To Paradise with a Chicken

We had an amazing time this weekend!  On Friday we drove to see the cottage hospital in Makunduchi.  It's a really nice little hospital in a little town in the southern part of the island.  After our tour, we drove down to the beach there.  It was by far the best beach we'd seen so far.  Then on the way back we got pulled over because we were riding with Zenyie's driver who doesn't have a permit to carry tourists.  After some explaining that we worked at Mnazi Mmoja, they let us go.  But they didn't say anything about us having 4 people in the back seat and 1 in the hatch back.

Then on Saturday we got up early to take the Dala dala to Kendwa which is supposed to be one of the nicest beaches, and it was definitely the best.  It felt like paradise!  And on the dala dala, the lady sitting next me had a live chicken in a cloth bag on the floor in front of her.  At one point I thought it died because it looked like someone sat on it, and it squawked, but when she got off the bus it squawked a bit more.  We spent the entire weekend sitting on the beach and swimming in turquoise clear water.  We stayed in a dorm room with 10 beds that only cost $15 dollars a person which included breakfast the next morning and evening entertainment.  It was a lot of fun!  We rode up with one of the German students, and we met 5 British students up there that had rented a car to drive up (driving on the Left side of the rode comes naturally to them I guess), so it was nice to have a big group to help watch our stuff.  The 2 British guys did get their wallets stolen, but they did leave them sitting on the beach alone when they went swimming at night.

We also had an eventful ride home on the dala dala with our first car accident.  Our bus was going fast and there was a really slow dala dala in front of us, so we tried to pass the other bus, but we clipped the back corner of it and broke off our side mirror.  Everyone was yelling about how it was the other buses fault for driving so slow.  Then about 30 min later, a women collapsed in the front of the bus.  Since Travis was the closest, he headed up to see what was going on.  We think she was having a seizure, and he was checking her pulse and breathing when she came to and started to attack him.  Another man grabbed her until she calmed down, but Travis got pretty scratched up and lost his sunglasses.  This whole time the bus is still flying down the rode and making stops for people to get on and off.  Right after the lady woke up, she tried to jump off the bus at a stop, so they had to hold her back to keep her on.  They finally got her calmed down and sat in a seat, and then 30 min later, when we got to her stop, she got off the bus and went on her way alone.  That made us all a little nervous, but she seemed ok as she walked away, and there really wasn't much else we could do.

Well, I have to go back to the peds floor to round now, so I hope everyone is still doing ok at home.  I hope to be able to keep you updated after I head to the mainland this weekend, but I'm not sure how the internet access will be, so I'll try my best.