Iringa Town (Saturday, July 25)

In the morning we drove into downtown Iringa and met Dr. Hamza Mwamhehe and Dr. Hilda Mrema, the government veterinarians at the Veterinary Investigation Center. They talked to us about the way that the government has the veterinary service set up, and took a tour of the lab. They have some rudimentary testing techniques, and use ELISA to test for some of the more common livestock diseases--AI, Rift Valley Fever, and Bovine TB. Most other things, including Brucellosis, they have to send to Dar to be analyzed, which obviously is a less than ideal method.

We then drove out to a village near the Kibebe farm, where the VIC vets were helping one of the farmers improve his husbandry for his chickens. The farmer talked to us--through one of the vets acting as a translator--about how he set up his chicken farm, and increased his livelihood from about fifty to over two hundred and fifty chickens. With this he was able to send his children to private secondary school, and hopes to make enough money to send them to university as well, and buy a car and bring solar power to his house. It was really interesting and cool to meet the "average Joe" Tanzanian farmer, rather than Europeans living in Tanzania, or the very highly educated (and I assume relatively wealthy) professors we have met so far. It was also really cool to hear his plans and hopes for his farm, and that he's been able to accomplish so much in a short time because of that motivation for his kids.

Chicken farmer with his wife

We bumped back over the dirt tracks and eroded stone roads back to downtown Iringa, and had lunch at Neema Cafe. We had the afternoon free to explore Iringa on foot. A large group of us headed toward the market and an internet cafe, and I attempted to send cards at the post office--unfortunately it was closed. I drifted through the market with different groups of people, mostly Stephen, Helen, and Vanessa, browsing the Maasai jewlery carts, Iringa fabric stands, and jumbles of African themed carvings and art for souvenirs. The Maasai men and women with their babies strapped to their backs were stringing beads in the moments between helping customers, and everything was very colorful and cramped.

Inside a Maasai jewelry stall

We walked through the food market, entering near stands heaping with whole dried fish--a little suspect since we're hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of uncertain road from the coast. But the fruits and vegetables all looked and smelled delicious--and we saw tons of the red onions that we saw growing in the baobab valleys on our way from Mikumi to Iringa.

Iringa market stall

It was nice to get a real feel for the town, and actually talk to some of the people in market, trying to figure out how to communicate and bargain with the very limited Swahili vocabulary I've mastered so far--mostly amounting to greetings, and names of animals. Around dusk, we headed back to Riverside campsite for dinner and a short presentation on bird population monitoring in Tanzania. The temperature here in Iringa in the dry season drops down into the 40s and 50s Fahrenheit, and tonight was particularly cold so I listened to lecture wrapped in my sleeping bag, with everyone else looking on enviously.