Shadowing

This past week I have had an amazing shadowing experience in the Kilimanjaro region of Northern Tanzania. It is fabulously beautiful here. I am shadowing a really sweet girl named Hilary who is an education volunteer that teaches Physics in secondary school. Her house is on a mountain and has a great view of the surrounding area, albiet a slightly treacherous hike to get up there everyday.
A couple of days ago me and Cristina, the other PCT that I am shadowing with, went on a five hour hike in the mountains around her house and it was absolutely beautiful. I took some pictures that I will try to post soon, but they just do not do the actual scene justice. Plus it smelled like something that Glade would bottle up and sell at Christmas time on the top of the mountain. I can't even describe how awesome it was. It actually felt kind of wintery near the top as well. And on the way down our guide took us by his grandfather's house and gave us some sugarcane, which I thought was really nice. I was thinking it would be pretty sweet to climb Mount Kilimanjaro while I'm in Africa (Which I can see from where I am right now and it is pretty beautiful) but that is a 6 day hike and I was pretty tired after just 5 hours. Maybe if I get placed in a mountainous region I'll get in shape just walking around.
On another day Cristina and I went to Hilary's school to help her facilitate a session on AIDS transmission and the amount of questions that the students had about that topic and about condom use in general was pretty impressive. You can tell that they have really put a lot of thought into it. For instance, one person asked if you can get AIDS when you get your hair cut, which I guess you can if they use infected instruments then cut you with them. They had a lot of questions about whether or not condoms were actually effective or not. For whatever reason, they all seem to want to believe that they don't work. It made me realize that they already know a lot about AIDS, but I'm going to have to do some work to dispel some cultural myths that surround the issues.
Today we all traveled into Moshi to get some delicious food and go out on the town tonight. This has just been a good week overall when it comes to food. First, when we passed through Morogoro on the way to my shadow site, we all went to this really western style grocery store and stocked up on ice cream, cheese, crackers, nutella and peanut butter, wine, and candy bars. I had the most delicious twix bar that I have ever had in my life. I was really tempted to buy some Frosted Flakes, but they were 10,000 shillings, which is about $10 and is a lot of money here. We also went out to a pretty nice resturant, complete with kareoke and all, and I had some mac and cheese there. Although I'm pretty sure the "cheese" was actually white gravy, but whatevs, it was still tastey. Then later in the week during our shadow, we made some delcious pancakes and veggie omelets everyday for breakfast, and had burritos with guac and refried beans one night and some noodles with a really good peanut sauce another night. And word on the street is that the resturant we are going to tonight has pizza!
So overall this has been a fabulous week so far. Its been so peaceful and quiet and the freedom has been wonderful. I can't wait to get to my own site. And it was interesting seeing how the other volunteers had decorated their houses and really made them home. I'm really excited about that. I'm trying not to expect too much so I won't be disapointed if I don't get it, but I am still hoping for electricity. Hilary's site had electricity and she had a portable DVD player so we got to watch some of the first sesson of Prisonbreak which I hadn't seen. I'm sure it would help stave off the boredom, but we spent the night at another volunteer's site last night who did not have electricity and it really wasn't all that bad. I guess I'll find out on Tuesday! Woo-hoo!