Mike and I arrived at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar Es Salaam at about 6:30, having spent another 5 hours on yet another Boeing, this time a 737-200, after going through the rigmarole of changing UK Pounds into US Dollars to allow us to buy entry visa’s we got out of the airport to be meet by Aseri Katanga and his brother Danny and driven into the city, where we were deposited at the Peacock Hotel at 8:30. It’s taken 23 hours to get from my home to the hotel, time to get a shower and a couple of hours sleep before being picked up at about 14:00 to go to Zoom Technology College where the real work will start.
We drove into ZTC (Zoom Technology College) at about 14:30 and were introduced to Gaodious Shija, who is the managing director of the college. He wanted to show us around and I was shown all the classes and facilities with lessons going on involving everything from how to use Microsoft Office right up to programming in Visual Basic. He also talked about the future and wishing to build more classrooms, computer suites and maintenance shops to allow more students to complete their training at the college. Although Mike and I were very tired we found it interesting and at 17:30 were sitting in his office to have a meeting about what I could do for them. By 18:30 we had all had enough and Danny drove us back to the hotel with food uppermost in my mind, so it was nice to find that the Peacock Hotel had a traditional Tanzanian food night and a chance to taste some interesting food, Kingfish, Red Snapper and green bananas, the Red Snapper in particular, dressed with Zanzibar spice was beautiful and I haven’t tasted Kingfish for a very long time. Unfortunately by 22:00 I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, it would have been nice to watch the entertainment laid on by the hotel but I needed to catch up on some sleep, because tomorrow was going to be another long day.
