Finally Home 2017-12-15

Friday Morning

I am home!

It was an amazing trip I will never forget. I know it looks like I have been on a safari vacation, but the focus we had as a team was always on what effect the Tanzania Maymester will have on our students, and how we can plan teaching and events to have the most impact on them. Of course I was astonished at so many things, so I passionately want the students to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel Tanzania like I did.

"The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see." - Alexandra K.Trenfor

This quote captures what I try to do when I teach. For the last week and a half I have been jotting down notes on what I can do to help the students learn, not only science, but also about people and culture. For example early in my astronomy class I break the students into groups, give them a globe, and ask, "Since the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, how is the Earth spinning?" Yesterday I jotted a thought, "Tell the students to go to the local market in Bagamoyo and observe how people are dressed. What do you see and why do you think they dress like they do?" I can't answer this for the students, but I hope I can guide them through the sense-making process.

Well, this post closes the my blog for the trip. I plan to post more picture, but I have to finish all of my grading for the semester now. 

2017-12-11 to 13 - Bagamoyo and Zanzibar

2017-12-11 to 13 - Monday to Wednesday

Monday - MARUCO (MARian University COllege)

Monday morning we walked over to MARUCO for a tour. We met and had introductions with the Principal of MARUCO and several faculty there. They were very gracious as we discussed where MARUCO is in its development. Professor Peter Msolla described that Tanzania's goal is to become a middle-income country by 2025, and that the keys that are education, science, and technology. MARUCO is in its third year. They currently have around 800 students and they specialize in science and science education. They are also starting a Research Institute that will emphasize local programs to reduce poverty and develop energy and food production in Tanzania.

Our team is not just working on developing the Maymester experience for our students, but also exploring how we can team up with MARUCO in its mission. Duquesne is working on ways to formally create a bond with MARUCO.

We met Professor Anare Kimaro, a chemistry professor, and Professor Stelyus Mkoma, the Deputy Principal. We toured the College. Plaxedes and I split off and visited the physics, chemistry, and biology laboratories and the library. This visit helped us visualize the education program at MARUCO, and ways we can help them.

MARUCO also helps us. We want to give our students a vision of serving others in a global context, and studying overseas in Tanzania will have a lifelong impact on them. Tanzania is a rich environment to teach our students about the challenges and opportunities here. All of us on our team pray that the Maymester will stir their hearts to make a commitment to serve globally.

We left Bagamoto and had an interesting drive to catch the ferry to Zanzibar. Part way there we hear a pop-whoooooosh, and the driver pulled over. The car with our luggage also stopped. We had blown a radiator hose. It took some time, but Tanzanians know how to fix cars. Somehow, they got it fixed. The traffic in Dar es Salaam was very congested, but Michael Wright had planned for contingency time, so we made the 4:00 PM ferry. Both ferry terminals were chaotic, but the ride was relaxing, and we and our luggage arrived at our hotel safely.

We had dinner with the Bishop of Zanzibar. He is on the Board of MARUCO. He filled us in more on the mission and state of the college. He is a very gracious person. As we ate a wonderful dinner under the skies of Zanzibar with a view of the sea.

Tuesday

In the morning we took a walking tour of Stonetown, the old part of the city, then tour of a spice farm in the center of the island. It was amazing to see how many of these spices are grown and taste them fresh off of the plants.

We checked into the Gold Zanzibar Hotel and Spa. It is one of the most beautiful beach hotels I have ever seen. There is a wide white sandy beach sloping into a peaceful green sea. I swam and waited in the ocean for about half of an hour, then Michael, Ryan, and I bobbed in the beatiful pool until we had leave to get ready for the evening. The Gold Zanzibar is operated by an Italian company. Michael said that Italians love “natural” pools and food, so the swimming pool was salt water. In a salt water pool you don’t need to add chlorine, so when I came out of the pool, I felt clean. It was cool.

We will probably plan for our students to spend the day at a similar place including a late night astronomy observing session.

Michael, Plaxedes and I met before dinner to go over and make a day-by-day outline of the Maymester. Dinner was at a large outdoor restaurant with great Italian food. We dined and talked about Tanzania and the trip for a couple for over two hours. Since dinner is not even served until 8:00 PM, it was late before I got back to my room. I went back out, dragged a lounge chair to a dark place on the beach and looked at stars for another half hour.

