Dear Friends,

I went from the stifling heat and humidity of Zanzibar through 42 hours of traveling to arrive back in the Green Mountains to welcome the latest Nor’easter. Everyone was giving me a hard time about how I seem to bring the bad weather every time I return from my winter breaks.

I had the most awesome trip ever. I spent my 60th birthday at the Ngorongoro Crater, the Olduvai Gorge and sitting on the banks of a river not more than 10 feet from 250 hippos. I took a bijillion photos and had the time of my life. Thanks go out to Chet Newbold, our Olympus Camera rep for loaning me a SP-565UZ. The UZ stands for ultrazoom. I’ll be putting some of my photos up on the net as soon as I organize them, but I got some awesome shots with this lightweight (but very powerful) camera. There were people shooting with gigantic lenses, but the UZ got me very close to the action!

The hippos were certainly the highlight for me, but I had close encounters with lions, baboons, giraffes and many other animals. There were three very poignant moments for me in this trip. The first was at the Olduvai Gorge. This is the site of the discovery of footsteps of our ancestors from 3.6 million years ago. While these steps, preserved in solid ash from the volcano, are now carefully re-buried to protect them, it was amazing to realize I was spending my 60th birthday at this historical location.

The same day I had the privilege to visit a Maasai village and meet a young prince/warrior named Ollie. The Maasai are one of the last remaining herding nomadic people. They live in houses constructed of sticks, ash and dung and live a very primitive and difficult life. Ollie was educated but returned to his people, his English was much better than my Swahili and we managed to have an interesting discussion. When I told him I was from the USA, he immediately started talking about Obama. He told me that he had hope. Hope that the USA would stop being a warlike nation and return to a peaceful nation. He talked about how important it was to respect other peoples beliefs even if they are different and alien from your own, rather than attempting to impose our beliefs upon others. He talked about respect for the dignity of man. His eloquence was astounding and it made it very clear to me that our President has an enormous burden upon his shoulders. He has been elected the stewart of the world’s hopes.

The third remarkable moment was when I visited Stone Town in Zanzibar. There, I visited the slave market which now has a cathedral built on top of it. Nevertheless, I was taken to the dungeon underneath were slaves were held in deplorable inhumand conditions prior to being auctioned off. Grace and I were in tears by the time we left the market, to think that such a short time ago people could treat other people so inhumanly was just overwhelming.

I was totally out of communication except for the time I called my mom on my birthday (a tradition I have done for all my adult years to thank her for bearing me) and once in the middle of the Serengeti when I bought a 1/2 hour of internet time to send an email to wish Hapy a happy birthday. The internet was a lot slow—it took most of that 1/2 hour just to send that mail.

The Chill Pill was a great addition to our gear. It gave us music in the tent at night or on the beach in Zanzibar and the sound was fantastic. The rechargeable compact speaker worked amazingly well! I also took the FastMac TruePower iV with me which is a battery backup for the iPhone. While I had no connectivity with the iPhone, I used it to play games and to learn Swahili. The TruePower iV not only powers the iPhone but charges it as well and with the large 3100 amp-hour battery it was also able to charge the Chill Pill in a pinch. I even used the included flash to take a picture with the iPhone at night.

It was good to get back home and back to Small Dog where the crew did a great job keeping things going in my absence. Plans are moving forward for our next big eWaste recycling day. Did you know that our eWaste collection day is the largest one-day event in the country? We are trying to round up some additional sponsors to help defray the cost because we keep smashing our old collection records and don’t expect anything different this year!