Everywhere we went in Tanzania—banks, public buildings even roofing supply stores—we saw framed photographs of handsome, kindly Julius Nyerere, the first president of the county.   Labeled “Baba wa Taifa” (The Father of the Country), they could have been the Gilbert Stuart portraits of George Washington that watched over schoolrooms in our youth.  And they reminded us that, despite his extraordinary accomplishments securing Tanzania’s independence from Britain and creating a cohesive democracy from so many tribes, Nyerere was proudest of the title he earned first:  “Mwalimu,” or teacher.

After our three months with Africa Schoolhouse, we were tempted to hang a big photograph of “Mwalimu Kishosha” in the Volunteer House.  Jefte Kishosha, the VP for Community relations, was our tutor and translator—but so much more.   He patiently tutored us in Kiswahili and Kisukuma, leavened with his own wit and humor.  On our first day, we were all in hysterics after he explained that our attempts to say “tutaonana”—“see you soon”—were actually “I would like to marry you” or maybe even “I would like to kill you.”

We would probably have given up in frustration and confusion after the first week in Tanzania if not for Kishosha’s guidance.  He found the right materials and craftsmen for all of our diverse projects, explained our “crazy” ideas over and over, and got us—and the materials—where they needed to be.  He bargained with market vendors for fruits and vegetables, and chivvied grumpy waitresses to bring us chipsi (fried potatoes), Kilamanjaros (beer) and Tanawizi (ginger beer).  He negotiated his way out of random weekly (and unwarranted) traffic stops—and our brief detention in the Misungwi police station after Pam was apprehended taking a photograph of a bank.

 We treasure his smile and his laugh, but also his ability to see and tell it like it is.  Nearly every day, someone would make their way to the door of the Volunteer House to ask for a job or advice. Living together in the Volunteer House during the week, our candid late-night discussions ranged from politics and religion to families and life stories.  He helped us see all aspects of Tanzania, not just its proud heritage but also its challenging present. 

 Nearly every day, we saw Mwalimu Kishosha reaching out to younger generations, too.  During our tour of the Bujora Museum, the official tour guides tagged along and ended up asking him more questions than we did.  At most schools that we visited, he would lead classes in the school song, or prowl the aisles of a classroom asking “What is History?” The “correct” answer—“studying the past to shape our future”—says a lot about this trained historian now building schools for his people.

Pam, Kidige, Scott, Kishosha

A few days after arriving in Tanzania, we watched President Obama’s inauguration one evening in our hotel room.  Since then, we’ve seen his name and image everywhere, from supergraphics on busses spanning the Serengeti to an “Obama Shop” or “Obama Guest House.”  There were Obama bookbags piled beside the water tank at Milembe School and, while buying supplies for the other primary and secondary schools sponsored by Africa Schoolhouse, Aimee Bessire was unable to resist the Obama-brand ballpoints on display at a Mwanza stationery store.  Dozens of souvenir shops in Zanzibar feature his portrait on kangas, the bold fabrics that women use as modesty wraps.  And the door surround a small grocery store had become a shrine covered with clippings of the president—side-by-side with Elvis.

It’s always a pleasure to find something American on display while travelling abroad—besides the ubiquitous red-and-white Coca Cola slogans, of course.  We’re sure that this didn’t happen in the Bush administrations—though if it had, we might not have been so thrilled.  In all fairness, despite seeing a “Hilary Clinton Shop” on the road to Ngorongoro, we suspect that it didn’t happen during Bill Clinton’s administration either.   Obama has made the American Dream seem real for the billions who live in this continent.

The modernist public library

Mwanza, Tanzania’s second-largest city, was our weekend base of operations.  The electricity and flush toilets, ice cold drinks and internet, Bollywood-flavored cable TV programs and jostling crowds in the street created a real contrast to the serenity and simplicity of Ntulya.  The Tilapia Hotel, our weekend haunt, nestles at the base of the tree-shaded, high-end housing on Capri Point, a peninsular oasis between the city and Lake Victoria. 

Beyond Capri Point and the iconic Kaiser Rock, the buildings that house and employ Mwanza’s 2 million people spill over the shores of Lake Victoria.  They crawl up and down the rocky kopjes and choke the highways heading south to Dar es Salaam or north and east to the Kenyan border.   There are freight terminals next to restaurants, car washes jammed between retail stores, and tiny kiosks for soda or telephone vouchers in the shadow of warehouses for international distributors.   

