Volunteering week 1 - 10th June 2013 to 17th June 2013

We arrived in Zanzibar airport to discover our flight time had been changed without any notification. Precision Air strikes again! After some confusion and waiting around, we landed in the chaotic Dar Es Salaam and were greeted by our volunteering contact and Polly, another volunteer and just your average girl from Newcastle starting at the same time as us.

We headed back to the Salvation Army compound where we were staying and were shown to our little huts. The accommodation was very basic with a shower that dribbled out cold water but it did the job. Within the compound there was a whole community of people from the Salvation Army with a secondary school, a clinic for young girls recovering from rape and a school for handicap children and albinos. It also had a church and a sort of canteen (that provided fishy tasting chicken eggs, so we didn't eat there much). It was pretty weird. Outside the handicap school there was a massive pile of broken wheelchairs, where all the wheelchairs went to dye. It was creepy. Apparently in Africa the albino skin is used by witch doctors in local communities so they're not safe and can be attacked by machete where their limbs are chopped off and used in medicines.

We started our Swahili lessons the next morning - Swahili is not as easy as everyone says! In the afternoon we headed into Dar centre in the Dala Dala which is the local bus service. We took the Dala Dala once before in Zanzibar which was quite fun. In Zanzibar it's basically just a pickup truck (or hainy van) where you climb in the back and sit on a plank along the side. You must get on quickly as the driver doesn't stop for too long and will take off when he's ready even if you're only half on. People bring everything on these things. We picked up some people with a giant sack of wood in Zanzibar and the ticket man spent 5 mins tying this to the roof while we continued to drive at breakneck speeds on the dirt roads, then climbed back in through the window. Great fun J In Dar however the Dala Dala is actually a bus but has none of the fun qualities as the vans in Zanzibar. Pretty grimy and more people packed on than you can believe, it'd give the tube a run for its money at rush hour. Trying to get off is a mission as there's no waiting to let the people on the bus off, it's just a fight to the death to get on/off through the tidal wave of people.

Once we managed to get out into Dar centre, the chaos continued. I've never seen such a frantic hive of activity throughout a whole city. It has to be seen to be believed. Streets and streets of markets selling everything from electricals to toiletries to food. People coming from every direction just milling about shopping, carrying oddly shaped items on their heads, squeezing through tiny spaces with big trolleys of products for delivery. Trying to cross the road was like walking across a mine field. As Mzungos (what white people are called in Tanzania) we stuck out like a sore thumb and people were following us trying to get us to buy things, calling out to us "I love you Mzungo" and so on. After about 20 minutes of attempting to navigate our way around we managed to find an actual supermarket, with aisles and everything! It was a welcome break from the madness and they sold things like shampoo and after sun (what a terrible mistake that was thinking we could buy them in Zanzibar)!

After 2 days with a short introduction to Swahili and thankfully Dar, we headed off on our 10 hour bus journey to Singida at 4:30am. The bus station was just as crazy as the city but the bus was really comfy surprisingly. In Singida we met HAPA, the NGO who is organising the volunteering project locally in conjunction with Volunteer Africa. HAPA support and fund the construction of schools and medical dispensaries in rural communities - mainly in the Singida region.

The restaurants here are mad, no menus and when asked what they have the response is "We have almost everything". After a week of ordering chicken and chips and a multitude of questions we learned that generally restaurants serve chicken, beef or goat with rice, chips or ugali (a dish like potato made from flour and really cheaply). Our Swahili teacher told us that chicken and chips is a rich mans meal and they usually only have it on special occasions like Christmas and Easter (This costs about 7000 TSH / 3 GBP!). In majority of places you must pre-order your food by about 2 hours (the chickens are killed to order) and even then when you come back you could be waiting another hour and get something completely different.

After some more Swahili lessons in Singida and an introduction to our Canadian camp mate Darren we were ready to head out to camp. First we just had to buy our food supplies for the week. Our budget provided by HAPA was 110,000 TSH (44 GBP) for 4 people which was plenty. I quite enjoyed buying the food at the market, being the little busy body that I am. It's basically lots of shacks outdoor joined together selling everything from fresh fruit and veg, bread, butter and all the staples to meat hanging from hooks (the swarm of flies came complimentary). With no electricity at camp and thus no refrigeration we were a little restricted but we managed!

Camp was only 50km from Singida and only 2k off the main road. Here we arrived at the village of Milade where we were to be situated for the next 6 weeks! Although we were anxious arriving at camp, we were pleasantly surprised by the set up. The big army like tent comfortably fit 9 beds, the kitchen was open but roofed with a large kitchen table and chairs come dance floor. We had 2 charcoal stoves for cooking, a washing up area and a large hole for rubbish. The bathroom was set up in the corner and was a long drop covered by cement with a squatting hole in the centre. The shower was adjoining this and came equipped with a bucket and jug for washing. We added our pocket shower to this (one of the best things we brought) which meant we could have a hot shower by leaving the buckets of water in the sun to heat and then filling our pocket shower. Both bathroom and shower were cordoned off with a large tarp for privacy. The camp was fenced all around by bamboo shoots and was right beside the work site which was great for breaks during the working day. We even had solar powered lights in the kitchen - sure what more could you want!

The welcome we received in the village was great. Greeted by the village leaders we were the first group of Mzungos to ever visit Milade and without any electricity, television or any real ability to travel outside the village it's hard to know if they'd ever laid eyes on a white person before. Certainly the children hadn't. Everyone was staring and then offering big waves and smiles. The children at the beginning would only come up to us so far and then run away if you made any move towards them. Polly actually made a couple of them cry on various occasions with her attempts at greeting them. About 15 women arrived with large buckets of water on their heads for our water tank so we wouldn't have to fetch it from the well ourselves. One of the village leaders brought us on a walk around the area past the water well and farms, up the dried up river bed (it's dry season) so baron but so oddly beautiful. The soil is so red and we were soon to find out it made everything else red and there was no escaping the dust and dirt. We finished our tour at the kiosk which is a little hut you can buy a variety of very random items including soft drinks and local beer and alcohol (warm of course). You know you're in Africa when you're sitting on a couple of wooden benches drinking warm fanta with the locals and a large group of cows and goats walks up the road, through your group and right past you.

We were now ready for camp life and excited to start the work!