Happy New Year!

Wow, it's 2011! Hope everyone had fun celebrating New Year's Eve. As we kindof expected, New Year's was pretty quiet in Kowak! We rang in the new year playing cards...pretty exciting! A few seconds after midnight, some of the neighborhood kids came to our window (they must have heard us cheering), asking to hang out. So we busted out all the pots and pans we could find, and marched around for about 10 minutes banging our pots and shouting, "Happy Happy New Year!" I'm sure the neighbors and the patients in the hospital loved it, though none of them came out to join the parade. The kids had fun though!

What else, this past week was exciting because we took a last minute trip to Mwanza,the 2nd biggest city in TZ. Wednesday morning at breakfast, Fr. Jim announced that a car was going into Musoma (the bigger city near us). We decided that we'd hitch a ride, but instead of going to Musoma, we caught the bus to Mwanza. The city is set on the coast of Lake Victoria. We spent most of the time just walking around, comparing Kowak to life in a bigger city. While the city wasn't completely paved, there were definitely better roads a quite a few multiple storied buildings, neither of which we've seen a lot of since we left the States!

Shopping in the city was still quite an experience. Unlike America where we have big stores that sell everything, they have little "Dukas" that sell a pretty specific selection of items. For example, one will sell all sorts of toiletries, one processed food items, one will just have material or just books ect... Most of the dukas are about 6ft x 6ft and crammed floor to ceiling with the items. Another options for buying was from one of the many vendors who laid a tarp out on the side walk and placed their items out for sale. Many of them were selling clothes or shoes. Most of the items were used, you'd see the vendor sitting there polishing and repairing the shoes before he sold them. Walking by the tarps was a little like thrifting, the selection looked like mostly items Americans had bagged and donated! We also walked through Mwanza's market, which was pretty neat. It was just tons of stands selling almost anything, from hardware supplies to fresh fruits and veggies to chickens! There was even a station that killed the chickens by snapping their necks boiling them, then plucked the feathers for you and chopped up the meat...quite interesting to watch!

We spent the night at a small hotel (it was actually a bunch of small bungalows) a little outside of the town on Lake Victoria. We had a nice relaxing evening, went to bed early, then woke up in time to see the sunrise over the lake. It was a great break from Kowak and the hospital, and so nice to be by the water for a bit. The other highlight was indulging in some "American" food (or something close to it!) We ate pizza, wings, french fries, ice cream, cheesy bread and drank some beer and wine! It was was fun to switch things up from rice and meat. Overall, it was definitely a successful trip!