{mambo}

So I’ve only been here for four days and I’m already in love. I love Moshi, the language (Swahili)….most of the people… The people in the Hostel are great! They are from everywhere! We’ve got people from Sweden, England, the UK and America mostly. I feel as if I’m going to get home and not know how to talk. Do I speak with an English accent, an American accent, a Sweedish accent, or a Tanzanian accent? Each day it seems like new people arrive, and someone else leaves. It should steady out here though in about a week and we’ll have a group of us that are all staying here for a while.

The Hostel Hoff is great. The walls are all made out of cement and the windows are covered in bars but are always open to let in a breeze. The power goes off regularly for hours which is a bit unfortunate, but no problem. When it does we walk around with candles stuck in glass coke bottles. (They reuse all of their bottles here and so we can’t very well buy a soda or anything even because we don’t know how well they’ve been cleaned). There are lizards that climb all over the walls which freaked me out at first, but I’ve come to learn it’s a lot better than spiders, which the lizards eat. Another fun addition to the Hostel has been our cat Ashley (the name M’Liss and I decided on for it). Ashley does a wonderful job at destroying any lizard that tries to walk in the door. Our other family member is Paul, a cute little dog that loves lying around basking in the sunlight. All of the dogs here are the same breed which I find weird. They differ in color a bit but that is all. Back in America we have labs, and golden retrievers, and dalmatations and such. But here, its just one little dog who slightly resembles a Lab, but barely.

 

Its taken a few days to figure out what we are doing exactly but I think that we have gotten it figured out. We’ve been visiting Tuleeni for the past few days and care planning to keep going there on the weekends. During the week, however, we will be working at a very new orphanage! It was a bit of a miracle really because we have really wanted to work in an orphanage but for a few days there we were going to have to end up working for a school teaching, which we didn’t really want to do (to teach in a school you need to know quite a bit of Swahili which we don’t)….but anyway. A few days ago a lady came to talk to Amanda at the Hostel saying that she just set up a new orphanage and are trying to get everything set up and she really needs volunteers so we volunteered in a second. It’s about a 30 minute taxi drive out of town and so we’re quite excited to be able to help her start setting things up, take care of the kids, play with them, and teach them a bit of English.

 

Anyway, time is running short so I must run. But hopefully I’ll be able to write soon!