Checking Out

We paid for our plane tickets today, so it’s official: we’re leaving Kigoma on Saturday. I’m very excited to leave, but a little sad too. Kigoma is a very special place; a small town in a beautiful location. Even though I’m very ready to leave, I’ll always have a soft spot for this place.

We’ve packed up the boxes of questionnaires and handed them off to Dr. Godfrey, finalized the budget, are close to having a clean data set, and will (hopefully) have all the transcriptions in our hands tomorrow. We’re done! It’s a very good feeling, and we feel proud of the work we have done. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with all the quantitative and qualitative data we have collected.

Our last few days here aren’t that exciting. Tying up loose ends, saying goodbyes. We took Anton (director of Jane Goodall Institute) out to dinner last night, and true to form Gibbs took two and a half hours to get our food on the table after we’d ordered it. We don’t get annoyed at it; it wouldn’t be dinner if you didn’t have to wait a few hours (it’s part of the entertainment here; what else would you do with your evenings?). We had good company: we were joined by the newly arrived conservation specialist for JGI Kigoma and the director of a research program for undergraduates (all sorts of water, fish, and snail projects) who’s been arranging groups of students to come over for research experience for the last ten years. She knows a lot of great facts about the lake, and is an all-around nice person too.

I had my last run in Kigoma, which made me a little sad. There’s great running here, although I won’t miss the dust and exhaust fumes from the cars. Today was our last day, and it was blistering hot; really uncomfortable. I spent the morning at Baby Come & Call and taking pictures of Kigoma. We went up to Hilltop for a lunch of grilled cheese (one of the best things I’ve tasted in a while), and tonight we’re having dinner at Gibbs. Ending our stay in Kigoma the same way we started it. And like that first day, we’re still waiting for our food.

So, we’re flying out of Kigoma tomorrow (Saturday) morning. We fly to Dar for one night, where we have plans to go to an Ethiopian restaurant with Molly and Terry, who are arriving back from Zanzibar that day. The next day we fly to Arusha, and on Monday we’re doing a one-day Safari to Arusha National Park. Tuesday we fly to Zanzibar, where we’ll stay until Sunday. We fly back to Dar on Sunday (fingers crossed the flight doesn’t get canceled!), and then back to SF on Monday. So, this will be my last blog entry until I get back to the US, when I’ll let you know how my travels went.