Monduli

Last Tuesday I drove out to Monduli, arriving just after the sun had gone down at a small coffee plantation in the Monduli mountains. As we drove west from Arusha, horizontal lightning periodically brightened the sky to our left, and after 30 minutes or so of driving, we turned off the main road (when we reached Mesarani) and headed north to Monduli. It was just after sunset and the shadow of the Monduli mountains - remnants of past volcanic activity were just visable as a grey outline. After driving 10 or 15 minutes down the smaller road, we began to climb, as as we did, the vast savannah land receded beneath us, giving way to lush vegetation with eucalyptus trees, (and many other trees that I do not know the names of), coffee, bananas and other farms. After a while, we left the tarmac road and drove onto a dirt road, which shortly after we turned off onto a dirt (and muddy) path. That is how I arrived in the small coffee plantation which is my home. It is beautiful. I met Rose, my friend Imma's sister who I will be staying with for the next three months, and Filamina, who is the 18 year old girl who works in the house, and is a riot to spend time with. She loves to gossip, and over the past week we have shared many stories and laughs, in addition to fresh sugar cane.

The organization that Rose has founded is a small NGO called the Monduli Women's Action Trend (MOWAT), and they have very general goals of helping women and children in areas of health, education, development, etc. in the Monduli district of Arusha. After talking at greater length with Rose, it became clear that her main goal is to figure out ways of income generation for women pastoralists. Rose is a teacher, as are the other two women who founded the organization, and one of their biggest frustrations is that many bright students, especially girls, drop out of school after only a few years. Usually the girls want to continue with their education, but they are unable to pay for school fees, or become pregnant. From Rose's experience, the mothers of these girls usually want to help their daughters to go to school, but because in pastoralist (and indeed most Tanzanian) society, the males are in possetion of all the assets, the women are not able to pay for the school fees themselves, and the fathers are usually uninterested in spending their money on the girl's education. So here I am. Over the next few months, I hope to help MOWAT to develop income generating plans to help the women in pastoralist societies - in Monduli this is the Maasai - so that they can pay for their daughters education. This week I have been in town researching ongoing similar projects in Tanzania, and next week I will hopefully be visiting with a number of Maasai communities in Monduli to interview the women to see how we can be of the most service, and how they envision us being able to help.

In the mean time, I am having a wonderful time, I am having a wonderful time getting to know new friends, spending time with old friends (I can give you a price quote for just about any safari now), eating fresh Avocado (our dog Fox LOVES avocados, which conveniently grow on the trees on or farm), getting to know Rose's two sons, Bill (9) and Dadi (6), playing cards, and watching Maisha Plus - the Tanzanian Equivilent of "Survivor." Filamina and I plan to hike up the hills to the top, where there is apparently a crater and you can see elephants. We tried this last Friday, but the rain stopped us after half an hour or so, and we spent the next hour seeking refuge in a neighbor's house, who kindly fed us hot roasted corn as we waited for the rain to stop.