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We left Ras Nungwi this morning and were driven to Stone Town about two hours away. We passed many villages and saw women dressed in colorful kangas walking with buckets of water, bundles of sticks or other packages on their heads. Many had small babies tied to their backs using a part of another kanga as a sturdy sling. |
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Children who were not yet in school because they attended the afternoon session helped carry water to their homes from the village well or helped to tend the garden. Most of the people lived in small cinder block huts with metal roofs or mud huts with coconut palm thatched roofs. |
While at Ras Nungwi we had a conversation with some men who were putting together a thatched roof on the dive center. They said that women and children gather the palm fronds to make the roofs. Then the women weave the fronds onto a straight piece of wood that they've also had to find. This forms something like a palm shingle. They can generally make 10 shingles in an hour once they've gathered the materials. They earn the equivalent of $1.00 per hour making the shingles but because they also have to spend time finding the materials they actually earn something more like $0.20 per hour! The men then construct the roofs with the shingles that the village women have put together. The roofs last from three years to seven years before they rot and need to be replaced. |
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Once we arrived in Stone Town I tried to send my first email from the Ras Nungwi office. They were very helpful but I kept getting a busy signal when trying to connect by way of AOL's International Access Number in Dar Es Salaam. They said that normally emails can be difficult to send because the phone lines are tied up so often. You just have to be patient and keep trying throughout the day. Unfortunately I had a ferry to catch so I didn't have time for patience. So I transferred the message to a disk and left it with Tim Hendriks to send at a later time when he could get through. |
We did some shopping for batiks (cloths with designs of African animals or people) and then we headed for the ferry to Dar. We took the Sea Bus which is a hydrofoil, but even so it was pretty bumpy at times. We are now in the large, cosmopolitan city of Dar Es Salaam and we'll be leaving very early in the morning to catch the plane to Kilimanjaro Airport. |