Sweet nectar from heaven....

What, you may be asking yourself, is this sweet nectar of heaven that she speaks of? Juisi (a.k.a. juice). Sweet delicious juice hand squeezed by the neighbor of my host mother. It had everything you could possibly think of in it…passion fruit, orange, mango, carrot, ginger, avocado (yep, I said avocado), lemon…..and mmm it was delectable. I could devote an entire blog entry to my love of this juice. I could write poems of its greatness. But I won’t…instead I’ll tell you of my home stay….

In short, it was a fantastic experience. My host family is great. My host mother, Elly, works here on campus and may be one of the sweetest people I’ve ever encounter. Her husband, Paulus, is a musician. He teaches music to students at two different schools in Arusha part time and plays gigs at local bars on the weekends. They have two sons, Jonas(9) and Simon(14). Simon is a bit shy and seems rather unsure of us (another classmate, Sam, was with me for the home stay), but Jonas is a hoot. I was particularly fond of how excited he got about the game of Uno that I brought him….probably because I love that game too. There was also a girl living with them, Paulina (15), who is the daughter of a friend.

We did all kinds of things this weekend, but much of our activity revolved around food. We were either a) preparing food to be cooked, b) cooking said food, or c) eating said food (the largest portion of time can be attributed to the latter activity…seriously, I ate so much I thought I would explode…but I’m not sorry…it was delicious). If you’re lucky, perhaps I’ll cook some of this food for you when I get back.

Besides the night we went to the bar to watch our host father’s band play, other particularly exciting moments include the plethora of great conversations we had about Tanzanian politics and the life histories of my host father and mother.

Overall it was a blast and I am excited for the next time we go back to stay with them. But do you know what else I’m excited for? ZANZIBAR! Yep...this weekend…it’s off to the sweet clove scented shores of Zanzibar for a week on Friday. Well…technically we’re only in Zanzibar for a couple of days and we’re in Dar es Salaam for the rest of the time, but these are just details.

More to come….