Sea Saturday, February 8

Saturday was the day for our first field trip with SUZA.  The school is supposed to provide our students with several trips throughout our month here, and they are usually on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays.  Today our destination was actually double, to the Jozani Forest Reserve and Paje beach.  Departure was set for 9:00, and like the eternal optimistic he is, John told all the students to be on time. And, they were.  However, the bus driver and other staff were not ready, as the bus driver had to go fill up with gas, something he apparently could not have done the afternoon before. So, as we should have expected, we were at least an hour late in getting on the road.

Before we got on the bus, we were surprised that students from an entirely different program were also boarding.  Then three female teachers climbed on as well with Mwalimu Omar, one of our teachers.  Later, we stopped along the road to pick up yet another male teacher.  So, the bus was totally crammed.  Since I was sitting in a front seat, I couldn’t observe our students, and I certainly couldn’t eavesdrop.  No one on Earth can speak—or perhaps I should say shriek—more loudly than Zanzibar women.  Fahdila has always been high volume, but the three female teachers came close to the same decibel level, and all three spoke at the same time.  It was nearly deafening.  Even though, I assume the teachers were along to interact with their students, these women kept huddled on the bus with the air conditioning going when we stopped and got out to explore the Jozani Forest.

This forest reserve is home to the rare red colobus monkeys, so while the students went off with a guide too look for monkeys,  I seated myself  at a little thatch-roofed table and sipped Passion Fruit Fanta while Iread more of “The Goldfinch” on my Kindle.  I assuage my grief at not being able to hike by watching the human life forms that pass by.  In this case, all arrivals were white tourists, both European and American.  Since most tourists do not stay in Zanzibar for longer than three days, they never really encounter the local culture except what they view as they whiz by in taxis and tour buses or perhaps meet as crew on the boat tours they take.  So, I’m sure they do not know or do not care how vulgar they look in short shorts that don’t even cover their cheek bottoms or tops cut nearly to the navel.  The most shocking person was a young shirtless man—but he was being divinely punished by a raging sunburn.

Fortunately the monkeys cooperated and the students got to see quite a few even mothers with their babies. They also enjoyed walking into the mangrove area, which for some reason is John’s favorite part of this hike.  Everyone loaded back up on the bus, and we were off to the little beach town of Paje, where we would eat the lunches our host mothers had packed for us, swim a bit, and see seaweed planting and soap making demonstrations.  One realizes the small size of this island on a trip from Zanzibar City to Paje, which is from the west to east coast and yet takes only an hour despite ox carts, bicycles, pedestrians, and zig-zagging daladalas on the road.

Paje is supposedly some sort of party town, but I wouldn’t label the collection of drab cinder block and sun brick houses a town, nor did I see any party spirit along the rutted, sandy tracks that wove unplatted toward the beach.  The only color was the incredibly blue and aquamarine ocean and a few windsurfer kites flying above the water.  We all unloaded at a big house right at the edge of the beach, and went inside to eat our lunches.  The dadas had packed us some pieces of scrawny chicken, French fries, and shredded cabbage and cucumber slices.  I was quite envious of the special treats many of the students had to eat—tandoori chicken, samosas, mandanzis, carrots and tomatoes, and special homemade pastries.

After eating, everyone changed into swimwear and ran off to the beautiful white sand beach.  The shallow water stretched far out, so even though the tide was high, one could walk out for a long way.  Along the shore there were shells and hermit crabs to inspect as well.  Still, after an hour or so in the sun, everyone was ready to return to the house, where we were to have some demonstrations of local industries.

A women’s cooperative raises seaweed, which it then sells to Asian buyers.  A couple of women came to demonstrate how they start and grow the plants on long lines in the ocean.   Because the tide was high, the students couldn’t see the lines out in the ocean as they had in 2012, but they got to put a new line in place.  These same women also make seaweed soap and showed us the whole process from start to finish.  Their ingredients were coconut oil, dried and pulverized seaweed, caustic soda, and a bit of scented oil, which in less than ten minutes of stirring was ready to be poured into a mold to harden.  Naturally they sold bars of the finished product, which cost about 35 cents a piece.  Perhaps I should have loaded up on the soap, but I bought only one bar because I thought the seaweed bits might feel scratchy.

Making seaweed soap

Then it was back to town, where John, Megan and I left the students and went in search of some yummy fruit juice.  We decided to go to a nearby café—just a tiny hole in the wall place—and see how their juice was.  On our way, John spotted a barbershop and decided he would give a cut and beard trim.  Megan and I went on and had juice, which was very good and cheap, but John hadn’t shown up.  So, I ordered a plate of salad vegetables (carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, and onions), and Megan got a whole plate of food next door at Lukmann’s.  John still hadn’t come even after we had eaten our food, so we finally left the café and went back to the barbershop.  There he was still in the chair being thoroughly buffed and polished. There had been a big soccer match on which meant that lots of noncustomers had crowded in to watch it on the shop’s TV, and even the barbers were too distracted to keep on task. As usual, the barber had just put his clippers on #3 or #4 and given John a convict cut.  And also as usual, John assured me that it would grow out by the time we get home.

Note:  I few photos from this as as my camera decided to stop working on Thursday, and John forgot to put his memory card back into his camera.  Sorry.