A few pictures

Everybody at MobilityCare for the small-business wheelchair delivery


Swimming with giant turtles in Zanzibar! Totally awesome but also surprisingly scary.


At the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, posing in front of the actual door to Dr. Livingstone's Tanzanian house.

Catching up... again.

Saturday, July 5th to Wednesday, July 9th

In the morning I took a little tour of downtown Dar, driving down the busy streets while my driver pointed out various important buildings that I’ll probably never recognize again. Then I went to the National Museum which was actually really cool. Tanzania has a pretty crazy history and it was a lot of fun to learn more about it. There was even a special exhibit of Julius Nyerere’s important cars!

In the afternoon I headed to the airport because I was off to Zanzibar! I don’t know why I have so much fun saying that name. I met up with Jake and Levi, two other MIT students working in Tanzania, and we had a great time exploring Stonetown, especially the crazy nighttime fish market. It’s basically a long street with barbeques on both sides, and big tables in front of each one with skewers of every kind of fish. You pick your skewers and they barbeque them right there for you! Then you move to the next stand and try something else.

On Sunday we headed out to Nungwi which is a beach village on the northernmost tip of the island. It’s about an hour drive on some bumpy roads, but definitely worth it. I spent the next few days catching up on some reading, playing Frisbee on the beach, eating tons of seafood, and doing a lot of floating in the Indian Ocean.

Now I’m back in Moshi and totally rested and recharged to finish out my project. I’m looking forward to catching up with the new small-business owners to see how things have moved along while I was gone.

Happy 4th of July

Friday, July 4th

Happy Independence Day! I headed off to the 32nd annual International Trade Fair this morning which was absolutely packed. It started drizzling a little but you would have never known because people were still scurrying about from booth to booth. It’s hard to explain what it was like, but basically it was a showcase of Tanzanian companies and goods, with a few halls showcasing goods from other countries. You could pretty much buy everything at this fair, from cell phones to flight jumpsuits to tractors. I had a nice chat with the representative from FINCA who promised me that they would be bringing their microfinance opportunities to Moshi and Arusha by October. I ended my Independence Day by having sushi at the Kempinski Hotel, my big splurge of the trip.

Count your blessings

Thursday, July 3rd

When I arrived in Dar last night it was dark so today was my first real look at the city. There are soooo many people! The streets are absolutely filled with people and the roads are packed from end to end with cars. During rush hours they have terrible problems with traffic, which I witnessed firsthand while I was standing up in a daladala.

The reason I came to Dar was to meet with a professor from the University of Dar es Salaam who had contacted me about some of her disabled students.

Can you imagine being born without the use of your legs, and forced to crawl on the ground to get around? Imagine being a college student and having to crawl across campus to your classes. If you’re lucky you might graduate, but now you have to crawl around the city to job interviews and it’s doubtful that anybody will take you seriously.

Dr. Tungaraza, the professor who contacted me, introduced me to one of her students named Michael who is living the life I just asked you to imagine above. He managed to crawl his way across the campus and graduate with a BA in Sociology, but is now finding it incredibly difficult to get a job. I was amazed by his determination and resilience, and it really fired me up to do something about his situation.

Dr. T listed off over 17 physically disabled students, many of whom are crawling to classes. The campus is huge and hilly and many of the classrooms are on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors of the various buildings. Most of the disabled students are unable to attend all of their classes because them simply can’t reach them.

I don’t know what I will be able to do for the physically disabled students of the University of Dar es Salaam, but I will do something. If anybody has any ideas of things we can do to raise funds, or if you know of any organization that might be able to help out, please let me know. I’m going to fix up the prototype wheelchairs that I’ve made in Arusha over the past two summers and hopefully send them down to these students, but that’s only a small dent in a larger issue.

Dr. T gave me a big tour of the campus so I could get a real sense of what it was like for her students. We climbed to the top of a steep hill where the large lecture halls are located and gazed out onto Dar while a nice breeze cooled us down. “Sometimes we forget to count our blessings. We don’t realize just how lucky we are,” she said. Let me tell you, I certainly counted my blessings today.

Catching Up

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. Things have just been so incredibly busy… which is a good thing. I don’t have time to write about everything that has happened and you probably wouldn’t have time to read that much anyway, but I’ll try to give you the highlights.

On Tuesday morning the last two small-business wheelchairs were finished and we organized a little party to deliver them. We gave it a 4th of July theme which was an excuse to make hot dogs and French fries, which everybody loved. Plus it’s watermelon season here. Agnes and I made the French fries from scratch. She made everything look so easy and I’m sure I slowed her down a bit, but I’m starting to catch on.