Wednesday

Today we have the morning to relax (I am blogging and listening to Van Morrison) before we start our trip home.

It has been a very productive trip and I can’t wait for May.

2017-12-09 and 10 - Saturday & Sunday

The Purpose of Our Trip

It may seem that I have been on a complete holiday, but actually our group has been engaging in a constant discussion about how we can use what we are learning and seeing to teach our Duquesne students.
Michael Wright is the Director of European Programs, and the Africa Programs at Duquesne. He has lived in Rome directing the Duquesne program there for over 15 years (long enough to get an Italian passport). He has put together an amazing program, handles the logistics, and the finances. I have been on and led several teams of students on international trips, and I can say he has put together a great program for us for the Maymester. Crazy ideas are being discussed, considered, extended, modified, and discarded all the time we are together and Michael is in the middle of it all.

He is the great Enabler.

Many times Plaxedes or I will see or hear something, then toss out ideas about how we could use it for our students. The group discussion with Michael, Ryan, Rick, and Phil has been very rich and encouraging. I am often pulling out my little notebook and jotting ideas down.
Michael has also arranged several meetings with people we can use as resources. Several times we have been surprised when meetings took unexpected turns. For example on Saturday we were meeting with a Mponda Miaolo who has been active in using astronomy for teaching and outreach in Tanzania, and he was bringing a student along. It turned out the student, Gideon Kaweah, is a student at Marian University College (also known as MARUCO), the very college we are going to team with in May. I am sure we will be in contact with him in planning our Maymester. And Mponda also works in the Ministry of Agriculture and has contacts Plaxedes can use in her Environmental Justice course. Two unexpected turns at one meeting!

Sunday in Bagamoyo

We left Dar es Salaam early Sunday morning so we could be driven to Bagamoyo and make the 11:00 mass. As we were walking around the Hotel Stella Marie where the students will be staying in May, I met two women, one African and one Asian who were heading to the Assemblies of God church. More on them later.
The mass happened to be the Children’s Mass, so it was only an hour long instead of the usual two hour mass. The church is beautiful and the sound of children singing throughout the mass was a moving experience. Also the priest gave the reading of the day in English (just for us). It was Mark 1:1 - 10. It ends with “but he (referring to Jesus) will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” What a special message to us since we are from a Spiritan University (Duquesne) and teaming with another Spiritan college (Marian/MARUCO.)
We toured the Catholic Museum and the grounds of the Catholic property at Bagamoyo. It was great to hear of how the Spiritan fathers started their ministry here and fought against the slave trade.
This is a beautiful tropical beach town. The setting of the Hotel Stella Marie is fabulous. There are palm trees on all sides, the hotel runs right up to the beach, there is an amazing beachside pavilion and dining facility, the rooms have great views of the Indian Ocean, there is a breeze blowing off of the ocean, this is Africa! The students are going to be blown away that they get to take university courses in this venue. We are all excited for the coming May courses.
In the evening Plaxedes, Michael, Rick, and I walked down the beach to the fish market, then stopped in a couple of places on the road back to the hotel. Along the way we met the two women from earlier. One is the new Dean of Students at MARUCO, and the other, Wi-Nei, is Taiwanese. Wi-Nei is the new Physics and Chemistry lecturer at MARUCO! What and unexpected encounter and blessing.

Dinner

The Spiritan priests, who alway come together for a Sunday dinner in Bagamoyo, invited us to join them. There were about 17 of us all together. We dined outside in a yard next to the beach. Many conversations were happening all at once as we ate together in the semi-darkness. The stars were out and my heart was quieted with awe and worship as we all enjoyed this evening together.
As usual, dinner wasn’t over until late. Two more amazing days in Tanzania.
Tomorrow, we take the ferry to Zanzibar!

Pictures from Dec 8th - Ngorongoro Crater

 These are umbrella acacia trees. They are common around Ngorongoro Crater.

A hyena. It and its friends were hanging around waiting for a male lion to be done with a kill. Hyenas are the only predator with jaws strong enough to crack the large bones of a kill and eat the marrow. 

 It was very overcast in the crater, but that gave us opportunities because some of the animals were more active in the cool rain. Here is a dazzle of zebras with a rainbow behind them.

 A male ostrich.

 Finally, our best view of a lion. He and a fellow male were right beside the road with some females close by. They were chillin'. They do that a lot.

