Christmas Memories

Yesterday I returned from one of the most memorable, adventurous, exhausting and plain interesting trips of my life. Last Friday the director of Kibidula asked me if I would be willing to go the northern part of Tanzania and buy some sheep for the farm. I would be going with a Tanzanian guy named Ezekiel and we would buy around 100 sheep and ship them back to Kibidula. It sounded fun, especially when I found out that the sheep were in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania. So Monday morning we took a fourteen hour bus ride to a town called Boma Ng’ombe. Which is Swahili is means cattle corral, it a small town at the base of Kilimanjaro. It was dark when we arrived but when I awoke in the morning. You could see the mounting right out the guest house window. It is really hard to describe, a huge dormant volcano the rises to over 19000 feet. And even though it is near the equator it has an eternal snow cap. Anyways it is a real beautiful mountain. The next day we went to a farm to look at sheep but he only sheep that farm was willing to sell were rams, so we bought five and continued looking for our hundred sheep. Well, they proved hard to find, but by Thursday we had all the business sorted out and a letter from the vet saying they had all necessary vaccinations (required for transporting in between regions of Tanzania). And we were ready to load them on the truck that we had rented. I was wondering how they would do it, but when it came time the Maasai sheep herders just grabbed the sheep and handed them up to me on the truck. Then came the adventurous and exhausting part, It was two thirty in the afternoon on Christmas eve and we had a twenty four hour truck ride back to Kibidula. Also, the sheep needed to be watched so that they did not trample each other to death. So me and Ezekiel took four hour shifts watching it the back with the sheep. So I spent this past Christmas Eve and part of Christmas day with the bleating sheep in my ears, and me returning the favor by bleating Christmas carols back at them. It took us twenty three and a half hours of almost nonstop driving but we made it back safely to Kibidula. As for me, I was tired and stank horribly, but it is one Christmas I will never forget.