Part 2: Kilimanjaro

Let me just say that climbing Kilimanjaro was definitely one of the coolest things we have ever done. I will try not to bore anyone with all the nitty-gritty details, but I want to share the whole experience.

We are climbing the Machame Route with the plan to complete the climb in 7 days. This route is supposed to be prettier and less populated than the Coca Cola route. The minimum number of days required is 6 but we added an extra day to give us more time to acclimate. Our first big shock of the climb was to learn how many people would be climbing with us; I do not mean other climbers, but porters. All told there were 14 people in our party: Aaron and myself, our guide, assistant guide, cook, and 9 porters (one of whom was to serve as the waiter at meal times). We had an entourage!! Even now, I cannot write about this without feeling a little humiliated that so many people were going to be involved in getting just 2 of us up the mountain. Talk about high maintenance!

Day 1: We were picked up from our hotel at 7:30 (18 hours after arriving in TZ) the next morning. It turns out that the guy who organized our trip is kind of famous. If you've seen the IMAX movie on Kilimanjaro, he's the lead guide. The drive to the park entrance was a bit surreal for a few reasons: 1. I couldn't believe we were about to start climbing, and 2. we were listening to this bizarre mix of American songs that someone had on an MP3 player (my favorite was "Grandma got ranover by a reindeer").

Our first day was a 10km climb from the Machame Gate (1950m) to Machame Camp (3300m). The hike was really beautiful. We started in the rain forest and ended in moorland - this may not be the correct term, but it's what our guide used. It was really cool to see the terrain and vegetation change as we changed climactic zones. Overall the first day wasn't too bad. What you'll hear everyday on the mountain is "pole pole" which means "slowly slowly", so that's what we did. We were told that it's important to eat while you can because most people lose their appetites from the altitude so we ended our first day by pigging out.

Day 2: Every morning on the mountain starts with "wake up tea" at 6:30, which is brought to our tent (at this point, we still haven't realized that we have a waiter). After tea, we are given a bowl of warm water to wash with before packing up our bags and eating breakfast. Today's hike was 8km to the Shira Plateau (3810m). The hike was pretty steep so we walked slow and arrived at Shira in time for lunch. After lunch our guide, Richard, took us another 200m up to the Shira Hut to get a good view of the plateau and acclimate a little more before going back down to sleep. Every night, Richard measures our pulse and oxygen levels to make sure we are doing okay with the altitude. He says at the base, our oxygen levels are around 100 and at the summit they will be in the 70s. So far we've been in the low 90s, so we're doing really well.

Day 3: It's the third day and I can't believe I'm still feeling good and I'm not even sore! I start today's hike like I have the last two by thinking, "today's going to be the really tough day". Today we are going 7km up to the Lava Tower (4400m) for lunch and then descending for 3km to the Barranco campsite (3910m). There is about 20 hikers that started the climb the same day we did, so we've been making some friends on the trail. I'm starting to feel a little less ashamed as I realize that the other hikers also have their own army of porters. It looks like we've been some of the few not to get sick from the altitude or the food yet. I would say our only biggest health problem right now is sunburn; even the backs of our hands are getting burnt!
We crossed into our third climate zone, desert, at lava tower (picture on the right). After living in Arizona and Burkina, I've seen my fair share of desert so I was happy to descend back down to moorland after lunch. The descent after lunch was probably the hardest hike we've done so far. It was steep and really hard on our legs. I'm going to be upset if my first day of sore muscles is because of 3km of downhill! The Barranco camp is set in a canyon filled with these funny cactus-like plants and is pretty chilly so we mostly hang out in our tent to keep warm. We're slowly learning more about Richard. He used to work for the park service and says he's climbed Kili 3000 times (we think he means 300) and his fastest time is 24 hours - pretty impressive. Today we got our first good glimpse at the summit. It still seems much too big and far away.

Day 4: Today is another 10km to camp. We are hiking 7km to lunch and then 3km to Barafu camp (4600m). On the trail map, the first 7k look pretty flat, this is very deceiving. It is actually 7k of climbing up and over steep ridges. I know that going up and back down helps you acclimate but when your goal is to reach the summit, there is something very unsatisfying about climbing 2000 ft only to descend 1900 immediately.
After talking with Richard, we've decided to do the climb in 6 days instead of 7. This means we'll be attempting the summit tomorrow and if we don't make it, we'll have another day to try again. He also says that it would be easier if we start the climb around 5am instead of midnight, which is what most people do. Since we seem to be the only people not getting sick from the altitude, I think he's been doing a good job so we decide to take his advice and sleep in a few hours before the summit tomorrow. (We take some altitude sickness medicine just in case- don't want to press our luck.) The picture above is Aaron fixing my trekking pole during our lunch break.