Signs and painted murals advertising construction materials, fast food and, of course, Coca Cola shout across front and sides of the buildings.  The streets are jammed with dala dala mini-busses with catchy names and three-wheeled piki-piki cycles, men wheeling carts piled with mattresses or bananas and women balancing trays of peanuts or laundry.  Tailors and shoemakers perch with their machines above the sidewalks, and hopeful shoe or clothing vendors spread their wares on the sloping sides of the drainage ditches.

Mwanza has the feel of a frontier town, and was chosen as the site for filming “Black Honeymoon,” a romantic thriller set in the less-than-film-friendly Congo.  For tourists, it’s mostly a stopping off point between the rainforests on the west side of the Lake and the western edge of the Serengeti on the opposite side.  For Europeans or Americans working for mining operations or NGOs, like us, it’s a place to unwind and stock up.  We saw many familiar faces during our weekends and, from encounters at the restaurant or snippits of overheard conversation, imagined a world of stories.

We’d spent several weeks driving around the dusty streets with Kidige and Kishosha at the wheel before realizing that the downtown is actually relatively compact.  Narrow, winding streets, clusters of mid-rise hotels and a kopje rising up through the center of town all make it difficult to get one’s bearings.  There are also remarkably few landmarks or public spaces that allow you to step back, pause and take it all in.

Most buildings are two or three stories high, yellow and blue stucco or other pastels.  Their abstracted classical details might date from the British occupation that started after World War I, or the proud modernism that marked Independence in the 1960’s.  The minarets of mosques or towers of Hindu temples punctuate the skyline, while the Tudor details of the train station, hospitals and Episcopal church complexes recall the colonial past.  And Post-Modern glass and steel towers speak of present-day ambitions to catch up with the rest of the world.

On our last afternoon, we wound through streets near the marketplace shadowed by late afternoon sun after the last errands and appointments.  Men in long robes and caps clustered near the mosques after Friday prayers, and bright flashes of kangas and kitenge fabric beckoned from shop doorways.   We knew how to find what we needed at Manji’s Hardware and the U-Turn—but also realized that there was a world of discoveries still to be made behind the surfaces of the city’s buildings and faces.

To see Mwanza on the big screen, watch for http://www.blackhoneymoonmovie.com

Library entrance

Train station, with its customary Maribou Stork finials.

The elegant Post Office

Detail of the mosaic mural, perhaps inspired by traditional basket patterns, over the entrance.

Typical street scene and Art Deco storefronts

One of many blocks built by the national housing authority in the 1960’s 

Detail of curtain wall 

Mosque

Mosque

Hindu Temple

Street lined with hardware shops (a customary haunt)

The parking lot at the market

Market street 

The back of one of the Teacher’s Houses at Shilanona

One of the biggest obstacles to student achievement in Tanzania is the lack of teachers. The average student-teacher ratio is 54:1.  In rural districts, it is usually much worse, especially at the primary school level.  It’s not uncommon to find a classroom full of eager students with no teacher.  There are many reasons for this—too few teachers for the number of students and low pay among them—but poor-quality or non-existant housing is a key factor in rural areas. 

Shilanona Primary School, with 11 teachers for 586 students, is a clear example of these issues.  The campus is set about a kilometer from the small village of Shilanona, on a handsome hilltop site.  There are three 40-year-old teacher houses set behind the classroom buildings, poorly constructed and poorly maintained.  Three more houses were started in 2006, but only two were completed enough to allow occupation. This spring, a storeroom in a classroom building was converted to living quarters for two teachers, with a thatched wall for minimal privacy.  The rest of the teachers must bicycle about 10 kilometers each way in heat and torrential downpours from the district center at Ngudu.

Initially, Africa Schoolhouse had planned to renovate the three oldest houses as part of its campus renovations.  However, after examining the poor condition of the buildings, we all agreed that the funds would be better spent building two new houses, thus increasing the overall capacity on the site. 

This provided an unexpected opportunity to improve the Africa Schoolhouse housing prototype.  Teacher’s housing had first been created by Leslie Jill Hanson for the Ntulya Primary School. Three houses at the Ntulya Health Outpost were built in 2011, following designs developed by the University of Florida School of Architecture.  As our homebase and living laboratory, this became a starting point for the design.

