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East Africa Archive 2005

Aug 25 | Sept 29 | Oct 19 | Oct 24 | Nov 8

Program Leaders: Brent Smith & Nancy Taylor
November 8, 2005

We returned to Morogoro from the Uluguru Mountains, staying once again at Sokoine University of Agriculture, this time for three days. Here students worked intensively on several writing assignments pertaining to Waluguru culture for the culture course, and deforestation; sustainable agriculture; and the causes, impacts and solutions to the HIV-AIDS crisis -- all important components of the demography/sustainability course.

We boarded a bus to Iringa and rode through some spectacularly beautiful country including Mikumi National Park and the Udzungwa Mountains. Iringa is a pleasant, relaxed town at fairly high altitude, so it is relatively cool at this time of year. We stayed the first night at Ruaha University College then students dispersed to the homes of host families where they stayed a bit over two weeks. All of the host families were middle-class, mostly professional, people, and all had at least one family member who could speak some English.

Our move to Iringa marks a shift in the academics of the program to more independent, research-oriented projects. The project in Iringa is an intensive ethnographic study of the students’ choosing. Topics that the students came up with are very interesting and cover a wide range of subjects, including home-based care of AIDS patients, the treatment and education of the deaf, treatment and attitudes toward the mentally ill, pregnancy and childbirth, marriage, and doctors and medical education. Nancy and Brent have been really impressed with the energy and rigor with which the students have investigated their topics, making contacts and conducting interviews. Geofrey Kombo, our program coordinator for the Iringa component, has been invaluable in helping students make contacts with appropriate people. Today, the last full day in Iringa, the students are feverishly pulling all their information together and writing their paper.

On Sunday, we hosted a thank-you dinner for the host-families at a local hotel. About 125 people were in attendance. A highlight was a traditional dance performance by the students (the students had taken several dance lessons during our stay as a special activity). Wow, could they move! Speeches were made, songs were sung, and the food was quite plentiful and tasty. Everyone seemed to have a good time.

We took two field trips while at Iringa. One was an all day visit to a village of the Gogo people who taught us to weave reed baskets. The visit also gave students the opportunity to interview villagers (with Geofrey as translator) for their ethnographic projects. These people are extremely poor, among the poorest people Nancy and Brent have ever met. They live at a much lower altitude than Iringa and the temperatures really sore in November at the end of the dry season. They are also Muslim and our visit was in the middle of Ramadan, so the people couldn’t drink, let alone eat, anything during these long hot days. Our second excursion was a morning trip to the nearby Isimila Stone Age Site. Since 1958 various groups of archeologists from America and South Korea have uncovered thousands of stone tools at this place dating from about 100,000 years bp. Hundreds of axes, knives, sling-shot stones, etc. are on display under huts that cover the actual digging sites, making this place particularly interesting. Also at Isimila are some small canyons of strangely sculpted stone towers. As we hiked through these beautiful gorges, we saw giant bee nests, rock hyraxes (a small rodent-like mammal, but related to elephants!) and cliff chats (a beautiful cliff-dwelling bird).

Tomorrow we board the bus to Arusha – a 12-13 hour journey. The next program component will focus on another independent project, this one on animal ecology and behavior. We will be studying animals like elephant, impala, dik dik, zebra, baboon, and vervet monkey at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, and certainly one of the most picturesque.