New additions for a new year.

A  new school year has well and truly started.  My first few weeks has been full of useful new purchases which will hopefully bring lots of extra excitement and adventure.

My first purchase was a juicer machine, well not really a machine more of a hand driven gadget. Not very exciting you may say, but when you can always get cheap pineapples, mangoes, oranges and passion fruit it makes a fun change to water!  Suzie and I have discovered that pineapples and oranges can create a lot of mess. Our first attempt at juicing left our kitchen very sticky which the ants enjoyed, but it did make us some delicious very fresh pineapple and orange juice. We have nearly perfected the art of non-messy juicing now! We are looking forward to juicing some good mocktails.

Asda! Only 30p a pint.
There are some cows behind there somewhere.
 I couldn't get very close!

The next ‘new’ is not really a purchase more of a discovery. Most days last year I would arrive at school  and be greeted with the delightful aroma of cows. I would occasionally hear the odd moo! from my classroom but I didn’t really think of them as being useful. This year the wonderful smells and sounds coming from the cow shed don’t seem so bad as they now mean that I don’t to drink disgusting UHT milk anymore. I now take some bottles to school, hand them over to the eskari (security guard) with the greeting of ‘maziwa’ (milk) and a smile. At the end of the day there is a bottle of milk waiting in the fridge for me. Now that is what I call shopping locally! My lessons are now sometimes interrupted by the eskari coming to tell me that ‘the cow is empty today!’. After a bit of home pasteurisation it tastes delicious on my cereal in the mornings.

As you can see it is just the small things that bring a little bit of excitement to life in Mwanza. The next ‘new’, Gary, is slightly more significant and will hopefully bring lots of fun and adventure to my next year. He has already given me lots of funny and awkward moments and caused lots of havoc in only a week. Gary the Gari (car in Swahili) was purchased just over a week ago. I thought buying a car in England was daunting enough but buying a car here bought with it all kind of interesting experiences.

 The fun of buying a car started with the test drives. I always thought that there were some bad drivers in England but Tanzanians seem to drive with no rules and basically where they like.  Driving in Leeds was certainly good training for test driving automatic cars in Mwanza. I had to avoid crazy Tanzanian drivers, goats, and very large pot holes.

After driving 5 different cars Gary was chosen because of his smaller size, good handling of pot holes and price! I did have to sit in some very strange and dodgy looking offices in the back streets but it was worth it to be able to drive to the shops rather than sweat buckets walking back with bags full of shopping.

 However, this did not last very long as the next morning he was not in my good books...... he didn’t start! Luckily we have a very friendly taxi driver who had helped us to buy the car who fixed us up with a mechanic who sorted the problem out. I thought that the teething problems were over but no!  The next day a flat tyre. After changing the tyre (yes I did have help!) we went to a very dark ally where they fixed the hole in the tyre for just 3000 shillings (£1.50). I was worried that it would be flat the next day but it is still going strong!

I was getting worried that buying a car had not been a good idea but people have reassured me that things like this always happen when you buy cars here. So hopefully Gary will behave himself now and take me to lots of new exciting places.

I have been back in Mwanza for 5 weeks now and I haven’t been on holiday! I have enjoyed getting to know my new class who are all lovely with a few cheeky characters to keep me on my toes!  The monkey have been enjoying my lessons from inside the classroom too!

 I hope you enjoyed the very exciting photos :).