Day 15: A small Tour

          My Mjomba Terevali has a best friend and fellow Architectural artist, Macmillan.  Today he took me on a small tour and showed me around his office and the first Tanzania Museum he and Terevaeli were working on.
          Macmillan's office is a small space he rents with a civil engineer in a large office building.  He showed me lots of photos of projects he’s worked on, including Aishi's Hotel and several restaurants.  Macmillan never works off of carefully graphed diagrams, preferring intuition and rough sketches.  This gives him several advantages.  First, it is very flexible to the needs of the owner and the limitations of the locality, as well as unexpected developments.  Secondly, it prevents the owners from stealing his vision and selling it to the lowest bidder.
          After the tour of his office, we went to the site of the future Museum of Kilimanjaro and (of course) restaurant.  At the moment, there is no museum for the area or the Masai or Meru, two native cultures that have lived around Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru for a long time.  The restaurant will serve only local traditional Tanzanian foods and will include a stage to provide samples of local artists for entertainment.  While the museum and restaurant are at this time only a vision, plans are underway and work is expected to begin within the next month.  I'll post an update later on how things are coming...

          Macmillan has also been working on getting me Dual Citizenship in Tanzania (or Dual Nationality as it is known here), as he has connections inside the immigrations office.  Unfortunately, there is no program currently set up for becoming a dual nationality citizen.  However, Tanzania and all the other East African Nations are meeting together and discussing issues of immigration and immigration laws.  The long and short of it is (really actually, this is just the short version), I can not become a Tanzanian-American citizen yet, but I might be able to within the next year or so.

          For a final bit of interesting news, I got a shave today.  I know, shocking, isn't it.  I could hardly believe it myself.  Just kidding, I know how to keep clean and respectable.  The interesting thing wasn't that I got a shave, it was the power outage.  Evening times are especially susceptible to blackouts, and this was one of those evenings.  My barber wasn't letting a little thing like no power for the shaver get in his way, though.  he led me down the street and over a few blocks to another barber shop owned by a friend of his and gave me a shave there.  Where there is a will, as they say, there is a way.


          Speaking of which, can I come over to your place to watch TV?  My favorite show is about to come on...


E’ya! - Tate


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