December 7, 2008

The day that will live in infamy! Coincidentally, my best friend here is Japanese and in just this last week I’ve had five dinners with her and her friends. She has been talking about setting me up with one of her friends but I don’t think anything will come of it. I’ve been trying to learn Japanese as well, but I don’t think anything will come of that either.
Erina Niijima, like me, is 23 and came here after graduating University without really wanting to start a real job. Like me her future career choice bounces around a fair bit, and the last time I asked she was talking vaguely about being a travel writer. We eat together pretty frequently, it is much more fun to eat a nice meal with someone else than to eat alone, and we can eat full meals; maybe she cooks rice and I’ll barbecue pork or something. Several other Peace Corps Volunteers have Japanese counterparts but I don’t know any other pairs who are as close as we are.
Last weekend I went to Mtwara (perhaps more on that later) and came back with some tuna. I love Ndanda but I think I would trade this site for another one on the shore, near the beach; I’d like to get a little wooden dhow and sail back and forth during the evening, when there some wind. The two towns on the ocean near me, Lindi and Mtwara, both have fish markets on the beach. Fishing boats return to shore between 10:00 and 3:00 with a fresh catch. In Mtwara last Sunday they several large yellowfin tuna, a huge devil ray, a few other large fish whose name I’ve forgotten, along with the ubiquitous changu and dagaa. Fishermen were hacking the larger fish into steaks when I arrived. The Lindi fish market didn’t have the large fish but did have octopus, squid and tiger prawns, still wriggling on sandy wooden tables. A bag full of prawns costs about three dollars, as did a lenghth of tuna steak about the size of my forearm.
I put the tuna on ice and brought it back to Ndanda for dinner. One of Erina’s friends, another math teacher named Lisa, was visiting; Lisa lived near the shore in Japan too and knew how to cook seafood, and so we ate tekkamaki and grilled tuna in a mission town in Tanzania when the power was down.
I found Humphrey Mutaasa’s blog: http://humphrey-ndanda.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html