Settling In

On Monday we got the keys to our new home in Morogoro. We’d been living out of suitcases in a hotel since arriving so Monday was a great day!  We’re pretty much settled in now – our clothes are unpacked and hung up but it won’t really be home until I make some bread in the oven. It’s a nice house; sunlit, roomy and airy, generously surrounded by all manner of tropical flora. There are banana trees, papaya trees and coconut, palm, and jackfruit trees. There are flame trees and a jacaranda-looking viney thing and other trees whose names I don’t yet know.  Every now and then we hear the plunk, plunk on the roof of falling coconuts or the occasional jack fruit. This morning, two monkeys chased each other around the trees in the back yard, much as the squirrels used to do in our back yard in Columbus.

I love the night sounds here. At dusk, there’s an instant chorus of soothing cicada-like sounds and gentle chirps of other creatures. I loved similar night sounds in Ohio, too, but they heralded the beginning of the end of summer so they carried their own measure of grief!!  Here, I can listen happily, knowing that the only change of season ahead is from dry to rainy. 

Dave is getting settled into his work, too. He’s working with Sokoine University and the Tanzanian Ministry of Agriculture on USAID’s Feed the Future initiative that aims to improve crop yields and help train the next generation of agricultural scientists here. Sokoine is Tanzania’s agricultural university and Dave’s been working with researchers there for a number of years on another project, assessing the impact of rainfall changes on small farmers on Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Morogoro is a kind of “bread basket” for Tanzania and, so far, has not been affected by the drought further north in East Africa.

I’ve added some maps at the side that narrow in on Morogoro. We’re not that far away!  And looking at the maps reminds me of a surprise on our flight here. Normally, we’ve flown south from Amsterdam over Libya and on to East Africa. But the airspace over Libya is closed to commercial aircraft now so we flew east from Amsterdam and then turned south over the Greek Isles and across the Mediterranean to Egypt.  It was a cloudless day and the view of the Islands with their green hills, rocky outcroppings, and twisting coastlines was simply awe-inspiring. We flew south across North Africa with the Nile River just to our left – a tiny line in the sand below and the only major river in the world to flow north to its estuary.