Africa on six wheels - a semester on Safari

This week we received a wonderful book through the post called "Africa on six wheels - a semester on Safari" by Betty Levitov. http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bookinfo/5157.html


Betty is a a professor of English from Douane college in the USA, Every other year Betty takes a trip across Africa with a class of her students from the college. They travel from Kenya all the way to Cape Town in a minibus. Betty has been staying with us since 1995 and is a much loved by all the staff at Njaya!

I think Betty is on her 6th visit to Njaya and her book has a chapter all about Njaya!

Her writing is wonderful and really captures to spirit of the people, She describes Simon our wonderful grandfatherly waiter ;

"If its possible that a person can smile perpertually, Simon,who works at Njaya was the evidence. He is four feet three and the top most inches come from hair, receding from the forehead, greying at the temples, and growing up in all directions from the crown. I coudn't geuess how old he was- 40, 50, 60 depending on whether age or the smile was the origins oh his wrinkles"

She goes on to tell wonderful stories about the place and people, Gilbert, John, Android, Emily, dixon and the rest of the Gang.

Here's a review

“A professional memoir written by a brilliant teacher and a compassionate traveler.”—Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner and the coauthor of What Becomes You

“I think I get it,” Betty Levitov’s youngest student said, sitting on a porch in Harare, Zimbabwe. “You’ve had a potentially fatal disease, and faced death, and now you’ll do just about anything.” The student was trying to fathom why a teacher would take thirteen kids from a small midwestern liberal arts college on a three-month trek across Africa.

The answer, a learning experience like no other, unfolds in Levitov’s thoroughly engaging account of her life-changing stint as a mwalimu (“teacher” in Swahili) with an Australian bus driver and thirteen college kids from Nebraska in tow. The group’s wanderings take them—and us—through seven countries. Through dhow trips and donkey rides on the Swahili island of Lamu, scuba diving and spice tours in Zanzibar, camping in the Namib Desert, and swimming on the edge of a cataract at Victoria Falls, we encounter remarkable people, new customs, and intriguing arts (along with malaria, flat tires, a bike accident, and a hostage crisis). As the students apprentice themselves to African cooks, fishermen, carvers, and batik artists, we discover with them a subtle and complex connection among people normally worlds apart.