Trip Update from Bunda

Yesterday (January 31) was a day of driving, not visiting. We left Karatu early in the morning and headed into the Ngorongoro Conservation Area on our way toward our next destination, the town of Bunda, near the east shore of Lake Victoria. We had just barely entered the park when we were greeted by our first wildlife, a troupe of baboons. The drive took us up to the rim of Ngorongoro Crater, where we had fabulous, though hazy, views of the huge flat expanse of the crater bottom. As we descended the back side of the crater the lushness gave way to a more open landscape dotted with an occasional Maasae boma or large herd of grazing cattle. One highlight of this part of the drive was picking up two young Maasae “hitch-hikers”, school age boys who had been up the ridge looking for a lost sheep and asked us for a ride back down into the valley. They had lots of stories to tell. Unfortunately, they hadn’t found the sheep they were looking for—“Eaten,” they presumed.

Leaving the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, we passed into Serengeti National Park and almost immediately began seeing lots of wildlife—wildebeest, zebras, gazelle, hippos, and giraffes to name a few. We were glad we had modified our itinerary to a closer destination for this day so we could take a bit more time for wildlife viewing. It’s difficult to drive past so much amazing wildlife and not stop to have a closer look! Probably we should have restrained ourselves a bit more, because once again, by the time we reached our destination in Bunda darkness was setting in.

On Thursday morning we met up with our Bunda “host”, Helen Hoskins, an Australian who has been living in Tanzania for 35 years and is currently chaplain at the Bunda Girls Secondary School, run by the Anglican Church of Tanzania. Helen took us to the school, where we began with tea in the headmistress’ office and then were given a very detailed and informative tour of the school facilities. It was particularly helpful to hear about places where they felt they had gone wrong in their construction and were therefore doing things differently in the newer buildings. They seemed eager to have us learn from their mistakes as well!

From the secondary school, Helen took us to their newly-constructed Shalom Primary School. There was a special sense of excited busy-ness here because they were just finishing up construction and planned to move students from their temporary location to this school next week. Visiting at this time worked well for us. Since the builder was present, Bill was able get answers to his many detailed construction questions. From here Helen took us to the current site of their pre-school and kindergarten to see the children who were about to re-locate to Shalom. As Helen said, “After all, a school is the students, not the buildings, so you have to meet the students.” We were happy to oblige!