Fabric Shopping in Arusha, Tanzania

You may have noticed since I returned from my travels that I have a lot of fabric now for sale.. well in case you were wondering, this is where it all came from. 


In Arusha, Tanzania, in a particular street in the centre of town just near the bus station, are lots of tiny fabric shops.. in alleyways, a small arcade type row of shops with a partially hidden entrance, and also along the busy street. They are visible by the fabric hanging from the rafters out the front and are typically just a very small room with a glass counter at the front (usually filled with batiks or tie dyed pieces). Inside there is barely enough space inside for two people. If you are invited in (which is at most of the shops, the shopkeepers are generally very nice) it is a challenge not to trip over the piles of stock on the floor, the shopkeepers wooden stool, or perhaps even a sleeping baby. If you are not invited in, or if it is just too small, it's a fun game of crazy sign language and pointing to the fabrics you would like to look at while the shopkeeper picks them out. Usually the shopkeeper is very helpful and chooses some for you, that she thinks you will like (and are often way off the mark), so you are constantly having to say hapana asante (no thank you)! After the selections have been made it's a game of bargaing which can take as much time as the choosing. It helps to know how much each type of fabric should be, I was lucky I had a friend come with me who called her friend in the know about such things.


A typical fabric shop, although this one is larger than most. It really was that dark inside, the shopkeeper had to use her mobile phone flashlight to see the fabrics:

Just to emphasise the darkness inside the shop, This photo was taken with f4.8 and a 1 second exposure, and has not been edited:

This is another fabric shop. This is not a wall inside the shop, or just part of the shop. It is the whole shop, it is actually just a shelved wall inside a covered alleyway. On the wall opposite (about 1.5m away) are shelves of shoes, a separate shop.

This part of town is very busy and crazy. I normally would catch one of the local mini buses to town then walk up from there, but I had my baby with me and i was planning to buy a lot of fabric so I took the plunge and drove. This video is just after my first shopping expedition. I thought I'd video the drive on the fabric street by sitting my camera on the dashboard. As you will see it's not for the impatient, or the faint hearted! You can see some fabric shops on the left hand side of the road at the very start of the video, they have fabric hanging in front of them. The times the camera drops is when I was going down and up the big ditches in the road, not running over anything!

A visit to Cradle of Love Baby Home, Arusha, Tanzania

While I was in Arusha, Tanzania last month I had the privilege of visiting the Cradle of Love Baby Home. This is the only orphanage in Arusha which takes in babies, they currently care for around fifty babies and toddlers from newborn up to three years old. The babies are there for a number of reasons, sometimes the mother may have died, or the babies may have been found abandoned, or the families just can not care for them. Some orphans are up for adoption, some will be returned to their families, and others will be transferred to a nearby orphanage which cares for children up to 18 years, the SOS Childrens Village.


Twins Princess and Priketts arrived at the Home as newborns, after their mother died soon after their birth. They were less than two weeks old when I met them, and so tiny. I’m not sure if this is Princess or Priketts, but she is the smaller of the two.  I was told the twins are to be returned to their family when they are a bit older.

Nappies, nappies, nappies! The home needs donations of even more cloth nappies, if I had known I would have taken some with me. Instead I took another much needed essential, baby formula.

Inside the baby nursery, the room which houses newborns to six month olds:

And this is little two month old Francis, who was tragically abandoned by his mother at birth and is for adoption. He fell asleep in my arms while I was feeding him, and I fell a bit in love.

One Day In Nairobi with a toddler

I recently had to spend a couple of days in Nairobi with my one and a half year old son on route to Tanzania. Not really because I wanted to, Nairobi does not have a reputation as being one of the safest cities in the world (it also goes by the name Nairobbery, and for a reason), but things just worked out that way.

Nairobi is a big city… polluted, noisy and expensive. I chose to stay somewhere familiar, at the Kenya Comfort hotel. There is no way this hotel could be described as flashy, but it is clean and has the basics – a bed, a tiny bathroom, and if you pay a little extra, a TV on top of a wardrobe. At $70 it is not cheap by African standards, but it is one of the cheapest places to stay in Nairobi.. and they also have free wifi, a 24 hour restaurant, a bar, and a good breakfast for an extra $10. Another plus is that right across the road are the shuttle buses to Arusha, Tanzania, my next destination.

So to make the most of half a day I had free, I decided to hire a taxi and take my son on a little adventure. Close by to each other are the Giraffe Centre and the Elephant Orphanage, both around the outer Nairobi suburb of Karen. The taxi to both cost 3000 KSH return.

