First week at work

Jenny and I started work this week.  We are still waiting for our work visas so strictly speaking we are just visiting our prospective workplaces.  I spent Monday , Thursday and Friday at ECHO and had a tour and met most of the dozen or so staff.  We have an American boss and a couple of young American women here for 6 month internships from ECHO head office in Florida.  The rest of the staff are locals with many years of experience between them.  Everybody has been most welcoming.  I've been looking at failed funding applications to see how we can improve our success rate.  Some obvious issues have stood out.  I've also been getting up to speed with the range of legumes species we work with and working on my Swahili.

On Friday I went to the Tanzanian Tropical Pesticides Research Institute.  We are planning a Conservation Agriculture workshop there in June and I have been asked to be a speaker.  The Institute holds the national herbarium and we got to look at their Canavalia (Jackbean) accessions.  Roland Bunch, a third world expert on conservation agriculture with legumes has collected some Canavalia species in Mali that he currently can't identify.  Roland is sharing an office with me and I can learn much from him.

Some of the diversity in Canavalia (Jackbean) beans. (Photo: Roland Bunch)

Yesterday (Saturday) Jenny and I went to Lake Duluti to our east for a walk.  It is a crater lake with rainforest surrounds and a great bird list.  We walked the circuit twice and saw 30 bird species (e.g. Purple Heron, Fish Eagle, Black Crake, Hartlaub's Turaco, Giant Kingfisher, Little Greenbul, Northern Brownbul, Thick-billed Weaver, Taveta Weaver and Red-throated Twinspot).  We also saw several large Monitor lizards, Blue Monkeys and Ochre Bush Squirrels.

Taveta Weaver - restricted to a small area either side of the Tz-Kenya border
- essentially around the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The first Grey Heron we've seen .

This morning we will listen to Essendon beat Geelong then do some shopping.  Later today we are looking at a Toyota RAV4 that sounds promising.  We also need to find a new bed for the spare room as we are expecting Stephanie, one of our friends from our Bukoba days, to arrive in two weeks from New York.  She will stay with us a couple of times during her visit to Tz.

Nile Monitor.

Hartlaub's Turaco.

I've had a go at getting a sourdough starter culture underway but after a promising start it turned too sour and has been discarded.

Our landlord Paul has arrived back from his other home in Tropical Queensland and has granted me custodianship of his extensive library of bird, tree, reptile etc. African books.  What a treat!

A small selection of Paul Oliver's books that I will be looking after.

Bird list: 139