Top priority

NB:  I wrote this and all the entries before we left Zanzibar, but—how’s this for an excuse—pirates kept me from posting the entries.  It hasn’t been possible to lay redundant Internet cables to East Africa because of the ongoing problem with Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Just before we left, the cable providing Internet service to Zanzibar was damaged and was out indefinitely. So be on the lookout for a backlog of blogs.

Already, we’re leaving!  And for weeks (months even), I’ve had blog topics I’ve wanted to write about, but blog writing hasn’t been the top priority. 

Since we’ve gotten back from South Africa, we’ve been packing, souvenir shopping, and saying goodbyes to both people and places.  Calvin celebrated his birthday, and—like Oscar’s birthday on safari—Calvin’s was a memorable day.  It was his first birthday ever on a school day (July not being a normal school month in the US), and he got to share a cake made by our good friend and landlady Muna.  For dinner, we celebrated by going to Sambusa Two Tables, the fanciest Swahili restaurant in town, which is a prix fixe meal at a person’s home; there are only two tables, and you have to make reservations and be hungry!

But mainly I’ve been working.  Since we got back from South Africa, I’ve graded all of the four questions I wrote for my team-taught communication skills class of 294 students (more than a full day’s work), I’ve taught myself how to do complex statistical analyses in Excel, and I’ve written the hour-long talk that I gave on my research yesterday to a diverse audience at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam.  I’ve been busy.

But now blogging is my top priority, and before we go home and get engrossed in our lives there, I wanted to write the blog entries that have been percolating for a while.  I know it’s not very blog-like to unload all these entries at once, but it’s the way it had to be.