A visual tour of the area...

Journal Entry September 22, 2009


I need to describe the areas that we have seen!  Surrounding Hill Front Hotel (where we are staying) the houses are mostly made of mortar-type walls or brick, with tin roofs.  There are some plaster (?) homes that look more solid and appear to have more than one room, while other homes are obviously just one room. On top of the tin roofs are piles of sticks and rocks to keep the roofs from flying off, I suppose!  


It appears people burn their garbage, as there are large piles of garbage in wide dug out cirlces around some homes.  There is also lots of garbage just strewn across the roads and paths as well (not so good).  There seems to be a lot of people around all the time...sitting, walking, bicycling. Lots and lots of children!  Today we saw children in school uniforms but not all and many children appear not to go to school at all.  In Africa, a child must have a school uniform and books to attend school and for many families, they simply can't afford that.  
The women are dressed in yards of gorgeous fabric - lots of colour and usually with a scarf on their heads and then of course babies and toddlers wrapped on their mother's back...everywhere!  So fantastic!

The children are fascinated with us and will call "muzungo, muzungo" which means "white person" in Swahili.  They may say, "Jambo" ('Hello' in Swahili) or "Hello. How are you?" which is about all they know in english!  They come and walk with us hand in hand - it's precious and fun to be such a source of entertainment to them.  


My feeling walking on the street is that the men don't seem particularly open to greetings, whereas the women are.  I'm not sure if that's a cultural thing or whether the men are more suspicious of us.  Everywhere you look there are women carrying something on their head.  They have a donut-like shape of material that rest on their head and then they balance anything from a mattress to a bucket of water to a basin of bananas up there! Incredible!  


There are also Coke and Pepsi advertisements ALL over!, along with cell phone company advertisements - roofs of houses and some walls of houses are completely painted with a company advertisement.  


Mwanza is known as "Mwanza - the City of Rocks" and it is not hard to figure out why.  The whole region that we saw, has these massive rock formations that some of the locals refer to as "mountains".  Somehow people actually manage to build homes in the midst of these rocks and it is really quite phenomenal to see.

Below are a series of photos that basically capture what I've written about above in my journal. I need to acknowledge the work of my teammates Sheri and Lindsay as some of these photos are theirs.  They were much better at getting pictures "on the fly" and capturing some everyday moments in Mwanza and Igoma.  So I'm grateful to them!...you'll see more of their pics throughout these posts as well.

Note the house in the bottom centre of this photo.

Don't miss the baby on her back!

Some of the little faces that greeted us every morning.

I thought this was so incredible...the little shack-like dwelling is this woman's business and even though it sits on a dirt road, she is out there "sweeping" the area in front of her business to keep it looking as neat as possible.  It is obvious that she takes pride in her work and desires to do her best in all things.  Amazing.

This is a great shot that Sheri captured because it shows these women laughing!...Sheri had asked if she could take their photo and they just get so shy and laugh and try and hide (even though they've agreed to the photo!).  They are fascinated with cameras and when you show them the photo you've taken, they laugh even harder!! You'll also note in the right side of the picture, the mounds of charcoal.  All along the roads, you would see women selling charcoal that they have broken up for people to buy bundles for cooking and fires at night.