Is there something in the water of the rift valley? – not only are the kids in Magara adorable but they all seem to have big cheeky personalities and the smiles to go with it. Photos of the faces of people I come across in my travels take me right back to that time and [...]
I’m not one to come over all maternal very often, but it was hard not to form an immediate bond with this shy and charming young girl in Magara, Tanzania. Fortunately she had a happy family life with a father and mother who also befriended us, so I didn’t get to come over too Angelina. [...]
Cradling my camera carefully as we bounce along the corrugated dirt track, wishing I’d worn a serious sports bra, getting painful bruises under my arms where I am standing up and clinging to bits of the open roof of the 4-wheel drive, coated in a potent mix of suntan lotion, dust and sweat, and grinning [...]
I walk into a light, bright, white wooden building, sunfilled with soaring ceilings, in Stonetown, Zanzibar. It is now seemingly an art market for tourists, but was previously a hostel and orphanage. However a quick walk down the steps into the cellar and a different history emerges. Here is one of the few remaining pieces of [...]
Doesn’t Swahili has the best animal names of any language ? Twiga for giraffe, Simba for lion, Tembo for elephant – to me these swahili words sound exactly like the animals look! Especially ‘Twiga’, which somehow manages to convey the tallness, the awkwardness and the beauty of a giraffe in one short punchy word. Twiga [...]
Squashed into the back seat of the dala-dala(local minivan buses), escorted by the chatty Heelal and the quieter Sa’id, I marvel at how a thirteen seater van can so easily accommodate twenty – no, we’ve just stopped again, twenty two passengers! Taking the dala-dala from the markets to the village on the outskirts of Stonetown [...]