The First Few Days...

So here I am in Dar Es Salaam and have survived the first few days, having spent most of them on the beach.

This volunteering business has obviously been so difficult.

We arrived in Dar Es Salaam at around 7.00am on a Sunday morning and were then taken to our accommodation on Kipepeo Beach just outside Dar. The intial ride from the airport to the YMCA hostel to pick up the other READ volunteers who had arrived early was very quickly, on the weekends the city seemed to be empty of cars but during the week its non-stop. However, we had to go to the ferry port to get to the beach resort where we staying and we got stuck in a traffic jam that made a normally ten minute journey last an hour.

In a metal car. With jet lag, no sleep and little water. Lots of fun you can imagine.

 The beach resort is amazing, it has incredibly views and the little beach huts we are staying in are adorable despite the Lonely Planet guidebook describing the resort as awful. The food and accommodation here I probably a little more expensive than you could get elsewhere and I've been premenantly covered in sand but its worth it.

On the first day, we spent most of the day on the beach and intermittenly in the sea before having a Swahili lesson in the evening.

The next day training began and we were given information on how to get to the region, what schools we were going to go to and a brief overview of the history and culture of Tanzania.

 The evening was fairly uneventful there was a quiz and later a 'vigourous' game of duck, duck, goose on the beach that I decided to sit out instead of risk injury.

 On Wednesday we travelled back to Dar to stay in the YMCA and met with the READ volunteers from Tanzania to talk about the differences between education in the UK and in Tanzania but got rather sidetracked and began debating feminism, religion and homosexuality.

The culture is obviously very different here with the emphasis heavier on religious values being upheld but they also appear to be more upfront than the stereotypically uptight British; one had no problem asking a girl from another university whether her and her boyfriend were having sex.

This place has taking some getting used to, mainly in tern\ms of the new flying insects and birds (that burrow into the rooves are they were thatched at Kipepeo) that are around to terrify me but I love all the lizards.

 I'm gradually coping with the birds being near me as long as they don't fly near my head. Of course, I could be a lot worse: some of the girls from another university beat a crab to death with a torch.

Here we go...

My flight is tomorrow at 19.20 from Heathrow Terminal 5 and I'm actually quite scared. I've never been abroad for so long without my parents, in fact when I did go aboard without them it was always with school so I had someone to look after me. This time however, I have to organise myself (which is proving to be a challenge) and take care of myself in subsaharan Africa of all places.

That's quite a lot for a nineteen year old who only pretends to be an adult part of the time to cope with.

I'm going with READ International, which is quite a small charity that takes books from secondary schools around the UK and ships them to Tanzania and Uganda. The syllabus is the same as in Britain and of course funding is poor so they can make a lot of use of what British students don't want.

I'm going to Lindi, in the south to distribute books around there (other students from other universities are going to other regions) and to help renovate a library (my parents thought the idea of my doing painting and decorating hilarious).

Who knows what is going to happen and whether or not I'll get malaria (I've taken the tablets but given how much I get bitten in the UK and the prevalence of the disease, knowing my luck......) but all (or least as much as I can manage) will be recorded here.