 We had several design goals.  First, to fit the buildings more comfortably into the landscape of rural central Tanzania.  Second, to minimize the impact of the intense sunlight and heat.   And finally, to create a prototype for Milembe School and other future Africa Schoolhouse projects, one that could be built in a variety of site conditions, with their crews and local, sustainable materials.  

Traditional Sukuma houses

Nurses Housing and Volunteer House at Ntulya

Before developing a solution, we became more familiar with the landscape, the climate and the materials.  We spent February exploring the region around Mwanza and as far north as Butiama, visiting school sites and observing the villages and countryside. Everywhere, we saw the soft lines of the traditional mud brick or reed and mud (wattle-and-daub) buildings with their thatch roofs—used by the Sukuma people as well as other tribes in the region.  They seem to blend into the scrubby, boulder-strewn landscape far better than the newer brick houses with crisp corrugated metal roofs that are rapidly replacing them. 

At the equator, with the sun transiting high overhead all day and all year round, those metal roofs also get maximum exposure to the sun, capturing its energy all day long.  With no interior insulation, that heat radiates the heat into the space below.  Soon after arriving, we purchased a thamometa in Mwanza and began taking hourly readings of the temperatures both outside and inside the Volunteer House. By late morning, the outside temperature was in the low-to-mid 90’s.  Inside, it was close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the underside of the green metal roof reached over 115 degrees.  

Whenever we looked up at the underside of the roof panels, we could actually feel the heat radiating down on our faces.  It was like standing in front of a cast iron radiator on a Maine day in January, with the furnace blasting away.  Keeping the doors open for breezes helped a bit, but that let in squadrons of annoying flies, too.  Not surprisingly, dissipating the unwanted energy and keeping it out of the living space became a key objective.

Scott had first become familiar with the concept of double roofs for cooling when he bought a 1975 Land Rover with a “Safari” roof.  Double roofs are constructed in Maine to insulate from the cold, and they are becoming a more common practice for passive cooling in tropical areas as well.  A number of stunning and sustainable designs have been recognized through awards from the Holcim Foundation, including the Secondary school in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso by Francis Kere Architecture and a Health Center in Dharmapuri, Tamilnadu, India by Flying Elephant Studios.

New Teachers House with “Sukuma Form” roof

Floating a segmented second roof above the basic gable form on wood trusses satisfied two objectives—fitting into the landscape and making the interior cooler.  It also incorporated the same low-tech materials—corrugated roofing and wood trusses—currently employed by Africa Schoolhouse crews.  The second roof adds to the cost (about $2000 per house, for a total cost of $9500), but we hope that the greater comfort will make the new housing more desirable, potentially attracting more teachers to the school.  This could also ensure that the future Milembe School teachers are among the best.

Cross-section of roof, showing conventional truss and roof below, and spacer trusses above

Floor Plan

The new compact, 550-square-foot floor plan offers a number of other features as well:

• covered outdoor veranda along the front of the building;
• open living/dining space connected adjoining the veranda;
• three bedrooms, for parents, boys and girls, or several unmarried teachers living together;
• one bedroom defined by a disengaged diagonal wall that would allow it to be used as a study;
• covered outdoor kitchen to the rear, providing good venting for the typical wood fires and replacing the typical practice of cooking in the yard or in an unvented lean-to;
• a duplex composting latrine and shower building, constructed between every pair of homes;  and  
• rainwater harvesting in a elevated storage container located in the kitchen area.

Building materials consist of:  site-harvested stone and concrete foundations;  concrete slab;  walls of fired jumbo brick burned nearby;  wood trusses and purlins with galvanized corrugated steel roofing panels.  Open bond front and rear wall areas under the porch roofs will provide generous cross- ventilation. Windows are jalousie-type, allowing for post-installation glass-fitting, with site-fabricated wood doors, frames and trim. 

We knew that construction of the two new houses would not have advanced beyond the foundations when we left Tanzania in early April.  Therefore, Scott worked with the crew to construct several mock-ups, the most important being a one-bay trial of the “Sukuma Roof.”  It was built on top of the existing roof for Classrooms 5-8, which is planned for replacement in the next phase—and may also be a good candidate for a double roof.  Once the materials were at the site, carpenter Mapanbano and Scott constructed the trusses in one day.  Mapanbano and his crew installed the trusses the next day and the roofing on the third day. 

Building the trusses

Setting them in place

The completed mock-up on Classroom 5

Mapanbano and Kishosha reviewing Scott’s ridge vent mockup on the front porch of the Volunteer House

The exercise allowed the crew to see how the double roof, though a new form, incorporated the same details and materials used in earlier projects. They offered valuable input on the construction and sequencing, which led to the refinement of many details.  One was a vent strip at the ridge that should allow hot air to escape from the interior spaces and the roof cavity, while rejecting water and foiling flying critters.  Another was a relatively simple way to waterproof the nail holes in the roof. 

Both features had gained personal importance after nights listening to the bats roosting in the trusses of the Volunteer House, and days arranging buckets and moving furniture once rainy season began in earnest.  This convinced us that mock-ups should be a critical part of future construction projects—as well as the importance of living in a place as a precursor to design.  If the contingency allows one or two double roofs to be constructed at Shilanona, it will also give us a real-life, real-time model, where we hope to track the cooling with our “thamometa” on the next visit to Tanzania.

Resources

For more on the educational system in Tanzania:  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Education_in_Tanzania&printable=yes

For more on the Holcim Awards:  http://www.holcimfoundation.org/T154/holcim_awards.html  

For details of the Secondary School in Burkina Faso:  http://www10.aeccafe.com/blogs/arch-showcase/2012/04/11/secondary-school-in-gando-with-passive-ventilation-system-in-ouagadougou-burkina-faso-by-francis-kere-architecture/?interstitial_displayed=Yes

For images of the Healthcare Center in Dharmapuri, Tamilnadu, India:  http://www.flyingelephant.in/complete.php?pid=6

Helena Burashi, Kishosha, Nestory and Scott discussing the pot-in-pot refrigerator

One of the biggest challenges of living—and eating—in Ntulya has been the lack of refrigeration.  We were able to keep some meat and cheese cool for a few days with a Styrofoam box and freezer packs that we’d originally used for transporting medicine.  However, it seemed like a good opportunity to try a more long-term, low-tech solution.

We had read about zeers, pot-in-pot “refrigerators” developed by the late Mohammed Bah Abba to help rural farmers in Nigeria.  His low-cost adaptation of traditional evaporative cooling devices won a 2000 Rolex Award, the 2001 World Shell Award for Sustainable Development and was featured in the Cooper-Hewitt’s inspiring exhibit and catalogue, “Design for the other 90%.”  By setting a glazed pot to hold the food inside a larger, unglazed pot and packing damp sand or water in between, he was able to achieve temperatures of 50 F degrees inside with outside temperatures of 90 degrees F.

This seemed like a relatively easy contraption to make—but not in Tanzania.   The cooking pots in the market were too shallow.  Pots in garden stores were big enough, but made of painted concrete, which wouldn’t allow any air to pass through for evaporation.  So, as with our bed and kitchen counter, we went to Bujora, this time to see Helena Burashi, a potter. 

Mrs. Burashi has had a distinguished career, coming to the Bujora Museum community as a young woman.  She married her husband, a drummaker, after they made a trip to Denmark as members of a dance troup in the early 1970’s.  On our first visit to her home studio, she was away to attend a funeral, but we left Scott’s sketches with Nestory, our carpenter friend.  A few days later, he called. 

“Is Kishosha crazy?” had been Helena’s response to the notion of an unglazed outer pot.  It will break and leak, she insisted.  Thus, we made another trip to meet her and discuss the plans.  Gathered on her hand-carved wood stools in the dooryard, Scott explained the concept while Nestory sketched out the pot-in-pot proportions with twigs.  Her quiet but emphatic voice and gestures were distinctive in this country where women are generally submissive.  We felt like we were in the presence of a venerable woman artist like Georgia O’Keefe or Helen Frankenthaler.

The potter’s home and studio

Grinding clay with mortar and pestle in the yard

Potters tools—shells and wood rollers

Pots awaiting the kiln—large water vessels in the rear, charcoal braziers in the middle, vases and mugs in the foreground

We all agreed to give it a try, using a glazed outer pot.  A week later, we picked up the beautiful outer pot, but the inner one had come out too small.  A new pot had been made, but was yet to be fired.  Helena insisted on carrying the pot—nearly as big as she is—to the truck, but refused to stop for a portrait photo.  We nestled it among our luggage in the back of the truck for the bumpy ride back to Ntulya.  Then, halfway home, we stopped to pick up a half dozen nurses and hospital workers en route to Sumve after the ambulance broke down. Pam carried the pot in her lap, prompting many laughing comments about her “baby.”

Mrs. Burashi carrying the completed outer pot to the truck

Inner and outer glazed pots

The zeer in place

Filled with light brown sand from the creek next to the house and set between doorways, the zeer makes a handsome addition to the Volunteer House kitchen.  We recorded temperatures for the first week or so of operation.  It was definitely cool to the touch and maintained a steady 70-72 degrees even with temps in the 90’s—adequate for keeping spinach or other delicate vegetables and milk a day for two in the heat.  We think that the high humidity of rainy season may have limited its potential—or it could be the glaze on the outer pot—and will hope for better performance in drier weather.

For more on the zeer and its inventor:

Design for the other 90%  http://www.designother90.org 

http://www.rolexawards.com/profiles/laureates/mohammed_bah_abba

http://www.notechmagazine.com/refrigeration/

http://practicalaction.org/zeer-pot-fridge#how_it_works

Early morning visits to the construction site, reviewing progress and details with the crew.  Drawing until well after sunlight fades. Thumbnail sketches of design ideas on teetering scraps of recycled paper.  Eating lunch at the drafting table (peanut butter, marmalade and bananas washed down with Tangawizi ginger beer). And maybe a late afternoon break for tea and cookies. Bach and the Beatles, Philip Glass and Keith Jarrett, James Taylor and Leonard Cohen on the I-pad or I-phone in the backgound. 

Our days and nights at the Volunteer House would be recognizable to most American or European architects.  In place of responding to ringing phones and an endless stream of e-mails, however, our concentration may be interrupted by sudden bursts of unfamiliar birdcall outside the window, the rhythmic wheezing of the communal water pump, the giggles of young goatherds peeking in our doorway or the wail of babies protesting vaccinations at the health center next door.  And when the sun goes down, we have to put on headlamps to see what we’re doing.

The combination dining/work table is covered with tools that may be less familiar to recent generations.   They bring fond memories of our days in architecture school and the early decades of practice—mechanical pencils;  graph paper pads and rolls of white trace; triangular architect’s and engineer’s scales;  colored pencils and permanent ink pens.  Flimsy plastic rolling rules to allow us to draw parallel lines (just barely).  No Xerox machines for copies, reductions and paste-ups—or computer mice to click for “copy and repeat.”

There’s been a lot of erasing and re-drawing, when a proportion needs tweaking or the detail just won’t fit on the paper—with accompanying mutters and perspiration.  While preparing for our office abroad, we debated whether to bring Scott’s laptop with AutoCAD, but laptop-sized solar chargers are hefty and beyond our budget.  While we were plugged in on weekends, Scott did generate 3-D models of the Teacher House and classroom designs with Google Sketch-Up on Pam’s computer.  They were invaluable in advancing concepts more quickly into construction details. 

For the most part, though, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed work by hand and by ourselves.  It’s allowed us to collaborate easily, sketching on each other’s drawings.  One of our most effective communications tool shas been a 1:20 meter site model, built out of balsa wood, Exacto knives and Elmers Glue.   

If what we’re doing is the architectural equivalent of “slow food,” it seems particularly appropriate in this place.  The foundations and walls we’ve drawn are staked out using recycled batter boards, machete-cut saplings and string.  Trenches are dug and concrete is mixed on the bare earth by hand.  And every day’s progress on the jobsite is as hard-won as ours is in the studio.

The Volunteer House at Ntulya has also been a laboratory to observe the environment and test design ideas. During the first few weeks, Scott conducted a series of sun studies, noting the vertical and horizontal angles as the sun moves from east to west throughout the day and south to north as we approached the autumnal equinox in March.   These helped us to visualize the dramatic differences between the sun’s impact on buildings located 3 degrees south of the Equator and those in the temperate zones halfway between the equator and the North Pole—more familiar to us.

Our compact solar chargers have allowed us to better appreciate the energy that can be harnessed from the sun as we live “off the grid.”  The phone-sized Mobile Power unit that was a Christmas gift will charge an I-Phone in about four hours, while the Goal Zero “Nomad,” with about six times the surface area, takes a bit less.  With both chargers, we can leave the photovoltaic cells face-up most of the day to take in the high sun (after learning to while stashing the phones inside a nearby doorway to prevent overheating or soaking in a sudden cloudburst).

Living in the house for ten weeks has given us an invaluable perspective on the rhythms and realities of everyday life—heat and rain, light and darkness.  It’s generated an ever- expanding list of Africa Schoolhouse design details that we’re hoping to improve—especially the parts that leak.   We’ve been able to study and debate the existing details with foremen Elisha, Amos and Mapanbano, along with a full-scale drawing of an open-patterned brick ventilator wall pinned up above the kitchen shelves, elevation studies behind the dining table and a mock-up of the rear bedroom ceiling angle on the opposite wall.  The two new Teacher’s Houses under construction at Shilanona will offer an opportunity to test the new details in the next few months (see posts on “Starting Work at Shilanona” and “Sukuma Roof” to come).

Red Bishop makes a splash of color in the hedgerow beside the Volunteer House

Lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and buffalos are the animals most sought after by tourists.  Like the big game hunters of yore, they arrive with the goal of capturing “the Big Five” on film.  However, our first “sighting”—between the airport and our hotel—was a Crowned Eagle. To our delight, our guide, John Longino, was an avid birder.  We found that looking for the tinier creatures gave us a unique perspective on the wildlife of those amazing places.

In the countryside around Ntulya and the lake shores of Mwanza, we had already discovered about two dozen Tanzanian birds, almost all of them new to us. A Black Kite swooped out of the sky to snatched the bacon off Scott’s plate during our first breakfast at the Tilapia Hotel—and many other unsuspecting guests during our months there.

The low use of pesticides makes the rice paddies and maize fields around Ntulya rich hunting grounds for Sacred Ibis, Gray Herons and Hamerkops.  The hedgerow beside our Volunteer House is visited from dawn until dusk by an assortment of colorful creatures like this Red Bishop or the Red-Cheeked Cordon Bleu, who serenade us with song.  

As this sign demonstrates, Nyumbani Shilinde, the founder of Ntulya Village, was a staunch protector of the birds, makes the countryside around it an informal sanctuary. 

The Sacred ibis, Pied Wagtail, Pied Kingfishers and Pied Crows all provide dramatic studies in black and white.  These crows, who roost regularly on the Health Post, remind us of waiters wearing white waistcoats.

The Blue-naped and White-cheeked Mousebirds are, in keeping with their name, less spectacular in color, but still showy with their tufted caps and streaming chestnut tails.

Over four days in Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro, John helped us to spot almost 80 different species of birds.  There were ostriches and Secretary Birds, as big as some of the gazelles, and tiny iridescent Bee Eaters, who also frequent our hibiscus bushes at Ntulya.   Shy, White-browed Coucals darted into the brush, and Kori Bustards put on blatant courtship displays. The three of us became a team—spotting a flash of movement in a bush or tree, pointing out the location, grabbing for binoculars, calling out the significant details, flipping through the bird book, discerning male from female—and finally agreeing on the ID.

 As satisfying as it was to watch our list growing each day, the pursuit also made us see in new ways.  We stopped the vehicle often, listening to the quiet of birdcalls in hedgerows.  And slowly, our eyes became trained to discern the faintest movement and the smallest of details—the color of an eyebrow or the swoosh of tail feathers—that also revealed the bustle of two mice scampering along a bare scraping of trail.

Post Script:  A wonderful article in the April 21, 2012 edition of the New York Times, “What do the Birders Know?”, outlines the history of birdwatching as well as how observations are now being used to track environmental change.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/what-do-the-bird-watchers-know.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

The Crowned Eagle that started it all

The trailing black tailfeathers of the — Widowbird recall the silk bows on Victorian bonnets.

These crowned cranes look like Las Vegas showgirls with their feathered tiaras and chestnut-colored bustles.

The Kori Bustard is handsome in a suit of taupe with black spots…

…and becomes extravagant when fluffing his neck and tail feathers to attract a lady.

Sacred Ibis drying his (or her) wings

Ground Hornbill striding through a field

His cousin, the Red Hornbill, in a treetop

Ostrich

Augur Buzzards at roost

Some say that the Ngorongoro Crater was the Garden of Eden. With the first evidence of humans resting just miles away in Olduvai Gorge and the sourrounding Rift Valley, it’s not hard to imagine that this could be one place on earth where Evolutionists and Creationists could reach a consensus.  The 8288 square kilometer caldera was formed around 2.5 million years ago with the collapse of a volcano, which still can be seen as a small mound within the crater floor.

