Today marks our two month Tanziversary, and we fully intend to celebrate with some (hopefully) cold mango juice from Hanga Food Land, but it is a bittersweet day. Today also happens to be the day that Sr. Anna, one of my favorite people in this country, must depart from Hanga in order to pursue a degree in nursing. As we found out at her mini-feast last night, this is a pretty big deal, as Sr. Anna will be the first Benedictine from this part of the country to obtain a degree in nursing.
Sr. Anna is about 45, has great English, is a great teacher of Swahili, is very positive and energetic, and will be dearly missed. Not surprisingly, the majority of the content of this blog revolves around what we got to do with her this week. She always claimed to be a member of the “Hapana Pipi” Ultimate team, but she never seemed to make it to our “practices”…finally, on Tuesday, she came! I have some great photos of the time I got to play Frisbee with the coolest nun in Tanzania.
Also, yesterday we got to spend the morning doing laundry in the nuns’ yard (they have way better facilities, and they are great to hang out with. Note to self: thorough clothes-washing in Tanzania requires sunscreen (who knew I could spend a weekend at a beach without getting sunburn and then get a sunburn from doing laundry?). Then we got to sit around and hang out with Sr. Anna and Sr. Claudia (intimidating and loveable cook) as we listened to music. It was wonderful quality time with them, and my pants and shirts finally don’t have their reddish tint from the dirt! I have not, however, gotten my socks back, as Sr. Claudia saw them hanging on the line and deemed that I did not get them clean enough, so she confiscated them and told me I would get them back in mint condition tomorrow…oh boy.
Last night Mike and I spent almost 3 hours in the kitchen helping cook what we thought was a normal going-away dinner for Sr. Anna (it turns out we ended up helping cook our first Tanzanian mini-feast)! The cooking is all done with fire ovens and stoves, so it was toasty to say the least, but it was really fun. We had ventured into the once-monthly soko (market) in the village and purchased some potatoes, tomatoes, and onions to attempt to make crispy potato wedges and tomato sauce, and our addition to the meal actually turned out quite tasty (there wasn’t much left afterward, so we took that as a good sign). We tried to help with other things too, so a lot of tomatoes were peeled, some uncooked rice was sifted through in search of pieces of anything that’s not rice, and a giant ugali pot was thoroughly cleaned by yours truly (I was handed a block of wood to use to scrape off the bits of ugali that were caked onto the sides). It was fantastic!
The feast was small, but there were great people, and there was great food. It ended with a delicious cake made by the other wonderful cook, Sr. Crisillda.
We will miss Sr. Anna dearly, but we know she will go on to help even more people with her further studies, which, as CSB/SJU helped teach me, is, after all, the whole point of studying. My mango juice box will be lifted to you tonight, Sr. Anna. Safari Njema! (safe travels)
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