Tarehe Kumi Na Sita

Today is “Tarehe kumi na sita Mei” (translated May 16), the day that has been rolling off of my tongue literally since the day we arrived. I feel like I told at least 75 people that I was leaving the country “Tarehe kumi na sita Mei”, and now that day is today, and like the true crazy that I think I’m becoming, the plane left, carrying the majority of my friends in this country, without me… And I am so excited!

The entire event of changing our tickets was an absolute nightmare. The flight left at 4 AM this morning, and we literally did not receive final confirmation from the airlines that the changes to our tickets were made until about 7 PM yesterday. I love that everything in this country is laid back, that people don’t strictly adhere to daily, or even weekly, schedules, but it would definitely be an understatement to say that yesterday morning Chris and I were in a panic. We were convinced that we were going to have to buy new tickets back to the US. I don’t know how we kept our cool through the situation, but with the help of my dear mother and Chris’ wonderful Stepfather, the SIT coordinator, the travel agency, the airlines, and some random American man named Dan who is apparently our ‘group leader’, our tickets were finally changed. I will be arriving in NYC on July 19th and in Minneapolis on July 21. W are traveling on three different airlines for four different flights, and it only ended up costing about $400 to change all of them... Holy buckets of relief. Anybody going to be in NYC July 19th???

After figuring all of that out, it finally hit me that all of these people who I have been living with in VERY close quarters were leaving in just a few hours… We all went out snorkeling, out to the sandbank that we visited on our first day, out to a really fancy dinner (compliments of SIT), stayed up all night, went to the disco with all of our favorite Zanzibaris, and danced the night away… literally. I didn’t sleep until the sun was up… and even then only for about 2 hours. It was so funny to hear all of the final confessions that came from everyone, like that our academic director actually has absolutely no interest in coral or coral reefs, and that all the boys had a ridiculous crush on our teacher’s daughter…

Chris and I are headed up to the North of the island today for about 3 days… There are 3 Oberlin students who were on the School for Field Studies Program in Kenya who are sprawled out on the beach in Zanzibar for about a week (Joanna, Mark and Val)… and we’re going to go sprawl out with them before we head off on our next adventure.

It’s exciting to feel like I’m starting over here. We have already been here 3 and a half months, and now we’re starting over with another two. The only difference is that this time we kind of know the language… and that there will be a lot of elephants.... and not a lot of dolphins.

Well, we have quite the to do list, so I should probably go start with that. I’ll let you all know soon what this country is like without supervision….