Creatures great and small, furry and slithery, leggy and legless, colourful and amazing.

Apart from meeting lots of interesting people, we've also encountered plenty of interesting little creatures in our house, garden and while out visiting friends.  Here are a few of them - more to follow in a future post.

Lizard on the wall of our house

Camel Spider

Tree snake in the kitchen

Christmas song and dance

Happy Christmas from the Brinds!


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Garden swing and more rain

One of the benefits of being in Mwanza (in our opinion) is the pleasant climate all year round.  Unless it's pouring with rain, Isaac gets to play in the garden almost every day.

Of course, when it does rain.....it really rains!!!

Of course, when it does rain.....it really rains!!!

Dar es Salaam and TDA Conference

This week Paul had a few days in Dar es Salaam, meeting with some of the companies we work in partnership with at Hope Dental Centre, and speaking at the Tanzanian Dental Association Annual conference.
Dar is a large city and is significantly more developed than anywhere else in Tanzania.  In some places in Dar it doesn't even feel like a developing nation.  Dar has a significant traffic problem - the traffic jam photo taken from my hotel window was there for about 8 hours every day!

The presentation in the conference was on the work we are doing with the Dental Volunteer Programme, training clinical officers to provide emergency dentistry in villages far away from Dar es Salaam.

Bustani

We have been enjoying eating the fruit of our garden. Here we are harvesting broccoli, carrots and eggs.

Isaac and Hannah

Its lovely to see Isaac and Hannah having fun together. There is nothing that makes Hannah giggle more than when Isaac say "Boo!"

               


Isaac and Hannah are all dressed up ready to go to a birthday party. These outfits were bought at the East Africa Trade Fair (see previous blog post)

Good weather for ducks

 

The rainy season has come! All the Tanzanians are wrapping up warm as it is now 'baridi' (cold), a very chilly 25 degrees celcius. 

It rains most days now, one minute the sun is shining then suddenly the rain appears, crashes down for 30 minutes or so and then stops just as suddenly. 

We have also had some impressive thunder storms which are deafening in our house which has a 'tin' roof. One of the recent storms knocked out our power for 24 hours and our water supply for 6 days. 

Isaac loves playing out in the rain and in the picture above he is shouting 'THANK YOU LYDIA' for his duck umbrella. We are still wondering if Lydia heard??

Duka

Welcome to our neighbourhood.  We live in the house to the right of the first picture, on a road of mixed quality (it has some tarmac, some mud, some sand, some large pot holes) in a suburban area but not far from the town centre.

Many of you of course will be familiar with the 'cornershop' - that little shop that used to exist all over the UK before the supermarket giants put most of them out of business.  Here the cornershop is called the 'duka' and we have one right on our corner - literally on the corner of our house!

The duka is run by Eric who sells beer, soda, flour, eggs, toiletries, batteries, glue, and 101 other useful things that you might just need in a crisis.  Having a duka 6.5 seconds walk from your front door has some benefits, it does also mean that it's a little noisy at night as locals sit round and enjoy and evening drink!  Eric is the guy in the checked shirt standing next to Beth.  I've no idea who the other two Tanzanians are, but Isaac was happy enough to go to one of them!

A day at the trade fair

A few weeks ago the East Africa Trade Fair was in town.  It's a bit like mini Bath and West show....without the animals.  Lots of stalls from all across East Africa selling their wares or displaying their new ideas.  Isaac was particularly fascinated by the animal pencils.
Of course they also have food available at such events.   The menu on offer included goat (mbuzi) and what we can only hope was a spelling mistake, served with chips!

It was also a good place to find some clothes and crafts.  Isaac was particularly chuffed with his new suit!

BEAN BAGS!!!!

At last, some pictures of the bean bags.
As many of you know, a large quantity of polystyrene beans made their way over to Mwanza in our bags.  Every bag had some, and we're really grateful that at the airport we didn't have to open up the bags to be inspected.
Despite so many beans making their way across, we were still a few short.  A huge thank you to Tracey who brought over an entire backpack full of polystyrene and delivered them to us when she came to stay for the weekend.  The beans actually travelled to Zanzibar and back without Tracey.

A big thank you also goes to Chris and Sarah for sending us their 'pre squashed' beans so that we could fit more into the bags.

See below for some pics of the kids enjoying the best (and almost only) bean bags in Mwanza!