Today for our environmental policy class we interviewed local farmers about common problems they had when growing their crops. It was really interesting to see the differences between farming here and back home. In Rhotia most people use oxen to plow, and many people don’t actually own oxen and have to rent them from neighbors who do. They also have much smaller plots of land and use the majority of the crops they grow just to feed their families. It was fun to talk to the local people, including our interpreter who was about our age and working to be able to go to university. He told me he wants to be a history professor.

After working on one of three papers I have due this week, I decided it was high time to start doing some sprint workouts. I convinced my wildlife ecology professor to let me borrow one of the GPSs we use for research to measure out 100m so I could make sure I was doing the right distance. He gave me an amused look and showed me how to use it, and I spent the afternoon sprinting back and forth through the camp while the faculty wondered why on earth the white girl was torturing herself. I told the professor that my coach wanted me to stay in shape here and he said “Does he know all you are doing is sitting in class and eating?” In Tanzania it is very rare to see anyone running, and it is common for people to say “pole” to me and the other SFS students as we are running through the village, which means sorry. We asked our language professor why people were always apologizing to us when we ran, and she said “they mean they are sorry because they know you are tired and are wondering why you are doing that to yourself”.

Swahili is also funny in other ways. The typical greeting is “Habari” which means “news”, and roughly translates to them asking you what kind of news you have. The answer is always “nzuri”, which means good. Someone asked the professor what you say when you do not have good news, and she replied, “Ah, here in Tanzania we have no problems. Even if I show up to your house and your mother has just died, and I say Habari, you will say nzuri!” Needless to say, there are still a lot of tricks to the language to learn, but we have our first test tomorrow so hopefully I will have at least some of them down!

Location: Karatu, Tanzania