First stop was the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, commonly known as the Giraffe Centre. Here is where a long running breeding program for the endangered rothschild giraffe is in place, and you can even get up close and personal with some friendly giraffes. You can hand feed them, and if you’re lucky, even score a big sloppy kiss. Be warned, giraffe tongues are very long and icky! My son just loved meeting the giraffes, and even held up some of the feed pellets to feed them himself. The centre is very small; there is a café, a souvenir shop, a giraffe viewing platform, an education room and a small tortoise display. Because of the small size, you only need to allow about half an hour to visit here, and a bit longer if you want to get something to eat. There is a low entry fee, and with all proceeds going towards the running of the centre.

Next stop for us was the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, also known as the elephant orphanage, which is a wildlife conservation charity  dedicated to the protection and preservation of endangered species such as elephants and rhinos. Orphaned baby elephants are found in the wild are brought to the centre to be raised in a ‘family’ of other orphaned elephants. The babies are mainly orphaned due to poaching, and would otherwise not survive in the wild alone. Visitors are welcome at certain times each day to see the elephants being fed and to hear the story of how the orphanage came about. The elephants are fed in an open setting and the only thing between the spectators and elephants is a single rope, which I discovered does not keep them in! During our visit when it was time for the elephants to be walked back to their private area, some of them managed to walk straight under the ropes and through the small crowd of people. Scary, even though they are babies some of them are very large! The ground is uneven and not paved, so I was very grateful for my Ergo baby carrier here. There is a small range of gifts on the way out, with all proceeds going to the orphanage, and also a small display of baby elephants looking for sponsorship.

There is a saying “this is Africa”, meaning be prepared for anything.. which I was reminded of on our taxi ride back to the city. We got stuck in some unexpected traffic, two to three lanes of cars going nowhere, but cars, mini buses and bikes weaving in and out of each other trying to get ahead anyway. Over an hour later we found out the reason why - a broken down truck, that was it! And as a result, I missed my bus to Arusha and had to stay in Nairobi for another night.

I was more than a bit shocked to see this pull out in front of the taxi! Look closely! Turns out it was a tame cheetah  being moved from one part of Nairobi National Park to another.

Explaining baby sleep training to an African mama of 8.

I had an interesting conversation today. Somehow I ended up explaining the concept of baby ‘sleep training’ with an African mama of eight, who is also my sons grandmother (Bibi in Swahili). It went something like this:

Bibi and I were sitting in my living room, watching my son (almost 13 months) play with his older cousin, when the conversation turned to sleep.

Me: He doesn’t sleep a lot, he wakes a few times at night, and only has one short nap during the day. Did your babies all sleep well?

Bibi: Oh, all babies, they differ. Some sleep a lot, some do not. Every baby, they are different. They will all sleep in their own time.

Me: In Australia, some people train their babies to sleep at night.

Bibi: (looks confused)

My boy with his Bibi

Me: They put their babies to bed in a cot in a separate room,

Bibi: They don’t sleep with them?

Me: No, they usually put them in their own room, sometimes from only six months old. I don’t do that, my baby sleeps with me because it is easy for me to feed him back to sleep when he is just lying there next to me.

Bibi: Yes, sometimes they wake and just want to suck. And having them in your bed, that is where they feel the love.

Me: Yes, I think he feels comforted when he is snuggling next to me. So anyway, what some people do to train their babies to sleep is to put them in a cot in their own room, and when the baby wakes they don’t pick them up or feed them.

Bibi: (looks confused and a little shocked)

Me: They figure this way the baby will learn not to wake up because they won’t have their needs met. Some mothers might go in to the babies room for a few minutes, patting the baby to settle them, then leave again. If the baby cries they just wait outside the room and go in some minutes later, but still don’t pick them up. They continue this until the baby goes back to sleep.

Bibi: They do not pick up their babies?

Me: No.

Bibi (looks a bit disgusted by this thought)

Me: I have even heard about a doctor who tells mothers to put their baby to bed at a certain time, close the door and don’t go in if the baby cries and to not go in until the morning, unless the baby is asleep so they don’t know their mama came in.

Bibi: (Looking absolutely horrified by now) Why do they not attend to their baby?

Me: I don’t know, maybe they prefer to sleep. Don’t worry, I would never do that to my baby!

I hope I haven’t given Bibi nightmares now by sharing this information with her. We discussed more on the topic, and also the stark difference in the way babies are treated in our countries, which I noticed when I returned to Australia the first time after being in Tanzania for about a year. To come from a country where babies are content, normally being held or carried on someones back, having their needs met promptly, to then arriving in Australia to see babies crying in prams, not able to even see their mothers and their cries being ignored was quite a shock. I think it’s safe to say that ‘baby training’ is a relatively modern western concept that will never catch on in Africa.