Part of the pride. A quarter mile away we saw about six more females relaxing. 

Ryan at the hippo pool. The day had a peaceful beauty to it with the clouds hanging below the rim of the crater. 

Snort, snort. 

I finally caught some of the small colorful birds. 

A Thompson's gazelle. (Unfortunately he was relieving himself.) 

 A close up of a zebra.

 A European Stork.

 A close encounter with one of my fav's - a warthog.

Good look at a Grant's gazelle. 

 Who don't like a gnu?

 Filling my role as The Napigator.

The rarest sighting - a caracal. It was feeding on a European stork. 

 It's buddy. Probably the female waiting its turn.

 Beautiful grey crowned cranes

The lighting was beautiful as we were leaving the crater. 

Yeah! Wartlets! 

We had to slow down to get past a herd of Cape Buffalo on the way out of the crater. 

Here is Phil & I's shout out to the Steelers! 

Former president Barak Obama is loved in east Africa because of his Kenyan heritage.

Pictures (and one video) from Dec 7th. Lake Manyara National Park

In the morning Ryan and I went out again with Lori for a sunrise walk.

The colors were great in the pinkish dawn light.

Lake Manyara National Park

Elephants

We saw several herds of elephants in the Manyara. They were harder to find and see because of the forest. But here (link) is a very short video (only 5 seconds) of a herd we got close to at a waterhole. 

 This is a very typical scene driving to the park. Many women carried items on their heads.

I'm ready to roll! 

A shoehorn hopped around and posed for us.

 This is a black-faced vervet monkey. We saw several troups of these while on safari.

 Cape Buffalo. They are very large cattle.

 Hippos in the distance.

And up close. 

Hippos. They are very territorial. They stay in groups, called crashes of one male and three to six females. 

An Egyptian goose. 

 This is a lone bull giraffe.

Here are two mature but young males. 

The beautiful lodge where we stayed on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. 

The crater is about 10 miles across.

2017-12-08 Friday

National Parks and Conservation Areas

Tanzania has had to negotiate the balance between resource conservation and the rights of indigenous peoples. One prominent tension is between the Maasai people and the areas rich with wildlife. The Serengeti as a national park in 1951 so the Maasai people were forced to move out of the park. They were relocated in nearby areas. Eighteen years later, in 1969, Ngorongoro was set aside as a conservation area. The laws protecting the wildlife are the same as the national parks, but the indigenous peoples are allowed to live there and raise livestock.
To me it is very interesting that the government and the local tribes have been relatively successful reaching a peaceful and fair solution. The Ngorongoro Crater is now restricted like a national park, but it is in the much larger Ngorongoro Conservation area.

Sopa Lodge

The Sopa Lodge is one of the lodges on the rim it is a four star hotel. BTW, it was a free upgrade to our party. We left early, at 7:00 for our safari into the crater. The is only two road accesses at the crater, each a one-way road, so we entered the crater via the eastern road. The descent is though a thick forest. Since it had rained the previous night, the road was slippery red dirt (like all of the other roads in the crater.) The road descends 2000 feet in a few miles.
Near the bottom of the road along a gully, there were at least 20 hyenas lying around on both sides of the road. A few were walking around. Fahad knew what was ahead, but we didn’t. We sat and occasionally crept forward watching the hyenas lay around. Then someone spotted a Cape Buffalo carcas on the riverbank. We were very puzzled that the hyenas were not scavenging it. We eventually found out why: there was a large male lion nearby watching it!

Lions!

Fahad told us that if the kill was made by lionesses, the hyenas would try to move in and drive the lionesses away. But they would never challenge a lion. He once saw a hyena running away from a kill in a panic right into the path of a lion. The lion swiped down on the hyena so hard its intestines flew out.
No animal challenges the King of the Jungle!
We watched absolutely fascinated for about half of an hour even though the lion only moved his head occasionally.
Finally we slowly drove on and saw lionesses for the first time a few hundred yard away. They were passively lying around stretched out on the hillside. There were probably at least another half dozen in the lion’s territory. Fahad said once the lion had his fill, he would call the females in and he would leave and the lionesses would have to fend for themselves. On the other hand if the lionesses made a big kill, they would call the lion to eat first.
Also prides of lion always consist of two to three males and numerous females. The pride is run by the Boy’s Club. We didn’t see them, but the other males will also show up and eat before the females can start.
Some of the nastiest battles on the plains are when hyenas challenge lionesses or vice versa over a kill.
We saw one other pride on our safari today. We saw a group with two males and four females right beside the road. We all totally ignored us. About a quarter mile away we counted about a dozen females scattered across a hillside sleeping or not moving. Lions sleep a lot, so you could watch a pride for a long time without seeing anything happen.

