After an amazing trip to Livingstone finishing with a trip to Victoria Falls, I began my long journey back to Tanzania on Tuesday morning. I left Livingstone on the 9-o clock bus, which I enjoyed just as much as the outward journey! The eight hours on a bus without air conditioning was wonderful… When I arrived in Lusaka I was met once again by Victor from Transaid. Victor acted again as a great host; he took me to the office of another Transaid project in Zambia – ‘MORE MaMAZ’. I was introduced to the team working on this fantastic project and told all about their latest trip into the rural areas and the problems they have encountered. After visiting the MORE MaMAZ office I still had five hours before my flight back to the UK, Victor dropped me at a local shopping centre so I could have a meal before my flight. When he collected me again to take me to the airport I still had over an hour to wait before I could even check in. Once checked in I was informed that there was going to be a delay to my flight – I was starting to think the day was never going to end! Zambia is currently experiencing worse power shortages than Tanzania, with 8 hours of scheduled power outage a day – which is going to increase to 10 hours very soon. It's due to the countries reliance on hydro energy and a severe lack of water in the dams. While waiting in the departure lounge the power unexpectedly went off. Shortly after, a representative from the airline advised that our plane was further delayed because of the power cut. When I finally boarded the plane I was exhausted, arriving back in Tanzania just after 5am on Wednesday morning. I promptly cleared immigration, collected my bag and hopped into a taxi back to NIT. On the journey back to NIT the notorious Dar traffic was just starting to build, but luckily it was just early enough to miss most of the heavy traffic jams. I was shocked that the majority of decorations for the election had been removed, the streets looked so different. When I finally got home I managed to get a few hours sleep before I took part in a webinar (an online interactive presentation) conducted by Hollie from Transaid in the UK. The webinar was used to demonstrate how to access Transaid’s online knowledge centre. The knowledge centre is a section of the website that can be accessed by anyone to view documents, tools and case studies produced by Transaid with the aim to share as much knowledge as possible to create the largest benefits. It's great! On Thursday an impromptu public holiday was held to mark the change in president – NIT was like a ghost town. Everything was back to normal on Friday however and I was heavily occupied following up on the progress of tasks that I'd agreed with people before I left for Zambia. Unfortunately it seemed that without my supervision, many of the tasks had not been started or were still in progress. I therefore had to realign my expectations and try to agree new deadlines with to get all the information I needed at the earliest time. Over the weekend I still felt jet lagged from travelling, so I enjoyed a very lazy weekend just doing the necessary things like food shopping. On Sunday I went to underwater hockey and was greeted by the largest number of people I have seen attend at one time. 16 people were there, which was great for the team however not so much for me, as I was a little late arriving and all the fins in small sizes had been taken! Luckily because everyone’s really nice we agreed a rotation system between myself and two other ladies to share the fins – which worked out great because we all got a little rest in-between a very intense game. After the game Tom mentioned that he had been in contact with another team based in Kigali, Rwanda who were interested in playing a game against us in either Tanzania or Rwanda. I am hoping we can schedule the game before I return to the UK at the end of December! |