There are some amazing artists in Tanzania. So on my day off I commissioned them to do some Genki English artwork! 🙂

Today was my (only) day off!! Yeah!! It was also the first night I’d slept as I’d changed rooms. And what a day off it was!

After breakfast we all got picked up in jeeps and taken to the Marine National Park. I’d come through here last week so it was cool to go back and actually get on a wooden boat and out into the sea.

Snorkeling was the first stop and it was amazing in the Indian Ocean. Like Guam or Cairns there were so many fish, but being with the team from this week made it all the more special. Hanging out with both the US and Tanzanian volunteers this week has been fantastic and something I hadn’t expected. They’ve welcomed me into their meals, their classes, games of Party Words and generally been really, really cool people.  Thank you!

So then we went and hung out on a huge sandbank for lunch. Sails up to protect us from the sun and a meal of fresh mango, boiled eggs and bananas, which tasted a whole lot better than it sounds.

We got to chill out after a long week, before the journey home.

But even better than that, as we were getting the boats I spotted a couple of local artists selling their paintings. I collared in my mate Kita to do some Swahili translation and I commissed them to do some Genki English African Animals – in African style!

And when we came back from the boat they were all done and they looked really, really cool! We’d been trying to find some African artists to do some new pictures, and here they were right on the doorstep.

The thing is that this wasn’t digital, this was all paint on canvas, real canvas, that they had to dry! So we had a landrover full of volunteers all carrying back wooden framed canvas paintings which we then had to march across the sands back to the camp. Not your everyday Sunday afternoon!

Let’s see how they go, if they test well I might get them to do some more.  What do you think?