Day 5- Summit Day!! Today we attempt the summit. We ate a quick breakfast of tea, pourridge, and muffins (no eggs today because they might make us vomit) and were off a little after 5. The porters are going to wait for us at camp, so it's just the two of us, Richard, and our assistant guide, in case someone gets sick. We put on all of our clothes for the climb - it's really cold up there! The ascent is 5km to Uhuru Peak (5896m) of steep uphill. The first 4k took us over 4 1/2 hours...pole pole. It was steep switchbacks with blizzard-like wind blowing and fogging up my glasses. One thing I learned from summit day was that Richard is not to be trusted to give an honest description of the trail. He told us the trail to the summit was an even mixture of really steep, kind of steep, and flat. Untrue. It was about 90% really steep, 9% slightly steep, and 1% flat. He also has a tendency to tell us we are almost to certain points when really we have another hour of climbing. But looking back, I think it's better he lied; the truth would have been too depressing. The other climbers we had been hiking with started the ascent at midnight so a few of them passed us on their way down which gave us some encouragement.
Finally, around 10am, we saw the sign announcing the peak through the clouds. We were told that when you reach the peak, you are so tired and feel so ill that you just want to get back down. Luckily for us this was not the case. Aaron had a headache and my stomach was doing something weird, but overall we were feeling really good. We took some pictures, danced a little and then I was hit with the feeling of "so what now?". Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see the crater or more than a few minutes of the glaciers so after about 20 or 30 minutes we headed back down. The descent was fast - 2 hours to get back to camp. It turns out that I'm not very good at walking downhill; my total number of falls: 4. When we reached camp, all of the porters congratulated us, which was really nice, and we had a hot lunch before continuing another 2 hours down to a lower camp for the night. We finally realized on our last night that the same porter was always bringing our food and tea...we had a waiter!

Day 6: This is our last day on the mountain and also the day I was finally feeling really tired and just wanted to get down, pretty convenient. Our legs were pretty sore from the summit and descent yesterday (I never knew downhill could be so hard on your legs!). On the Machame route, you take a different, more direct path down so we only had about 11 or 12 km to the park gate. We realized yesterday that we never lost our appetites and that eating enormous amounts of food was no longer justified (especially since we're going to the beach next week) so we cut back a little on our meals, which really confused Richard. After about 4 hours, we reached the bottom where we received certificates with the date and time of our summit and gave all of the porters their tips before saying goodbye. By the time we reached the bottom I was really tired and, I think, more than a little grumpy and sore so I don't have many recollections from that morning. The picture above is our whole group minus 3 porters. We had a group of 3 brothers whose grandfather died so they left yesterday morning to attend the funeral.

I apologize if this was too long; you'd be surprised what I left out. If there is anyone thinking of doing the climb and wants more info on routes, guides, etc. feel free to write us. The next day we started our safari so watch for another entry with some cool animals...

Tanzania: Part 1

Jambo from Tanzania! We have been really busy and having an amazing time in Tanzania so far. There's a lot to talk about so I think we'll do this in installments. Let me start by saying that I cannot think about this trip without a flood of superlatives coming to mind so prepare yourself to read about things that are the most, best, greatest, etc.

First, the flight to TZ. We got a good first-hand look at the security of the Burkina airport as we were leaving. We watched as every member of the flight crew set off the metal detector and kept walking without anyone so much as raising an eye. Then, all of the passengers are subjected to a very public patdown. When it was my turn, the lady grabs my money belt under my clothes and announces in two languages (in case anyone was confused) "money, ok": very discreet.

We had an overnight layover in Ethiopia and were pleasantly surprised to find that the airline had booked us at a local 4-star hotel where the employees were very eager to please and even more eager to apologize for anything. At one point, I had someone apologize to me as I was walking up the stairs. I am not sure what that was supposed to mean, perhaps it was "I am sorry that you are walking up these stairs instead of me carrying you." At any rate, it was more attention that we are used to or comfortable with.

We flew straight to Kilimanjaro airport, which was amazing because we got to fly right next to the summit on our way in. I was pretty intimidated by how huge it was; excited, but really intimidated. Our trekking company picked us up from the airport and took us to our hotel in Moshi. It was pretty unbelievable that we were going to be picked up at 7am the next morning to start the climb. It felt like it was coming too fast. We spent the few hours left of the afternoon walking around Moshi, buying altitude sickness medicine, and staring at the mountain towering over us. Our first impressions of Tanzania, it is beautiful. It is so green here I can't believe it. I got really jealous walking through their fruit and vegetable market. It's been hard for us to adjust to everyone speaking English here. We keep answering people in French out of habit.

