Kipilefti

One big difference between Morogoro and Makete: in Moro, bathing was much easier! It’s “summer” here and still cold enough in my house that I’m leery of taking off warm clothes and even leerier of dumping soon-to-be-cold water on myself! But I smelled pretty funny this morning, so I took a shower, and now I’m in bed under all my blankets and I was going to go get another liter of plums at the market but I’m too cold to get out of bed! I think that in the winter I’m just going to smell funny. Bathing is totally not worth it! I’m also thinking of cutting my hair to shoulder length to make it easier to care for, but there’s nowhere here to get a decent haircut, so I probably won’t. I’ll just keep it up all the time.

So a little more about my site: Makete is a big enough town to be on the tourist map of Tanzania my dad gave me when he passed through Moro, but the road it’s on is pretty terrible. It’s 110 kilometers out of Njombe but the bus ride takes five hours, and I hear it’ll only get worse when the serious rains start. Right now we have a thunderstorm every couple days and get torrential downpours for an hour or two, but during the rainy season I guess it’s like that all the time. A PCV I was talking to said that clothes never dry. I am not looking forward to it!

Usually, from the windows at the back of my house I can see down across the valley and to the mountains beyond the valley. There are a few ranks of mountains that are visible in clear weather. Sometimes clouds drift between the distant mountains. When the rain comes I can’t even see the valley, much less the mountains beyond.

There’s a road that runs sort of behind my house. There are a couple houses in between but I can still see people and motorcycles and lots of donkeys passing through at all hours. Sometimes at night the donkeys decide to express their opinions, loudly.

Also loud are the large crow-type birds that love to go through the food waste I toss off the porch (one advantage of the cold: nothing smells! Although perhaps that’s also an advantage of the fact that I’ve been sick since I got here…). They’re somewhere between crow and raven sized and it looks like they’re wearing little white vests. I like them when I see them from far away but from close up they seem too maliciously intelligent.