Rogers house

April 10^th

We wake up to have a breakfast of toast, fruit and a hard boiled egg and then Rogers comes to get us and has a friend named Saleem with him. They catch us a cab and we all head up through town into an entrance with an armed guard. The entrance is to the local college and Rogers lives somewhere on the grounds. Our cab wobbles and slides along the bumpy and muddy roads. We almost slide into a tree but the cab drivers here are really good at negotiating these roads.

We make it up the hill to Rogers house and we pack our things and hike them up another steep hill that can only be accessed by foot. When we get up to the top of the hill, through trees and bushes, it turns out Rogers doesn’t have the key. He sends his friend off into the jungle to find a key. His friend is gone a very long time as we wait and the cab driver waits, and then finally Rogers heads out into the jungle to go after his friend. They both get back a little while later and we bring our stuff into Rogers room and then we are back down the hill for some lunch.

He brings us to a diner where we have some rice and veggies with sauce. We end up paying for Rogers and his friend which we felt a little weird about because we just thought we were going to be hanging out with Rogers, but this was only the beginning of stuff like this happening...Since Morogoro is a poor town people will try to get as much as they can from you. It is not a malicious thing, it is just a cultural thing I believe. It’s important to be able to set clear boundaries of what you are willing to pay for and what you are not up front. This goes for cab rides, hotels, food, whatever, it’s just important to get these things established ahead of time to make sure there are no miscommunications.

As Rogers and Saleem take us around town they tell us they will make us some of their traditional foods for dinner. So they take us to the local open air market. They sell fruit, veggies, beans, rice, amaranth, quinoa, millet, dried fish, spices, many chickens in tiny little cages. There are piles and piles of beans and grains everywhere, it looked pretty colourful and beautiful. The shop people were friendly and helpful. After getting the ingredience they needed we paid for the lot and headed back into town to catch a cab back to Rogers house. Each ride in and out of town from Rogers house is =3000 shillings. (It is slowly dawning on us that this free accommodation is going to be costing us more than staying at a hotel...)

We get back to Roger’s house a chill for a a bit while Rogers and Saleem make dinner. We have a meal of beans, casaba and purple potato and ginger tea. We all watch 10, 000 BC on the laptop. (Just in case Matt from England is reading this, he worked on the movie in New Zealand, Matt, what were you thinking?)

After watching the movie and having some chats we were off to bed. A small slated bed with a thin mattress. The whole bed has mosquito netting over it. (Hey, it’s not just for being fancy, it is actually used for mosquitoes here. J