Sights, Sounds, Smells, Sensations of Tanzania!

Living in Dar es Salaam is truly a multi-sensory experience!  Here are a few notes on what some daily sights, sounds, smells and sensations are like so far:

Sights:  Our yard is filled with palm trees, a banana tree and a tamarind tree.  On property there is a small house where our night guard, Emmanuel, his wife and daughter live.  Surrounding the yard is a high cement wall with an iron gate and barbed wire on top to discourage theft.  Other houses nearby have broken glass on top of their walls.  Next door there are some kids who climb their tree to say hi to our kids (the extent of their English appears to be "Hi" and "Hello!"...which is about the extent of our Swahili!  Just outside our gate, there are cows and goats grazing which we sometimes need to maneuver around.  The kids have happily discovered that there is a dog with puppies just before the main road!

Sounds:  We're far enough from the main road that we only hear a few distant sounds of traffic.  Our days are filled with sounds of songbirds, Indian crows cawing, roosters crowing, dogs yowling, ocean waves crashing (yes, we can hear them from our bedroom window, especially at night), and as Emily says, "We get free music here!" (we hear a variety of cultural music including a couple of African praise church services during the week).  We're pretty close to our neighbors so there is a lot of Swahili floating around.  If the wind is just right, I can hear the Muslim call to prayer a few times a day, which is a haunting sound.

Smells:  The most disturbing smell is the ever-present whiff of smoke in the air.  All Tanzanians (including us) burn their garbage.  It truly pains my eco- and health-conscious soul to burn plastic!  Because we've had to buy quite a bit to set up our household (including a refrigerator), there's even more garbage than usual.  As we settle in more, I'm going to try and talk to the gardener about starting a compost for the organic matter and ease my conscience a tad.  It certainly makes me look at garbage in a new way and I have renewed motivation for bringing my cloth bags to the grocery store.

Sensations:  Several times a day, we bump and thump down the dusty, rutted roads that lead from our house to the main road.  The two roads from our house are unnamed (therefore we don't have an address in the conventional sense), and the last road is called Upepo Road which means "wind" in Swahili.  It is definitely very windy here during the days which has made the temperatures quite pleasant so far.  At night, the wind dies down, the mosquitoes come out (we've all experienced tons of bites) and the humidity notches up.  It's still comfortable to sleep, but this is the equivalent of winter in Tanzania...I'm fearing what it will be like in December!  At least we do have A/C (if the power stays on).

I hope this gives more of a picture of what life is like here in Dar es Salaam!