Category: Tanzania

Many towns, small and large, in Tanzania have cultural tourism opportunities. You often show up at the village centre and you can be set up with a guide to take you through the market or to visit a natural area or to visit a home and have lunch. There are often signs in the village giving you a number to call (“kupiga simu” in KiSwahili which means to hit your phone (number)). This seems like a pretty cool thing all around: local people get to show off their culture and make some money, while tourists get a bit of a taste for how some people live in the country that they’re traveling in. The small village where we often go to the farmers’ market to buy vegetables, Tengeru, has their own programme.

A few weeks ago, Rich and I traveled to Moshi, which is the jumping off point for climbing Kili. I actually booked a room to stay in over AirBNB for $20. The next morning we drove up to Materuni Village. Most tourists, of course, are driven there by their safari company, but we got to go up in tvhe RAV4. Almost immediately, a guy riding on a pikipiki (motorcycle for transport, often has 2 passengers and “stuff” as well as the driver) stopped us to ask if we were going to the village and if he could be our guide. It was good that he “called” us since we a couple of different young men ran next to our car to see if they could be our guide. We said, no, we’d already arranged it with “Mercury.”

When we arrived at the village centre, Mercury showed up and we paid for a trip up to Materuni Waterfalls. Mercury was a great agricultural guide, pointing out lots of different crops and explaining how they’re grown. We saw a couple of different types of bananas – for eating or for making “wine” which we got to sample later on and then our guide even bought the two men in the group a bottle to bring home – elephant ear or taro, maize, and shade grown coffee, among others.

Some enterprising boys (too young to be guides yet) had caught a chameleon. I got to take it from Mercury and let it crawl up my arm, too.

Materuni Falls is pretty spectacular, although it was so wet that we didn’t spend a great deal of time there.

We had thought about just hiking to the falls and then leaving but decided to do the coffee tour as well. So glad we did since it was very fun and we learned some things. We also got to eat lunch with a spectacular view of the surrounding area.

Coffee has three coats that need to be removed or cracked. The first coat is the berry itself. Mercury explained to us that people used to remove the berries by hand until growers got ahold of small McKinnon mills. The company that introduced the mills required the growers to sell them all their production for five years. Now, though, the growers own the mills and much of the coffee is sold through a cooperative.

After the first removal, the beans have to be washed to remove the slimy material that remains. This is where we got to pick up the process.

This second hard coat is removed by pounding the beans in a mortar with pestle. All of these processes are done with singing and chanting, and it was quite fun.

Today I taught five PhD and MSc students in the biodiversity program here at NM-AIST about qualitative monitoring for soil and site stability, hydrologic function and biotic integrity. It was my first chance to take them out in the field. We went down to the basketball court where it had been dug out and we could see some signs of erosion.

The best part of the lab was listening to them discuss each point in KiSwahili – I’m taking a class in the evenings and some of the language is starting to come back to me from my Peace Corps service in Kenya. Their discussion was primarily in KiSwahili with some English words specifically from the exercise thrown in: “Angalia erosion” (Look at the erosion).

We were finally chased out of sitting to discuss the analysis when a bee swarm that we had noticed suddenly lifted out of a tree to move to somewhere else. We also decided to take a different path home since they seemed to be hovering right above our original path.

I went to Moshi to visit my Fulbright friends on Saturday. We all met in Chicago at a pre-departure orientation. Moshi is on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. While there, we got to hang out with another Fulbright family who have just finished their Fulbright stay. Sometimes it is nice to be around other Americans just because you have a lot of assumed knowledge.

It cost about $2 to get there by bus – $1 to get to the road and another $1 to get all the way to Moshi. I didn’t have a seat at first since they leave from Arusha full. I got on in Tengeru. There were a lot of stops to drop people off and pick people up. I had a book on kindle on my phone so that was okay. My legs didn’t fall asleep like they would riding the matatus in Kenya.