Coming up...the climb

Kilimanjaro. Check.

Only have 4 minutes to write this. We just hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. It was awesome. Tomorrow we leave to go on a safari for 2 days. Then to Zanzibar. We'll write more and add pictures later. Hope all is well.

Moore 101

Thanks to our friends at the marche, "Emy" and "Harouna" have slowly been improving their Moore. Here are a few key things we've learned:

sida = husband: Learning this during training would have really saved me some trouble. In French, AIDS is called SIDA so you can imagine my confusion when everyone at the marche one day kept asking me how my "sida" was doing. I told them, in Moore, that I actually don't have AIDS but they insisted I did and wanted to see it. I actually started to get a little upset as more and more people joined in to insist that I had AIDS until finally someone mentioned "Harouna" and I figured it out.

If in doubt, mmbaa or mmdaa: It turns out that this is an official response to a lot of things, so if you're not sure what someone is saying, just throw it out there and there's a good chance it'll work. There is supposedly one of these that women say and another one for men, but I can never remember so I just kind of mumble it. The other day some old guy rattled off some incomprehensible Moore to me so I gave him a nod and an "mmbaa" and he looked shocked and told all his friends that I speak Moore.

wend.....-> amina: There are a lot of different ways to say goodbye and they normally involve some kind of blessing and the word "wend" (might be "wenda") for God. Anytime you hear a sentence start with this, you can just tune out the rest because the answer will always be "amina" (amen).

ligdi ya wanna?: Pricing is Moore is kind of odd. We've learned the Moore words for most of the prices we use in the marche (100F, 50F,...) but it doesn't actually mean we've learned the words for 100 or 50 in Moore. This is because there is a conversion of 4, or maybe 5 (I missed this session in training), between Francs and Shells. Moore prices are given in Shells which means when I wouldn't use the same Moore words to buy 25 mangos and pay 25CFA.

There's been lots of other things, but we'll leave it there for today. In case there are any lingistic scholars out there, many (and probably most) of these Moore words might be spelled wrong. Since we learn by talking to people, I just write them how they sound to me and have no idea how to spell them.

Pictures!

Here are some of the new pictures:

Potato marche: every stall is full of potatos or onions.

Soccer with the girls club.

Issouf, our forestier, talking with the students

Planting the seeds

This picture wouldn't be nearly as funny except that it wasn't posed - this is how I found Aaron one day. This is what the hot season has done to us.

The kittens have brought out Aaron's maternal instincts. Quick note about the facial hair: Aaron decided to stop shaving sometime back in March. We have been shocked at how a culture of supposedly indirect communicators have been so direct in telling him that they don't like it and he should shave.

Nothing makes me happier than seeing teenaged boys walking around school holding hands. Here are some of our students.

Awarding the top students

Our trees after 2 weeks

This guy is incredible. He got all of the soil ready for planting and waters the trees everyday. He does it all for free but we occasionally bring him some lunch.

Holy Heat Rash!

School is finally ending. These last few weeks were tough for everyone: teachers and students. Luckily, there were enough (unexpected) holidays and special testing days thrown in to keep things exciting. The girls club has come to a somewhat tragic end for the school year. We had been playing soccer and dancing every Friday night and a few weeks ago during our soccer games, one of the girls called me "nasara". This immediately ended our soccer game and any future soccer games. I probably would have let her off the hook if she had apologized, but she decided to laugh about it instead...she should've apologized.

Each class at school has a "professor principal" who is like the homeroom teacher responsible for the class and any problems with discipline or grades can be brought to the PP. I brought the problem to the PP of her class thinking he might talk to her for a while, take a few points off,....the usual punishment. The next thing I knew I had a bunch of girls in the salle de professors (teachers lounge) crying their eyes out and apologizing. It turns out that the PP decided to punish the entire girls club by lowering their grades (still not sure by how much), and expelling them from class for a week. I tried to tell him that we could just punish the one girl but he is now convinced that they are all bandits and the others should have corrected her, but they didn't, so they are just as guilty. While I appreciate his help and I'm sure this is how Burkinabe teachers handle problems like this, I feel like this might hinder any future girl's club participation. Next year if I try to advertise for girls to join, what can I say: "Remember that big group of girls you saw crying outside of class for an entire week? That could be you!" Maybe I'll try an English club instead.

