On Tuesday morning I went running in the morning and made it back just before it started to rain. Jaclyn (another student who will be here for two months) and Edmund (a professor from Berkeley who is a Geographic Information Systems expert) were arriving at 10 am so Tanya and I spent the morning at home so we could go to the airport and pick them up. Mid-morning the power went out on us and we discovered that we were out of electricity credit, and were the only ones in the area without power, instead of the typical area-wide outage. Tanya said she would buy electricity credit on the way to the airport, since the store was on the way.
There wasn’t room in the taxi van for both of us to go, so I stayed home while Tanya and Masoud picked up Jaclyn and Edmund. It would have been nicer at home if the fans had been on, but since it was still morning it wasn’t too hot.
They arrived safely and Tanya secured electricity for us so we were with power again!
After chatting and catching up a bit, Jaclyn and Edmund unpacked while Tanya and I made a vegetable curry, rice and chapati for lunch. It was quite delicious.
Keeping with the theme of not giving anyone a moment’s rest when they arrive in Zanzibar, we headed to the office at 1 pm to get set up for the GIS training Edmund would be giving this week.
We did some introductions then started the training around 2 pm. I spent most of the afternoon helping people to install the ArcGIS software and to register their accounts and to transfer the data needed for the exercises from a flash drive to their computers. There was an hour and a half of lecture just as an introduction to GIS since not many people here have worked with spatial data before. It was a pretty short session, which was good for the first day.
From the office, we went into Stone Town and walked around a little bit before going to dinner. We had dinner and drinks at the Africa House, which is on the second floor of a hotel that’s right on the beach, overlooking the ocean. It was nice to relax and watch the sunset. I even remembered to take some pictures this time (to be posted at a later time).
After dinner Jaclyn and Edmund were feeling pretty tired after their long journey so we went back to the house and hung out for a while before going to bed.