Saturday, November 1, 2008

Rungwe Mountain

Since the last update the incoming class of Peace Corps Trainees has finished their training and has been placed as volunteers at their respective sites. A new volunteer was placed near me as a site mate for me at another secondary school in the Uluguru Mountains. She has already decided to return back to America, “It wasn’t what I expected.” I was disappointed when I found out her decision to return before she started teaching but was not taken back.

November I made a trip to the Southern Highlands of Tanzania to work with a fellow Peace Corps Teacher and his students to map a trail from their school Rungwe Secondary School to Rungwe Mountain Peak. I left on a Friday morning and boarded a bus to Mozambique. Before arriving at the boarder of Tanzania/Mozambique I got off the bus at a village where the road to Rungwe began. After meeting up with the other volunteer and his mountain club we had a nice dinner and left for the Rungwe Mountain Peak at 10 p.m. Before I go on I want to preference this story that I was ill prepared for this trip too few clothing and not enough water, two things I should know better coming from Colorado…I feel shame. The night was perfect with no clouds and the stars painted the entire sky, half hour into our hike we saw the biggest of which we would see three, shooting stars. The first shooting star was the biggest one I have seen to date, we saw it shoot across the sky and slowly burn out into the darkness and it was amazing. The hike that night was four hours to the lower tree line of the mountain where the students built two campfires to keep warm until first light. At first light we made the last hour to Rungwe Mountain Peak, Rungwe Mountain is a dormant volcano with a large crater at the top. The crater was the former top of the volcano but now is the size of four football fields, which made for a great piece of land to play Frisbee. The crater was a lot of fun to play in and take a short nap in but the hour down navigating the steep ridge was a sign of the work it would take to climb out of the crater. By now it had been fourteen hours into our hike and I had started to become low on drinking water and the two hour hike out of the crater in the African heat was making me curios; why is it that humans find joy in making themselves suffer? From the summit of Rungwe to the next available water source was four hours back down the mountain, when we arrived at the stream I had never drunken so much untreated water in my life…ever. I am happy to say that I didn’t suffer any major illnesses despite my efforts of drinking liters of untreated water and the handfuls of wild raspberries we ate on our way down. Arriving back at Rungwe School was very sweet it had been 36 hours since I left my home in Morogoro on a bus and then proceeded to climb a mountain; the only sleep during this time came while upright on the bus and a calm nap in the crater of a dormant volcano. The first shooting star we saw that night proved to be a good omen for the trip!

After the trip to the southern highlands it was back at school to wrap up the finale term before the New Year. I was engulfed with work at school as the term came to an end with the preparation of exams, administering of exams, marking exams, getting finale grades together and filling score cards and parent reports out to mailed before we were to be released for our term break.