I got the golden chance to visit Tanzania a short while ago and of course, that fed my deeply adventurous nature a great deal. Arusha it was to be precise. Along with some of my family, we were warmly welcomed into the country with a good number of friendly smiles and gestures. I also definitely couldn’t help but notice that the customer care is actually commendable over there. The keenness towards observing every little difference between one’s own home place and that of someone else obviously kicks into high gear when they are a distance from home.I took into account literally every small detail. This included the size of the cows, the preciseness of the people’s speech, the very juicy fruits sold by the roadside, the breathtaking number of trees all over the city, the huge plantations, the unique presence of the Masai people with their beautiful cloth colours and the amazingly vast land that makes up Serengeti National Park. I did not miss the beautiful sight of Mt. Meru and the famous snow capped Mt. Kilimajaro—too bad I saw it in the dry season, I imagine how much better it would have looked with the rains to keep its slopes lush green. Even in the dry season, it sure is a spectacular sight!However, there is one thing I learned by being on the other side of the boarder, in a place I barely thought I would relate to my home. It is the simple fact that somewhere at the back of those constantly varying differences; we really are one kind of people, with an equal zeal to achieve a better life. That is when the idea of merging into East Africa eventually made sense to me. I realised ‘there’s one thing that will feed all of us with some sense of satisfaction somewhere’. Referring to other places simply as they are—“other places”—didn’t make sense anymore, because I realised that ‘there’s actually more to places than what we think. I learnt a lot about the importance of experiencing new places and the realisation that any place can be home, because at the end of the day, we people are somehow all connected.
