Tanzania

Earlier in the semester, Emma asked me to give a presentation to her class.  This year, her school had gotten the loan of a huge vinyl floor map of Africa from National Geographic --it's making its way through different schools nation-wide.  Because of that, they made Africa their theme for the year (thus a diorama of the Algerian Desert). 

Back in another age and time, I did fieldwork in Tanzania, and I have a bunch of slides.  Of course, this was eons ago, so everything was shot on film, and very few of them were made into photos --most of them have been hibernating in my office in a notebook for 15 years now.  We've just gone through them, to pick out the ones we'll have digitized and made into large photos to pass around to the class.  It's quite a trip down memory lane. 

I spent about three months in Tanzania, traveling around and collecting rocks which were shipped back to the U of Michigan, where I was a graduate student.  This was in 1992 --almost 20 years ago now! It was an amazing experience, especially because I was there to work, and there for a longer time than a typical tourist.  Our home base was in the house of a bush pilot who flew medical supplies out to remote areas.  His house was in the middle of a coffee plantation, in the city of Arusha.  There were bars on the windows, and he hired a local man to spend the night outside his home to deter thieves.  This man would have a rather smokey fire lit all night, and it took me a long time to really appreciate the smell of a campfire again.

We picked out photos of elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, lions, and zebra along with a few pictures of local people, Mt. Kilimanjaroo, and a baobab tree.