Dar Es Salaam

So I'm staying with some friends in Kijitonyama in Dar Es Salaam. The water has been cut off, and I'm murdered by mosquitoes, but I'm loving it here...

{Apart from London}, Dar is probably my favourite city in the world. I love the buzz of life here- beautiful girls, heads covered with colourful scarves, streets filled with people selling things; orange soap, red packets of washing powder, green peppers, purple onions , yellow containers of water, sodas and sweet menthol cigerettes, everything bright, gaudy broken yet still somehow working. We spend alot of time sitting around outside at reed plastic tables talking about whether Kilimanjaro or Tusker is better. At dusk the sky is silvery blue, and the palm trees make exotic silhuettes, couples walk out together, and the muezzin calls the time for the people to sit and eat, and break their daily Ramadan fast.



My friends are here are mostly ex-SPW volunteers. Tom is running the Tanzanian part of an NGO called grass roots soccer, which trains football coaches to teach reproductive health as part of football skills and drills with young players. http://www.grassrootsoccer.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=360&Itemid=244, or http://apps.facebook.com/causes/996

Willy and Ally amd Asura have just finished studying at the Instititute for social work here in Dar, and Rama is just about to start. Jasmin and Clare, wazungus who decided to stay on after our programme finished, are working with these guys, together with a guy called Adili and some otehr big names in music production here, to set up an NGO called Kijana Chapakazi (hardworking young person). It's a really inspiring project, which has drawn in a lot of young, motivated people with a rainbow of different skills and talents, from film productionto hiphop, art, social work and health sicences...Their aim is to facilitate television music and film projects which educate and empower young people. At the moment there are in the early stages of this project. They are already registered, and are now searching for donors, and partners to work with. (If you're interested, and want to know more or donate money, let me know and I'll send you more info.)

The other day we had a party to celebrate the birthdays of Tom, and Nelly, a friend of Clare's who has been out here visiting her. We bought five crates of beer, lots of konyagi, two huge fish, an octapus and a goat... Nelly is an artist so she spent most of the night painting everyone's faces, and around a two in the morning we all decided it would a good idea to go clubbing. It was alot of fun... We woke up dazed and confused on the floor in the living room when the dada who cleans the house came at 7am. She didn't seem all that impressed by the debris of beer and partypoppers, mud goat, bones and god knows what else... I passed out again, and when I woke up a couple of hours later, she had cleaned the whole house.

lots of lurve, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx