Jacob with the quilt..which he loved!!!

Jacob

The whole family!

Finally after being in Tanzania for 3 weeks and multiple attempts to find days and times to meet up Jacob and I finally got to see each other on Saturday!  I took a bus into the airport where we met up and we saw each other from across the airport and both got huge smiles on our faces and hugged and there was a lot of “Dudes” and “I’m so excited to see you!”  It’s amazing how friendship works, even though I haven’t seen him in over a year its like nothing has changed.  He’s still the awesome person I meet two summers ago we spent a wonderful day together like no time had passed at all!

After our greeting Jacob took me on my first dala dala ride (dala dala’s are the buses here where they pack them full to the brim similar to subway cards) to get to his neighborhood.  Quite the experience especially in Dar es Salaam where traffic rivals that found in New York City but there are very few established rules of the road so everything is just a ridiculous jokey for position.  On the ride we talked about my volunteer placement and his classes (currently undergraduate students at Dar University are on strike because inflation has caused the cost of living to go up but the student’s stipends have not increased and there is a lot of unrest.  Police opened fire on a group of protesters and hauled a bunch off to jail and used tear gas on huge crowds.  If the students strike for more than three days in a row that sets the entire semester back by about two months so Jacob is hoping for a peaceful resolution quickly).  Jacob is really enjoying his studies, which is a mixture of public policy and sociology, but he finds that it’s really tough being a student and a new father but he is working hard at both jobs.

Once we got to his house where he and Salome rent two rooms we sat down and I gave him the quilt everyone from Kirchenwald helped make...he absolutely loved it!  (which I had no doubt that he would loved...for as long as I’ve known him he’s been a sucker for sentimental stuff).  He immediately called Salome in from the other room so that she could look at it and they discussed how’d they’d rearrange the furniture in the one room so that they could hang it on their wall!

Having the opportunity to meet Salome and Carin was incredible!  Salome is so sweet and is about to restart he nursing internship now that she has recovered from the c-section she had with Salome.  We sat and looked through Jacob and Salome’s wedding photo albums and then I got to hold baby Carin for awhile.  She is the tiniest cutest baby ...at only two months old she weighs about 5kg and is as long as my forearm, she’s so little and so cute!  Her birthday is November 30th and her name means a combination of love/hope/peace in Jacob and Salome’s vernacular language (everyone in Tanzania learns their vernacular language from birth, then has to learn Swahili to go to school, and then has to learn English if they want to continue onto Secondary school).  Jacob and Salome are the cutest proud parents, it was really nice to see.  I think they are both stressed about being new parents and having to finish up school but they seem to be handling it well.  Jacob sings the song “You Are the Light of The World” to Carin at night when she’s falling asleep...so precious!

Salome and baby Carin :)

After introductions and chatting Salome served a traditional Tanzanian lunch (which normally get’s served between 1 and 2 o’clock here) of rice, potatoes, beef in a stew like sauce, and the vegetable that looks like spinach but is called something else here.  And even though I have been a very strict vegetarian since arriving and I can’t actually remember the last time I ate beef I was an excellent guest and ate everything on my plate (I’m sure my parents will be shocked to hear this news). 

Once we finished lunch, Jacob asked me if I wanted to go to the largest mall in all of Tanzania...I said sure and we said goodbye to both Salome and Carin and headed for the mall.  Which was in act very large and very touristy.  The inside housed a store that looked exactly like a grocery store in the U.S. and a store that was very similar to Wal-Mart as well as a movie theater, a fast food store, and lot’s of other places that were very unlike the Tanzania I’ve been experiencing for the last 3 weeks.  It was also kind of a shock as well to not be a minority in this store, about half of the people looked like native Tanzanians while the other half looked like they were “out of towners.”  Spending the last 3 weeks typically being the only white person unless traveling in a group with the other volunteers it was a little weird to be surrounded by so many people that “looked” like me and kept wondering what they were all doing in Tanzania.  While at the mall we stopped in the grocery store to pick up diapers for Carin, and then we headed to the Wal-Mart like store and walked through the camping section and reminisced about K-Wald.  We saw a boy with longish hair, with a headband, and had Birkenstocks on and he goes...”Oh wow he kind of looks like Sioma!”...hysterical...  We found a dutch oven and talked about how good cherry cobbler is made on the fire.  He also wanted to know whether or not a bunch of his campers were back at camp this summer...I was able to inform him about a few.  The funniest part of the days was when he broke out into “Da Moose Song” (the annoying one not the fun one) really loud in the middle of the store and then burst out laughing when he realized that a bunch of people were looking at him.

Getting to hold sleeping baby Carin!!

To everyone that told me to say hello to Jacob he says hi back.  He really does miss the states and K-Wald and would love to be able to bring his whole family over someday for awhile.  Salome especially would love to work as a nurse in the states.  Before we parted for the day we made plans to meet up again a couple more times before the end of my trip to visit the orphanage he use to volunteer at, to go to the 

church that he and Salome were married in and to go to Dar and have me sit in on some of his classes (hopefully my swahili will be much better by then)...The whole day was incredible I couldn’t stop smiling he is such an awesome person to be around!  We both kept saying how crazy it was that we were together, in Tanzania, hanging out...what a crazy life this is :)