but I have a bed with a bednet, lots of fans, my own private little courtyard for washing clothes or whatever, a little kitchenette with a hot plate and water boiler (so I can make Africafe at home!), and the very African combo shower/toilet room (this is ubiquitous in the places I've traveled to in Africa - I've never seen it anywhere else).  There are always swahili ladies and young men washing, cooking, or preparing food in the courtyard in the front so there are lots of delicious smells going on at all times of the day, and when I arrived there was a pretty intense football game going on in the street/alley right outside.  I think it will be a rich experience!

Stone Town itself is pretty quiet right now actually - seems like we're well in the low season - and I like the low key vibe.  I met Alison N., the post-doc running the project, this morning and she took me to one of her favorite local spots for tea where I drank chai na maziwa (Tanzanian milk tea), fresh squeezed passion-mango juice that tasted like it might have some ginger in it, and sampled some of the carbohydrate options - mkate wa ufuta (sesame seed bread - the best way I can describe it is like a fluffy naan cooked over an open flame with sesame seeds on it) and some weird potato and spice things that had fish and meat inside.  Think spicy mashed potatoes with a filling of ground beef or flaked fish.  Totally weird but very tasty! The entire bill was about $1.25 for both of us! We went to their offices where I met the research team - Brynna, the recent Yale graduate and RA I met back in December, Alison P., a Johns Hopkins Masters student trying to finish her masters paper in the next 3 weeks, and the Fatimahs.  There are 3 Fatima's working for us.  The small one goes by Tuma, the huge one goes by Fetty, and the medium one goes by Fatimah.  Two are nurses who have worked in the government system for years and the other is a teacher.  They are all relatively new to research but seem eager to learn.  Soon after I arrived it was tea time (obviously, this is Africa after all) so I sat on the floor and drank more tea and snacked on cassava and more sesame seed bread.  All conversation and work is conducted in Swahili.  Alison N. is fluent, Brynna has been studying since she arrived in August, and Alison P. used to live in Kenya so she can get by.  I think this will be a great team to work with! I am going to focus on helping Alison N. write a grant for more funding, and I am also going to supervise some focus groups and interviews.  I'll fill you in on more details as I figure out my role a little better!

Yesterday we had a team meeting at Alison's house so the graduate student and I packed up the office and took the dala dala there with the three Fatimah's.  It was quite a scene as they all rushed around putting on their hijabs and buibu's (not sure how to spell it but they are these floor-length, long-sleeved black coat-type things that many muslim women wear when they are in public).  The dala dala we were directed to looked like it could barely fit one more person, but even the huge Fatimah was able to squeeze in (I honestly have no idea where the space came from).  The team meeting itself was pretty incredible - each person brought up one important point from the focus groups that had been held last week and the whole group discussed it until we had exhausted the point. It was so interesting to hear the Zanzibari nurse's perspectives.

It turns out the graduate student likes to run and is training for a 10 mile race so we met early this morning (it gets too hot to really even move later in the day).  I had no idea how many people exercised in the morning! We passed one group of about 40 people wearing matching blue jerseys (like football jerseys) running the opposite direction in an organized, double-line formation chanting something I couldn't understand.  We got a little bit further and saw a group of about 100 wearing matching red jerseys doing calisthenics or aerobics or something on a football pitch.  We had to pass through a Hindu crematorium (yes, a little creepy) and went down 100 stairs to the beach where it was completely covered in people exercising - men and women! The women all had a minimum of a hijab, and many were wearing buibuis, but they were out there either running along the beach or in groups of 10-50 doing organized calisthenics.  As we ran by we could hear the groups counting in unison "saba...nane...tisa...kumi..."

Anyway, I’m settling into life and work here. I hope to take advantage of some swimming options this weekend, and meet up with my swahili teacher next week.