Baking With No Oven

I love to bake, but it has been unattainable since arriving in Tanzania. Everything I know how to bake needs an oven (hence it is called baking). Unfortunately I only have a double hot plate.

Today I could not stand it any longer. So I tried to make cookies. I looked up a recipe for "no bake" cookies. I found a recipe for chocolate peanut butter cookies that I had all the ingredients for... well with a few substitutes. So I attempted to make them. The result was a liquid mess. It looked like someone was trying to make brownie mix but added too much water. It was slightly disheartening.

I did not want to wash them down the sink, because I used up a lot of our ingredients, so I showed them to Justin. He thought they looked like a start of something good. Justin went across the street and got eggs and flour. We added an egg, a pinch of baking powder, a pinch of baking soda (we didn't know which would be better, so we used both), and some flour.

We kept adding flour until we got it looking something recognizable as batter. We then started to cook them on the hot plate like a pancake. It took about two hours watching the hot plate to finish the batch. They resulted in a shapeless chocolate mass that is sweet and chocolaty. Some of our latter ones looked a little more like cookies. They do not taste like anything that I have ever had before, but they are really good.  

-Lauren

Language School

Justin and I spent the last three weeks at language school in Arusha, Tanzania studying Swahili. I was in the beginner’s class and Justin was in the intermediate class. We learned more than I ever thought possible. I thought my brain was going to explode. There is so much that I was given to learn that it will take another few months for me to actually learn everything. We had pretty much the same schedule, but Justin studied a little more advanced material. We had six hours of classes a day with a break about every two hours. Our schedule was:

7:30am--wake up (This is an hour and a half later than we normally wake up, so it was nice to get to sleep in a bit)

8:00am--breakfast (They provided us with delicious breakfast. I normally had an omelet and bacon on toast)

8:30am--class starts (During this time we would go over home work, and review what we had already covered)

10:00am--tea break (Tanzania was once a colony of England)

10:30am--learn something knew (This is the time that we would be introduced to new vocabulary and grammar)

12:30pm--lunch time (There was a mix between Tanzanian food and Western food. It was all really tasty)

1:00pm--break time (A time to rest your brain before going back to class. I normally read during this time)

2:00pm--afternoon class (This was a time to reinforce what we had learned so far that day, through reading, role playing, and games)

4:00pm--we are done for the day (During this time I did homework, read, and played volley ball)

6:00pm--dinner time (Once again we would have some great food, and a delicious dessert)

After dinner we would socialize with the other people taking the course. We met some really nice people from all over the world. Our evenings and weekends were free. Which was much needed, because by the end of the day I thought my brain was going to explode. 

- Lauren