On Sunday we did a tour of Rau Forest Reserve on the outskirts of Moshi with Rau Eco and Cultural Tours. Linus was our guide for the trip through the forest. He was really knowledgeable and passionate about conserving the forest. He told us the story of his company while we were having some snacks – three young guys graduated from Tengeru Community Development College close to Nelson Mandela. They decided to start this business Rau Eco and Cultural Tourism Enterprise. It took a few years to just get 6 reviews on TripAdvisor. An Austrian business professor visited and spent 3 weeks with them helping to figure out a master plan for their business. She had them do some seemingly weird exercises – like walk into the forest and find a good place to meditate. They were supposed to spend 30 minutes at it and ended up spending a couple of hours!

Upon entering the Forest, it was cooler and a lovely spot to be in on a warm Tanzanian day. We saw Colobus Monkeys right away and Linus told us about their diet, behavior and conservation. He also pointed out a number of indigenous tree species, giving their common names in English and Swahili and their scientific names. He told us how each tree is used in traditional medicine. Some trees had termite tracks on the outside but were otherwise resistant and so were good for building, while others had been eaten by termites.

One of the best parts of the hike was going into the middle of the forest on a “silent walk” so that we could really hear the monkeys roaring about their territories, the birds, and even the bees buzzing around. We then had a little snack (chips made from bananas) and did another activity of meditating while experiencing the heart of the forest.

We went to what is probably the largest Mvule tree (African Teak) in existence. There were some young Tanzanian Scouts and their Scout Leader there as well.

Next we went out into the nearby rice fields and saw other birds and how Tanzanians plant other crops on the border of the rice fields. It was so green! Mr. Benjamin, a local farmer, climbed a palm tree and brought us each a fresh coconut. He hacked it open with a machete so we could drink the milk. He also cut some sugar cane so we could have some more sweetness.

One thing that I appreciated is that Linus was able to answer all kinds of questions, and was really good at judging just how much information we wanted (I wanted a lot!) Rau Ecotours have also spent countless hours picking up plastic bottles from the forest. Linus talked about local people being skeptical that they could clean it up, but their educational outreach has seemed to have a big impact.

Then it was back to the headquarters where we had lunch provided by a retired doctor and his wife. It was a nice Tanzanian end to our delightful day.

I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to be here at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology last year. I decided that Tanzania would be a great place to do a Fulbright, and so I sent out emails to universities here. Prof. Anna Treydte at NM-AIST answered my email and got an invitation letter from the Vice Chancellor in just a week. This is a Teaching/Research position, but it’s a graduate school so teaching will be very different than at home. I’ll either teach workshops or classes on restoration, savanna ecology or experimental design and statistical analysis.

I also developed a research proposal to determine techniques to use to restore a savanna ecosystem after removal of the invasive tree, Prosopis julifloria. This tree is considered one of the worst invasive species in the world. It was introduced in the 1980s in Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia. Another Fulbrighter who I met in Chicago at our pre-departure orientation was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal and told me that the forestry technicians planted. . . yes . . . Prosopis juliflora.

Planting grasses rather than shrubs or trees after removal of the invasive will probably lead to better outcomes. Grasses have a fibrous root system and generally take up soil water before it has a chance to percolate down to the roots of trees, making it very competitive. However, an interesting point is that replacing a tree with a grass has implications for climate change. Carbon sequestration in grasslands is most likely lower than in a savanna or woodland. So, an interesting ecological question is how much better do restoration outcomes need to be to consider using a grass instead of a native tree or shrub?

The image is of the campus. My office is in the main building with the five wings. My house is across the street from the hostel. The hostel is where the M.Sc. students stay. Ph.D. students stay in the houses as duplexes, and faculty stay in individual houses.

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Great progress yesterday. A worker came around and hooked up the gas cylinder to my stove so I can cook now, I got an office (and now internet), and I went into town and got a sim card so I have a phone again. I’m attaching a some photos of a pair of hornbills who were feeding in a eucalyptus tree right behind my house this morning as I sat on the back veranda having breakfast. These are silvery cheeked hornbills. I can’t begin to tell you how beautiful the place is and how welcoming everyone is here.

In Salt Lake City, getting ready for a 10hr flight to Amsterdam and then another 8 hrs to Arusha.