We're getting ready for our trip to Tanzania next month. Getting in shape for Kilimanjaro has been pretty challenging since Burkina is blessed with an abundance of conditions exactly opposite of what we'll find on Kilimanjaro (hot, flat, sea-level). I do a lot of walking with a heavy pack on really early before it gets too hot and we've created a home gym equipped with weight machines (Puma backpack filled with rocks) and a stairmaster (cement block next to the house). After all this work, I really hope I make it to the top of Kilimanjaro. If I don't, I hope I can at least fail with some dignity. If I were to get violently ill from the altitude or get injured saving a fellow hiker from a falling boulder, there's some dignity in that - a little less in the case of the illness. But if I don't make it because I've stopped on the side of the mountain crying because I'm too tired to go on, that's just disappointing. I don't want to rule out crying like a baby, it might very well happen, but I do hope that I will get up and keep walking afterwards.

All that stuff I had said about it not being that hot...I was wrong. These last two weeks have been wretched. It's too hot to nap, but too hot to move, so we've been reading a lot. Luckily, I think we will start having some cloudy days every now and then to cool things off. We actually had about 5 minutes worth of rain last night which was enough to make the next day almost comfortable. My heat rash is awesome now. Everyday I discover new clusters of red bumps.

School is now over for us. Aaron had the fun idea to capitalize on the Burkinabe love affair with certificates and print off certificates for the girl and boy with the highest grades in our classes and give them some candy. We also recognized the most-improved boy and girl in each class, but didn't have time to print them certificates so they just got candy. The award ceremonies were fun. We still struggle to tell which students are boys and which are girls based on their names; as a result, the most improved girl in 6C math turned out to be a boy, oops. Both Aaron and I met with our proviseur this week to talk about what subjects we'd like to teach next year. It sounds like I might get to teach English (a subject I know about) and Aaron will teach physics as well as math. Hopefully, this will all work out. I think the fact that the school doesn't have to pay us gives us a little sway in what classes we will teach, but not much.

Earth Day and other things

Other big news from Titao: The government-run electric company has finally finished their 5-yr long expansion of their power lines from the nearest city 28 miles away and we now have electricity!! Life is pretty good on the grid. It hasn't made a big difference in our lives except that we have street lights on our two main roads and we can finally find yogurt. Who am I trying to kid...yogurt!...it's made a huge difference. The other big arrival that we are constantly reminded of has been the infamous hot season. It seems to be the favorite pasttime of people around town to ask us how we are dealing with the chaleur. Honestly, it's hot, but I was expecting much worse. After months of hearing about the hot season, I was ready for unimaginable awfulness but it's really just a lot of imaginable sweatiness (and I mean A LOT of sweatiness), and the occasionally heat rash in unexpected places.

We are now finishing our first school year - hurray! It's been fun... sometimes. Lately, I've been trying to incorporate the kids' knowledge of American culture into our classes. Last week in Review-Jeopardy, Barack Obama destroyed Eminem, Shakira, and 50 Cent. I also taught the girls club some American dances. Really, they couldn't have found a worse resource for American dance moves...I know nothing. So far we've done the electric slide and the macarena. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know; otherwise, I'll have to bring out the lawnmower and maybe the sprinkler.

We heard the best song on the radio on Easter Sunday. It was set to lounge-type music and the only lyrics of the song were: "Jesus, il est comme ca" (Jesus, he's like that).Enough said, I guess. The kittens are now in their cute phase. Before they were boring and slept all day, and later they will be too big to qualify as "cute" so these are the golden weeks right now.

Yesterday we did our Earth Day tree-planting with the students from our school. We had about 45 students come representing almost every class at our school. The first hour or so was a sensibilisation from our local forestier about the importance of trees, deforestation, littering, etc. and then we had another PCV who lives near us speak about the nutritional and other properties of the trees we were going to plant. Finally, we got to work opening water sachets, packing them with pre-mixed dirt, sand, and manure, and planting the seeds. They planted 1000 sachets with 2 seeds in each sachet just to be safe. The majority of the trees were moringa which are becoming popular here for their use in malnutrition but we also planted some neem seeds that will be transplanted with our moringa trees because they are supposed to keep termites away.

Overall, the tree-planting went pretty well. There were the normal surprises and hiccups: like when our school told us three weeks in advance that there wasn't class Tuesday through Thursday only to tell us the night before that there was class and we needed to change the date for the tree-planting; or when the forestier told us 2 weeks ago he had extra seeds, but then he didn't bring them for the planting so he left to get them, and came back saying he didn't have any. I would still call it a success. Of course, we aren't done yet. Our work for the next month will be planning out the area at the hospital where we will be transplanting the trees, finding people to dig the holes and a way to protect the trees from animals, and teaching the people at the hospital about moringa and how to use it in their malnutrition program.


By the time we finish that, it will be time for a vacation! Tanzania here we come...