Last day in Singida

Tomorrow I head out to Mvae to finish off a couple of staff houses so it will be at least a week, maybe two, before I can write again. Today we learned to cook and it was about ten times nicer than anything we've been able to buy. All the food in restaurants is greasy and surprisingly lacking veges considering there are so many available!

Swahili is fun. We got sent out with 10 questions to ask at least two locals and had a great time trying to understand people. One guy told us he had ten kids, but apparently thats a really really funny Tanzanian joke. Which is a pity because I actually understood what he said.

There's way less to report today than last time since our days are quite repetitive and so far we've really just had Swahili lessons and practice. That's been good though, I got sent to the market to buy sunflower oil (we each had a thing to buy to cook with today). "Ninaomba mafuta ya kupikia nusu lita alizeti?" It worked too, they understood me and I got it at the real price not the "mzungu" price.

Ha, one funny anecdote. "Mzungu" means white person or European and it gets shouted at us a lot, it's not rude, just a way of getting attention. Yesterday we wanted to order some wine, vinyo, and as we figured out how to ask for white wine one of the Irish girls said "vnyo mzungu?" Which in no way means white wine, it really means white person's wine. We laughed ourselves silly for ages and the poor waitress was so confused by these wazungu chizi (crazy white people).

Mvae has three volunteers there already but the houses just need plastering and painting so maybe we will finish in a couple of weeks and move to Mughumbu (I think I spelt that wrong) with the other volunteers. I plan to work really hard so that we can meet up with the others, I'd like to have a couple weeks with them.

By the way, Gmail is really unreliable here, it only works on Firefox and very few computers have that so if you need to make contact try the hotmail account for now.

Baadaye! (Later)