After lunch we called each of the new entrepreneurs up to present them with their new small-business wheelchairs. Mr. Beads will be expanding his beads shop and has already found a place in town where he is planning on “opening up shop.” I met him last year which I visited him in Monduli, a mountainous town about an hour outside of Arusha. Daniel hadn’t told me his name, only that he made things with beads, so I kept referring to him as Mr. Beads and it looks like the name stuck! This is the first time that Mr. Beads has ever had a wheelchair and it was absolutely awesome watching him hop in there and wheel around MobilityCare with a huge smile on his face.

Our last businessman is a young guy named Ebeneza who will be making shoes. He likes to work under a tree that overlooks a carwash, so he called his business Waterfront Shoemaker. I guess you could consider the carwash a waterfront view! I don’t know if he makes womens shoes, but if he does I’ll certainly be a customer.

Wednesday morning I started my long safari to Dar es Salaam. [“Safari” is actually a Swahili word that means “journey.”] It took about 9 hours on the bus which is considered fast. As we got close to Dar it occurred to me that my bus had been overtaking every other vehicle on the road, and not a single car had passed us. The bus stopped for about 15 minutes when we reached the halfway point, which was just enough time to check the tires and grab something to eat. I tried to sleep but it was too bouncy, and I was afraid I would miss something out the window. The scenery changed quite a bit, from Baobab trees to bush to palm trees. Every now and then we would pass a small town with people milling about and trying to sell us things through the window. Somebody suggested a hotel called The Sleep Inn, whose slogan is “for a great tomorrow, be our guest tonight.” I love it.

Pictures!

Me with the new entrepreneurs


Handing over Richard's new small-business wheelchair
(Daktari wa Viatu is Swahili for "The Shoe Doctor")


Joseph and I displaying the completed small-business wheelchairs

Three small-business wheelchairs.... coming right up!

Thursday, June 26th

I was really nervous today. Mostly because I was afraid the wheelchairs wouldn’t be finished, and their delivery was the reason for the party in the first place. Joseph drove me to the workshop early in the morning so we could help them put on the finishing touches. He didn’t know the word “nervous” but I couldn’t really figure out how to explain it!

I was in charge of putting the rubber stoppers in all the exposed pipe ends, which resulted in me getting my hands completely covered in rubber cement. Then I started moving some of the small pieces into the car and ended up with black paint on my arms from a piece that was still a bit wet. At that point I decided I would be more useful at KASI, helping set everything up and greeting people as they arrived.

The hardest thing about the party was figuring out what time to tell people it started. Seriously. At home if I said the party started at 11am, people would probably come around 11:10 or 11:15, just a little fashionably late. In Tanzania if I told people the party started at 11am, the first guest might trickle in around noon. This usually drives me crazy but today I really appreciated it because we needed all the extra time we could get to finish up the chairs.

The party that was slated to begin at 11am officially got underway around 1:30. Another reason it started so late was that Tanzanians take forever to greet each other. It’s really quite sweet actually. I think I talked about this in another entry so I won’t go into too much detail, but in the schedule of the event that Dr. Nyamubi and I made we allotted 30 minutes for “greetings.”

Dr. Nyamubi welcomed everybody to the event and then I spoke for a while, introducing the relationship that MIT has developed with KASI and the local wheelchair workshops, and then talking specifically about the small-business wheelchair project. Everything I said had to be translated which was actually nice for me because I could think about what I wanted to say next while my translator was speaking. Next our VIP guests spoke—the Moshi District Administrative Secretary was there, as well as Annarose, the Siha District Commissioner who is giving us a piece of land. Everybody spoke in Swahili so I don’t know exactly what they were talking about, but I heard it was good.

When everybody was done speaking I called Hilda, Peter, and Richard up individually to give them their new small-business wheelchairs. It soon turned into a photo frenzy with everybody wanting to jump in and shake hands and congratulate each other. Good thing I had a clean MIT t-shirt to wear today! When all of that was finished lunch was served which was really tasty, and people had plenty of time to mingle and talk about what had just happened.

There were two journalists in attendance—one was a radio presenter and the other works for ITV which is the main news channel here. I don’t know if we’ll get any coverage but they did take me aside after the event for a special interview. I probably sounded like a blubbering idiot in my Swahinglish but it was fun!

I was too buzzed with excitement to head home after the party so I headed over to the Kindoroko Hotel which has a really cool bar on its rooftop. There’s no elevator and let me tell you, after 5 steep flights of stairs I was some thirsty! It was a little cloudy so I couldn’t see Kilimanjaro, but I did have a good view of sprawling little Moshi. And the mango juice I ordered was so fresh that I could see the bartender crushing the mangoes behind the bar. A perfect way to end a perfect day.