Prologue and Intro to Chapter 3: American in Dar

I left you (the reader) in Ujindile, finishing up my run in the Peace Corps.  That was August.  September through early-October found me relaxing in Zanzibar, the beautiful island-nation off the coast of Tanzania.  By mid-October I’d moved back to my parents house—a joy all adult children (and their parents) should partake in at some point in their twenties.  By late October I’d headed to Jersey City, the place my maternal side of the family first immigrated to in the 1920s.  They had a grocery store which supported their large Italian family, all of whom lived upstairs.  I lived on the 8th floor of the Candlewood Suites and worked long hours as a corporate health-care consultant.  I made small talk about the Jets in the elevator, and looked forward to quesadilla Friday’s in the cafeteria.  Once, the self-check health station at work, which takes your blood pressure and weighs you, told me I was borderline obese, so I stopped the quesadillas and focused on the New York Sports Club.  Mid-January my contract ended.  I hit the road and followed a spiritual journey guided by Jet Blue flight specials:  horse-drawn buggies and retirees in Charleston, SC; ghosts and bee-keepers in Savannah, GA; friendly men and delicious cake in Charlotte, NC; a blizzard watched from an apartment that smelled like Subway in Chicago, IL; culture shock and a cattle call of unemployed RPCVs in D.C.  That felt like the end of the road: D.C, where all wayward RPCVS go to compete for work at NGOs.  I think I could have been happy there—in some strange reality where I got a real job and started on a track towards something other than the next adventure.  But, in the midst of doing that I stumbled upon another adventure, disguised as a job.  A job based in Tanzania.

At the moment, I’m in Zanzibar, just for the weekend; writing from the top of a tree house looking out over a rainy beach with tourists trapped under thatch, and dhows in the mist.  Tomorrow I head back to Dar.  Back to the office to organize volunteer trips to Tanzania: host families and work placements at orphanages and schools for American and European volunteers coming abroad.  Helping others start down a path that brought me to where I am today. 
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I wrote that update a few months ago and never posted it. In fact, I've got a whole folder of mediocre blog posts that I just haven't gotten around to posting and now seem irrelevant. Out with the old, in the with the new. New city, new job, new Chapter of the blog. And so it begins:

A Day in Dar, as Recounted During my Lunch Break


This morning I got an iced latte at Africafe. They used long-life milk to make it, but it was delicious. I picked up my intern at the office and hit the road to Watoto Wetu, an orphan center just outside the Dar es Salaam city limits. We sat in traffic for an hour and listened to the New Yorker: Fiction podcast while motorcycles weaved in and out of the line, and young men on foot tried to sell us tropical fish out of small aquariums balanced on their heads.

At Watoto Wetu I sat and watched two Swedish volunteers and one Icelandic volunteer teach English. They were playing hang-man with eight Tanzanian children who live at the center. Several held my hands, touched my freckles, and played with my Ray-Bans as I watched the students guess the word: T S H I R T.

After an hour and a half at the orphanage the intern and I are back on the road, windows down, pumping Jackson 5. I texted a few friends to see who wanted some chipsi, a rare lunch treat only awarded to myself on days when all of the food in the refrigerator has gone bad. Then my mind got to thinking: you know what goes well with chipsi? Beer. Beer and chipsi on a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon in Dar. That's the ticket.

Ten minutes later I'm back in the office and back to reality: work to do, presentation to prepare, volunteers to organize. Beer will have to wait, but not too long, tonight the girls and I are breaking out the dancing shoes. Beer and music with a light breeze on a Wednesday night in Dar: that's the ticket!

And that's a lunch break intro to my life as an American in Dar: volunteers, cute kids, randomness, office, and dancing. Some 1st world comforts with 3rd world charm. It's not a bad life, though it could use a little more writing.

More lunch break updates to come! Mungu Akipenda