July 8 - Tanzania

Welcome to Arusha! Well, not quite. We actually flew into Kilimanjaro airport because Charly still needed to get a Tanzanian visa, which isn't possible at the Arusha ariport. As we stepped onto the runway, we turned around and around looking for the famous peak, but clouds covered any view we may have had of Kilimanjaro and its snowy peak. No matter, we were soon greeted by the sunny Keely who gave us a warm welcome to Tanzania.

Keely is an Acumen Fund Fellow and one of Charly's mentees. She has spent the last nine months in Africa: eight months in Arusha, working with AtoZ manufacturing company, and the last month in Nairobi working with ABE and other prospective Acumen Fund investments. We are very lucky to have her as our guide because she won't be here too much longer. Keely has just accepted a job offer in Geneva to work for a new SME (small and medium enterprise) spin off of Blue Orchard, a microfinance investment fund. She will complete her work as an Acumen Fund Fellow at the end of August and will head home to California for the first time in three years! But she'll be back soon enough in mid-September to climb Kilimanjaro with her sister and mother before starting her new job.

[On the spot, Alex and I vowed to someday organize a synchronized job change--the perfect occasion to climb Kilimanjaro and maybe another peak as well!]

It was just about noontime as we rolled into Arusha and we stopped by The New Safari hotel to drop off our belongings in our room before heading to lunch. It seems Keely had already visited our room, leaving us each a Tanzania Care package: sanitary hand wipes, a notebook, a hand carved wooden pen, and a Keely-guided Tanzania itinerary for the next 2.5 days! It isn't hard to imagine why Charly and Keely work so well together :)

It's Sunday, so there's really only one place that's open for lunch--a nearby hotel restaurant. Keely invited her good friend Tom to join us and give us a quick crash course in Swahili. With a bit of Tangawizi (a strong sort of ginger ale), the Swahili began to flow and I could barely keep up writing down all the new words as Tom took us through greetings, numbers, and other useful phrases. Tom is actually Masai, but his family (39 members in all!) now lives in town. Although his father has several wives and tons of children, Tom and his siblings have been raised as Christians and will only take one spouse, which is the growing trend among the new generation of Arushans.

With a "twende?" ("shall we go?"), we left the hotel restaurant and Keely took us to Via Via. Via Via is a nonprofit restaurant and one of the few restaurants in Arusha that still has a thatched roof because the locals defended it during a period when thatched roofs were outlawed in Arusha (due to fire hazards). The restaurant, of course, was closed, but we walked past the main building out to the back lawn. Down on a small stage area, a man had laid out all his batiks, large and small, in the surrounding grass. This is another of Keely's friends: Felix. He is a local batik artist and has a studio just down the street. This afternoon, he organized a batik workshop for us. In addition to those batiks he laid out, he also had a binder with even more of his work--amazing landscapes, whimsical abstracts, and drummers and dancers clad in brightly colored skits and head scarves.

With much more than just a little guidance, we each designed and made our dream batiks. Charly made a large baobab tree next to a smaller acacia, both silhouetted against a Serengeti sunset. Alex went for a landscape scene of Ngorongoro. And I designed an image of a drummer and dancer jamming to an African beat. The process of batiking has many steps. I will describe the basics, but really, it's best to do it yourself, so if you're interested, let me know because I'd love to do it again! Here are two links to videos that will also give you a good feel for what it's like (made by Keely and Felix):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBOGFmIKrFA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq4xCmsQPrU

First, you make a rough sketch of your drawing (in pen) on the cotton cloth. Using a stilus filled with hot wax you then cover (with wax) those areas that you would like to remain white. With a sponge and dyes, you create the main background colors. Then, in a process that you repeat again and again, you put wax on the colors you want to preserve and add dye to those areas that are exposed. In the end you cover the entire picture with wax, crack the corners, and rub in some black dye to add a beautiful lightning-bolt pattern of black wrinkles to the edges.

It was a sprint to the finish because the sun was rapidly setting and we needed it at each stage to dry the wax layers. We all finished just as the last rays of sunlight disappeared.

Enjoying a few hours of twilight, we sat on the porch at the Mount Meru Game Lodge and Sanctuary and watched zebra, birds, and ostriches roam the beautiful landscape just meters in front of us. This lodge was once an orphanage for abandoned animals and is now just a place for visitors to enjoy their company.

Lala salama! (good night!)