Today, it’s an ecological oasis. The British protected its rich wildlife as a game reserve in 1921—while permitting Europeans to hunt game there until the 1950s. Today, it hosts up to 320 species of mammals and 1200 kinds of birds. This was part of the vast herding lands of the tall and stately Masai.  They relinquished claim to the land in the 1950s and can no longer graze cattle or cultivate crops there.  However, the balance between man and nature remains unsettled—whether the traditions of native peoples or the imbalance created by changing ratios of predators to prey—just as it does in protected lands throughout the world, including the United States’ national parks. 

We visited the majestic sanctuary in the rainy season, when animals tend to be more dispersed and thus can be harder to spot.  Nonetheless, a full day in the Crater offered us more birds and animals that we could have imagined. With the abundance of water and regeneration of food supplies, we witnessed the full cycle of life—courtship and mating, young wildebeests and zebra suckling their mothers, jackals stalking the calves and a pregnant hyena dragging home a huge bone remaining from an earlier kill.

Beginning and ending our tour were sweeping views across the Crater, its forested flanks and the plains of the Serengeti stretching westward.  Rhino Lodge, originally the home of the park warden and later a government rest house, was our base camp for the two day stay at the Crater.  We’d chosen this as a “budget” option, in contrast to our night at the Kirumuru Tented Lodge overlooking Manyara.  The food and decor reminded us of college days or an Appalachian Mountain Club lodge, but were intrigued when the staff warned us not to wander off alone, because wildlife often pass through the grounds. On our first night. we were thrilled to watch a Cape Buffalo snorting while chomping grass at dusk, from the safety of our balcony only a few yards away.

Morning mist rising on the outer slopes

The plains of the Serengeti

Plains on the outer rim

Wildebeest

A black-backed jackal harrying young wildebeests

Water buffaloes

The road out of the Crater

Lake Manyara, located about 60 km. east of the Ngorongoro Crater, is less well known than that World Heritage Site, but it proved the perfect place to start a four-day break in early March from our 50+ hour workweeks.  Lake Manyara Park’s 130 square miles encompass a wide range of habitats, from dense forests kept green by springs to acacia woodlands and the shallow, 77 square mile lake itself.  Thus, it offers visitors access to a diverse range of African wildlife in an intimate setting.

We had the benefits  of visiting the Park twice, late on the first afternoon and the following morning through mid-afternoon. It was fascinating to see how places like the Hippo Pool changed—the beasts that had been just a few bumps on the pool’s surface in the heat of the day emerged as an entire herd grazing on the banks in the cool of the next morning.

The dirt roads wound through deep forests and across open planes.  We stopped several times to watch troupes of Baboons or Blue Monkeys foraging, grooming and gamboling just a few feet from the truck (park rules require all visitors to stay inside the vehicles, lest they be pounced on by hungry lions—or bother the beasts).  We had distant views of giraffes, elephants with calves and a Nile Monitor lizard basking on a tree limb suspended over the water.

For the most part, we were alone with our guide and the ubiquitous Toyota LandCruiser.  Other vehicles were largely hidden from view until we stopped for lunch at the designated picnic spot and parked among a herd of about twenty of the elephantine trucks.  

View of the Lake from our “tent”

The water pump outside our front door starts singing before dawn and continues until sundown.  Sitting on the porch after a day’s work, we may watch a half dozen women gathered, chatting as each pumps water for her family.  Wrapped in colorful kangas like a group of exotic birds, they hoist 20 liter buckets of water on top of their heads, secure babies on their backs and stride gracefully down the paths through the fields.  Often, their young daughters accompany them, each carrying a bottle proportional to her size with equal aplomb.

Early one afternoon, we looked up to find five little girls gathered around the pump.   Scott grabbed his camera while Pam walked out to say “Ulimhola” (“how are you?”)  The minute tall, bearded Scott emerged from the doorway, they left their buckets and scurried into the bushes. 

Slowly, as our helper Maduhu and two of the nurses at the Clinic told them it was OK (and Scott retreated into the house), they crept back—except for the tiniest one, who remained hidden in the bushes.  They finished pumping, set buckets or bottles on their heads—and posed giggling for a few pictures before returning to the safety of home.