Hippos

The hippos were easy to watch. We drove to a lunch spot with a bathroom right next to a hippo pond. About a dozen hippos were in the water. Most of the time only their eyes, ears and snout were visible. Occasionally one would dive for whatever hippo reason it had and pop up a minute later. Sometimes they would stand briefly. We ate lunch and watched them for about an hour. Finally they all got the hippo message and slowly worked their way up the river.
It was cool to eat lunch while listening to their hippo snorts.

A Black Rhino

We were driving along a while later, when the driver suddenly stopped and pulled out his binoculars. After looking for a couple of minutes, he said, “There is a rhino over there.” Sure enough, a dark bump about 300 yards away was a rhino. When he rolled form his side to his belly, we could see his pair of horns with binoculars. Rhinos also sleep a lot, so we moved on after about 10 minutes.
With that sighting, we complete four of the Big 5: lion, leopard, rhinoceros elephant, and Cape buffalo.

Ostriches

We saw quite a few ostriches today. It was cool and overcast, so most birds were not very active. We came up to one pair very close to the road and watched them watch us for 10 minutes.

Caracals

The most unusual sight we saw was three small cats called caracals. They are about bobcat sized, but with tails and very tall pointed ears. In 17 years this was only the third time Fahad saw them. One was eating a European stork about 20 feet from the road. The other two were a little farther away laying down. They blended in well with the grass. Caracals usually only come out at night, so the dense overcast probably played a part in them being active.

The Birds

There are many, many birds in Ngorongoro crater. Here is a list of some that I remember: - Pelicans - small colorful birds - crowned Crane - European storks - Cory bustards - Black kite (like a hawk) - Egyptian geese - Oxpeckers riding on the backs of zebra & buffalo
We finally left the crater and had a long drive back to Arusha and the Spiritan house. We got back around 6, but of course Michael Write had a dinner scheduled for us. We went to dinner at a nice hotel in Arusha and had a presentation by Erwin Kinsey, director of ECHO, a center for bringing sustainable agriculture to the Maasai people. A Duquesne student Julia who is finishing her Physician’s Assistant degree from Duquesne was also there. It was exciting to see how through Duquesne’s Semester Abroad program she became committed to working in Africa.
As usual, dinner wasn’t over until after 10 PM.

More Pictures from Dec 6th in Tarangire National Park

 A typical scene from the highway. These men are motorcycle taxi drivers. for $.50 and up you can get a quick ride anywhere.

 Entering the first national park.

 Scenery from the park entrance station.

 Looking into the safari vehicle. Michael Wright is standing, Ryan is next to him. In the middle row is Plaxedes and Rick. Phil Clarke is next to me.

I loved all the warthogs trotting around. 

The first herd of elephants we got a good look at. 

Zebras were everywhere. 

Rear and side view. 

There were a lot of impalas in the forest. 

Wildebeasts (I still like to call them gnus) were often mixed in with zebras. 

Here is one of the famous baobob tree.  They are large and scattered throughout Tanagire Park.

Wildebeasts 

 More wildebeasts

Proof I really was there. 

A good look at female impalas. 

There was always one and only one male watching over his harem. 

Fahad said the males lose so much weight watching their harems so they only last  about three months before a stronger male will displace them.

 A good look at an elephant.

 More proof.

 More elephants. The trees are acacia. They are the main food of the giraffe.

One of the many colorful birds. 

Finally, a giraffe. I don't understand how a giraffe could eat acacia leaves because the branches are covered with very nasty thorns. 

We watched this herd of elephants for about 30 minutes. 

 

Troops of baboons were common. 

This is a black faced vervet monkey. They were also common. 

A close look at an old bull giraffe. 

My "tent" at Lake Mayanara Camp.

 

This is the view from the patio of our lodge at Lake Mayanara. 

Lori led us on a sunset walk out on the dry lake bed.

Phil, Rick, Ryan, Michael, Plaxedes, and I.