Sylvia's Journal

I was picked up early in the morning and driven to the campus of my host on the outskirts of Arusha. The school’s architect must have been inspired by the German pillboxes that dotted the North Sea beaches of my childhood. The lovely hilltop campus is rudely interrupted by one very tall and a few lower concrete structures with small narrow windows and entrances that don’t feel like entrances and are hidden from sight. If I hadn’t followed someone who knew his way around I would have been hopelessly lost.

The buildings violate everything that I learned about Pattern Language from Christopher Alexander. They are also not designed for people with handicaps. I am happy that my ankle has healed. Endless narrow stairs make learning, teaching or eating pretty hard for someone who has difficulty walking. You can also tell that the place was designed by a man for men. The men’s bathrooms are right next to the eating hall but the women have to go down a flight of stairs and are squeezed in a small space between the front door and the reception. It appears their bathroom needs were an afterthought.

Despite the physical distractions of the building itself, the 360 degree views are lovely and, I have been told, include Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru on clear days.

Back at my hotel in the afternoon I called a few people who I had taught some 12 years ago in a memorable course in Sweden and Mombasa. To my great surprise a few are still in the same place, whch is just down the street from me. I will visit them today. As it happens, their organization might already be teaching a course about health leadership and management; so this I will find out today.

I went out of the hotel after my phone calls to make the short trip to the supermarket across the street and take a picture of the (Coca) Cola Clock Tower. Countless young men, hanging around the hotel in the hope of selling trinkets to hapless tourists descended on me like flies on honey, trying to lure me to their shops and calling me ‘my friend.’ They feigned shock when I told them I did not make friends that quickly. It was very annoying and I escaped quickly back into the safe confines of the hotel.

I had planned to have a ‘mocktail’ as encouraged by the welcome letter from the hotel manager in the Hatari Tavern, at exactly the same place, though now renovated, where John Wayne had a real cocktail in 1962 after a busy day of filming. But instead I got terribly distracted by my efforts to connect to the Internet.

The hotel advertises itself as “The Essence of unrivalled quality.” It came up a bit short in the Internet Access Department. After 4 hours of trying to connect my mailbox to the internet I gave up. It did mess up my planned evening of work on tasks that need completion this week, as I got completely pre-occupied and obsessed with getting the connection to last long enough to empty my outbox and send several messages composed after dinner on their way to America. I think I would have torn my hair out of frustration it wasn’t for Upton Sinclair’s Oil! that I am reading while pressing periodically the ‘connect’ or ‘reboot’ buttons. I finally gave up, long after midnight and settled into an uneasy and restless sleep.