WWOOFing in Tanzania

For the past two weeks I have been living and working with a Tanzanian family in the Pare Mountains outside of Moshi. I was WWOOFing with them but didn’t actually end up working on the family farm. The man who was hosting me is named Seraphine Mungulu and he had many other projects that he was working on to improve the farming practices of his community. The house in the Pare Mountains where I spent most of my time was actually his father’s house and he owned a large plot with bananas, maize, ginger, beans, and some other vegetables. The farm was on the side of the mountain like most of the farms around them. They have always practiced organic farming in the sense that they didn’t use fertilizers but now they were starting to set up terraces and figure out a way to irrigate. The main project I helped Seraphine with was walking around to gather names of groups that could benefit from receiving a magazine about organic farming. The magazine’s production was being funded by an outside organization that had employed Seraphine to try to gather names of rural farming groups. So almost daily we would walk along the thin winding trails of the mountain-side to visit churches and leaders of other villages. It wasn’t a very efficient way of doing everything, but Seraphine had said that many people wouldn’t give him names just over the phone and he had to find many of the people in order to get their numbers. So we would show up at the house or church unexpectedly and I would listen as they talked in Swahili or Mpare, the local language of their tribe. It is still funny to me that you can just show up at a house without them knowing and they are ready to sit down and have a conversation. Some of the people we would try to find would be out in their farms but mostly people were around. So different from the US!

Most of the family I stayed with, from left to right: Everest (Seraphine's brother), Chaz (his nephew), Seraphine, his son Betodi on the ground, Rosie (his sister), Delphina (his cousin), Peter (his brother), and his father who I called Babu.

The winding paths through the banana farms on the mountain.

The mountain area was such a beautiful place with a view of the lowlands and other mountains in the distance. The lowland area was a national park and you could see the wilderness stretching for miles. On the mountain sides were mostly farms and houses but there were a few patches of forest around streams and a big forest reserve on mountains nearby. One morning I got up really early to try and catch the sunrise. It was so beautiful since we were on the eastern side of the mountains and could watch as the sun rose over the lowlands, bathing it in a red glow. I went on a couple hikes around the area, one to the top of the closest peak and another to a waterfall.  The waterfall hike took about 2 hours to another part of the mountain where the river was diverted into many farms. We walked out to a view of this thin, but super tall waterfall. Seraphine said it wasn’t very impressive right now since people were using too much of the river water for irrigation but I thought it was really cool. We also hiked around to the top of the waterfall which required some scrambling over river rocks. It was a nice hike!

The waterfall from the overlook



The view of the lowlands from around my home in the Pare Mountains

My general daily routine was to wake up, drink chai and eat mandazi (fried dough balls) with the family. Then I would help Seraphine by typing up the names and contact information for groups that we had gathered since he couldn’t type very quickly. I would often do all the dishes from the night before and breakfast to help out. In the afternoon we would either walk to find groups or I would help with some aspect of cooking or preparing farm products. I learned to cook many African dishes over a wood fire which I’m excited to prepare for people back in the US.  The preparation was de-corning dried corn cobs so they could be pounded into maize flour and peeling bean pods so the beans could be used for cooking. I would sit and help with these tasks with Seraphine’s father and sometimes Seraphine. As we worked people passing the house would stop and chat for a bit, maybe even sitting down to assist too. Another project I helped a little bit with was the piping of water from a spring on the mountain-side to irrigate part of the farm. They had already helped to set up water systems from two sources for the drinking water of the surrounding area and now they hoped to start some irrigation. Seraphine also wanted to change the system of irrigation that most people use in the area which is just channeling streams and flooding the entire area with water. On the mountainside especially, all of the fertile soil is washed away by this technique. He was interested in introducing drip irrigation but it will be an expensive project. I helped them lay out all of the plastic piping and bury it from the source to his farm.

The pile of bean pods we had worked to de-pod in the yard between the house on the right and the kitchen on the left

Every afternoon the choir of the Catholic Church the family attended came to practice at the house. If I wasn’t walking around with Seraphine I would watch them sing and dance. They sang in Swahili but I could understand bits of it. They had beautiful harmonies and everyone from the young to the very old performed a synchronized dance to the song. They had two drums and a shaker to sing along to. The energy and joy of everyone was infectious and I joined in to dance with them a few times. The choir singers also brought a lot of the neighborhood kids to the house who were all really fun to play with. They loved it when I picked them up and spun them around. I played with Seraphine’s niece, Jacinta and nephew, Michael the most. On several occasions Jacinta had me follow her to one of the many roadside stands to buy candy. She didn’t speak any English so many times I would just rely on her gestures. She also took me to some houses of her friends which I always felt awkward about but as usual I was welcomed into their houses warmly.

The choir singing outside of the house

Some of the kids I would play with, Michael is on my lap

We had three meals a day but they were all later than what I am used to, lunch at 2 or later and dinner at around 8 or 8:30. I enjoyed so many of the foods we ate but especially the huge avocados! I surprised everyone when I told them that an avocado that size would probably cost 3 dollars where in that area they were around 20 cents or so! Many of the meals consisted of ugali, okrah in a tomato stew and dried fish. The dried fish were the only thing I was served during my stay that I couldn’t really eat. You just bite into the whole fish and eat the head and everything. It’s like a fish chip. I tried them a couple times but couldn’t make myself eat more than one. Another dish I enjoyed was cooked bananas with potatoes and a little tomato. They used green bananas to make a tangy starchy dish. It was also wonderful to eat some of the fruits that grew around the mountain. I tried a really sweet fruit called topay topay, some guava and passion fruit that grew wild on the mountain, and I chewed on delicious stalks sugar cane.

My visit came to an end after leaving the Pare Mountains and spending two days in Moshi at Seraphine’s other house. I enjoyed exploring the city’s markets and streets a lot. It is a nice area because there are many trees along the streets of the city and it was very green. It was sad to leave everyone who had become my Tanzanian family, but I was very excited for my internship with Save the Elephants to begin next.