Cathy Schrull

Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone: Traveling To Dar

It is always a busy time getting ready for our trip.  We are leaving our U.S. life behind for over two weeks.  I know that’s a really short-term trip for full-time missionaries, but for folks with non-mission-releated “day jobs” and lives like us, over two weeks takes some planning:

There’s the bills that will come in and need to be paid while we’re gone.  That’s relativeley easy these days thanks to the wonders of online banking.  There’s arranging for a house/cat sitter.  We have two cats, both of which are very needy in different ways and who have become even more needy since our third cat died this winter.  There are the travel drugs, needed because Tanzania is a Malaria zone; and making sure that we have enough of the everyday drugs that folks of our age seem to accumulate.  And, of course, there is getthing the “day jobs” set so that they can be left for such a relatively long period of time.

As we get closer to the time to leave, UPS and FEDEX packages of items we are planning to bring with us start to arrive.  Orgainzational piles of things to back build up in various corners.  Eventually the day comes when it’s all packed, we go the the airport and then spend entiely too much time sitting up right in cramped airline seats.

Don’t get me wrong:  Air Emerates does an execelent job of feeding, hydrating and entertaining us on the trips to Dubai and onward to Dar es Salaam.  But I get almost no sleep under these conditions.  Something that isn’t too surprising when you consider that the major leg of this trip starts at noon ET and ends around mid-night that same day.

We have now successfully negotiated these flights and are in Dar es Salaam.  We’ve gotten cleaned up and consumed an excellent dirrner here at the hotel.  Right now I can barely keep my eyes open, so I will edit this again tomorrow, and, I hope, add a picture or two………

Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone: Heading Back to Tanzania

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The 23 Hour Night

We are now on our way to Dubai, where I hope to be able to publish this post.  Yes, the post name is correct:  tonight is about 23 hours long for us.  We left Dar es Salam at 5:00 pm on Tuesday and expect to arrive in New York around 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning.  Of course there is this little 8 hour time difference to take into account.  By “body clock time” we will be arriving we will be arriving at 3:30 in the afternoon.  We are flying on Emirates, and I just got my first taste of cheese and chocolate in two weeks!

IMGP4190I left our previous post in Mwanza, where Bishop Makaya’s brother, Herman, kindly took us under his wing for five hours or so, as we had a 7 hour layover.  We had a delicious  fish lunch/dinner at the Victoria Palace Hotel, which a friend of his is a director of (his friend is also a director of an import/business).  The hotel was very nice and the breezes off of Lake Victoria were marvelous.  After our dinner, Herman showed us some of the sights of Mwanza.  We drove along a bit of the lake shore and saw some of the really fascinating volcanic rocks in the area.  He showed us the Buganda hospital, one of the five largest hospitals in Tanzania.   There is a medical school right by the hospital which, I was fascinated to see, seems to be run by Baylor University and the Texas Children’s hospital.

IMGP4211The we headed to the fish market.  There we met another of Herman’s friends.  This one has an interest in the fish market (“the best in East Africa”) and also runs a taxi service.  It seems that successful business men in Mwanza have more than one business.  The fish market specializes in very small fish, a lot of which are sold as chicken feed and larger salted fish, which I understand, are exported, much to the dismay of Tanzanians.  One of the things that I found fascinating was the birds.  There were very large Pelicans and what smaller white birds that I believe are egrets.

Herman dropped us off at the Mwanza airport in plenty of time for our flight to Dar and we made our way to our hotel for the night,

IMGP4194Normally we stay at the New Africa, which is rather expensive, but we were unable to get reservations there for last night so Bill made reservations at a new-to-us hotel, the Tanzanite Executive Suites.  This hotel is much less expensive than the New Africa and is in the Islamic part of town.  It is also Islamic run, which is clear from the clearly posted signs in the lobby that alcohol is prohibited.  Our suite, and it WAS a suite, had way more room than we needed.  It consisted of a main room with sitting room, eating table and kitchenette and TWO bedrooms with full baths.  One bedroom had twin beds, we took the room with the king-size bed.  The baths were large with fantastic huge showers.  The décor was simple, but everything was very clean and the floors were tile.  The only improvements I could suggest would be more towels (there were two bath towels, and I had to “steal” the hand towel from the bath off the other bed room) and softer mattresses.  The mattress in our room was extremely firm, which may be a cultural expectation, but I would not be comfortable spending more than one night on it (our beds in Kasulu were softer).  The Tanzanite Executive Suites included breakfast in the price of the room, and wi-fi internet, so it was altogether a good deal.

We spent the morning transferring some unused cell-phone credits from one of our cells to Daudi – no point in letting the credits go unused and they would be lost by the next time we return to Tanzania.  We visited our Imagination Computers, our in-country source of all things technical to pay off some of our out-standing bill for a replacement piece of equipment for the solar power which had been fried by an electrical storm earlier in the year and the keyboards, and to order some additional equipment for the Bible College.  Then we headed back to to hotel, got cleaned up for the long flights home and headed for the airport.

Bishop Makaya had flown into Dar today for business at the British Embassy and we met him and Emmanuel Bwata at the airport. Emmanuel had left of Sunday, by bus, for Dar, and we had been sorry not to be able to say goodbye to him.  We were delighted to be able to share a final meal with him and his uncle at the airport before checking in for our flights home.

This will be my final post before landing in the United States, but it will not be my final post for this trip.  There will be at least one more post of reflections.