Fake Wedding Rings And Fictitious Children
….in my attempts to mitigate these harassments, I started putting one of my rings on my ring fingers. Believe it or not, it has been a game-changer. I can finally walk a block without random men yelling for my attention. You should seriously see me be obnoxiously loud about my fake husband…
It’s Ramadan! Invite me for iftar? I already have the shoes #CROCS
….because I’m a grown woman (lol! deep down I really do wish someone would buy me a dress for Eid lol!), I'm settling for these new crocs. You can also shop the Crocs Ramadan collection at #Footsteps, and then we can be twinning and iftar hopping in style lol! JK JK - but seriously, get the #crocs.
Living on a $400 income as a fun-loving human in Dar es Salaam
…..let’s talk about this budget thing, shall we! So, the whole point of a budget to me is to manage and spend my money in a way that lets me 👏 live 👏 my 👏 best 👏 life! And that looks different for everyone so, you need to figure out what that looks like for you and pick any budgeting method out there to help you get to that goal. I just happen to use the zero-based budgeting method. The whole concept of a zero-based budget is to make sure that by the end of each budgeting period your income minus expenses equals zero. This ensures that each one of your $ is accounted for, which is especially important when you only have $435 of them to go around 😂.
$70,000 a year degree for $400 wages
Let me start by addressing the title of this post. Yes, $70,000 a year is actually how much my degree cost 😂. And it was actually a 4-year degree so that’s a total of $280,000 give or take. That’s not even counting the $30,000 a year high school I went to for two years. Before you assume I’m some sort of billionaire’s baby -or sugar baby- let me disclose the fact that I’m a proud -poor African- scholarship baby. Now, do I sometimes wish someone could have given me that money to start a business with instead? Totally, yes! But were these academic experiences worth it? Absolutely!
Coming as I am - in my Crocs of course
Few that last: the Rowdy sling bag
Lately, I’ve been so adamant about owning a few things that will last me a long time. I've been paying attention to a lot of talks around fashion waste and decided to transition into being a conscious consumer. Living out of my suitcase may have something to do with that decision but I really am determined to reduce the amount of fabric waste I personally produce. This has come to mean reducing the number of items I own so I am building a capsule wardrobe full of items that will last and I will love forever.
Postcards from Zanzibar
Zanzibar! Can you believe this was my first time in Zanzibar? Wow, I am slacking. But not anymore, I am determined to travel within this country and this continent from now on… starting with this city that is so close to home yet so far off my reach -or so I thought.
Knew Music from a legend in the making, Sir Damini Ogulu a.k.a Burna Boy
…Sir Damini Ogulu -the dude has earned the title in my books- preaches in this album! He says, “you were African before you became anything else” in Spiritual. That statement is practically a middle finger to anything that creates hyphenated African-ness. From Inferiority complexes to systemic oppression.
Urban babe in the bush
… here I am, 6 years later, overlooking the Serengeti plains from my office window. I knew my hundreds-of-thousand-dollar-degree would take me places, but I did not imagine it would bring me to a job in the Serengeti.
Yet here I am, an urban babe in the bush!
Haas Coffee
Haas Coffee comes highly recommended on Google. It is indeed a beautiful and cosy coffee shop and, I am sure their coffee is great. I lie. I am not sure. I wouldn't know because I don’t drink coffee 😂.
That is why this post isn’t about coffee. It is about tea. Chai tea to be exact. So, what’s my verdict on their chai?
KAUAI South Africa
Oh KAUAI! You are an absolute fairytale for a foodie on a diet. Can you already tell I love KAUAI?
For those who do not know it, KAUAI is a chain restaurant in South Africa that has the mission “to make healthy eating easy and accessible.” Their menu is seasonal so it is always super fresh and try as hard as possible to use organic and non-GMO foods.
One year of blogging
Listen, it’s been a while since I’ve written here and I can bore you with excuses or I can just pretend like I’ve been here all along and tell you about what I wanna talk about.
I say it as if you have a choice lol😂 I’ll just get on with it!
Café Aroma
First week back home in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and best believe it I am already Chai finding!
The heat in Dar es Salaam is unbearable at the moment so we are all in an everlasting search for the shade and/or air conditioning. Coffee shops are a great place to find both a shade and free air conditioning in Dar es Salaam. So, I just had to enter the first one I could find. Close to where I stay is Cafe Aroma. Any trip to a coffee shop is a chance to try a fresh Chai and today was not going to be any different.
MUD aka Mudspot
In October, my work took me to New York. New York! The city of lights! Such a fave! Though there are many things to do in New York, this was not the trip for it. Like I said, I was here for work. So, the least I could do in the few days that I was there was to Chai find, and I did. I found Chai at MUD aka Mudspot.
Chai Diaries: An Introduction
Chai, the Swahili word for tea is perhaps the third most popular Swahili phrase next to “Hakuna Matata” and “Jambo.” The reason for the word’s popularity is that there is an Indian spiced tea that has taken over coffee shops worldwide also called Chai.
Being a tea fanatic and coffee shop lover, it was only a matter of time until I stumbled upon this drink.
Battling with anxiety and depression in your 20s
To my family if you are reading this, please do not freak out, I promise I am fine, alive and breathing.
It’s been almost two years since I first self-diagnosed depression, yet, I am still healing. I have fallen in and out of depression since then, but I have also become better at helping myself heal. Though I am going through yet another rough patch, I thought I should still share my self-care methods with you.
On hair and spirituality
If you had been following my birthday month countdown (which you should have. Jokes, do whatever you want 😂 ) you would have noticed that a lot of it was reflection notes. I wanted to sum it all up with one more reflection on two things that I have been thinking about critically recently. When I initially drafted this post, it was titled Birthday Reflections. Birthday, because I specifically wanted to conceal my age. Age is one of those things that breeds a lot of insecurities in me... it is quite up there with language and financial status, but I shall not get into those. However, let me tell why age is one that causes so much anxiety in me.
Road trip-ing in South Africa
By the time you are reading this, I would have had a great Easter with one of my best friends in Johannesburg, come back home from a week-long road trip, and had a whole week of classes. That’s right! I went on a road trip! I flew to Johannesburg, spent Easter there and then drove (well someone drove) all the way back down to Cape Town.
A symposium, a period and a worldwide web surfing session later
Hi, lovelies!
I missed you on Friday but I promise it was for a good cause. I spent the whole day on Friday at the Dreaming Feminist Futures Symposium and didn't get a chance to post here. I promise not to make a habit of this but this was not one to miss. Although I do not have any pictures or anything visual to share with you, I have a whole entire Journal. Each year the Africa Gender Institute hosts a themed symposium like this and with it, they release a new issue of Feminist Africa. This year's issue is the 22nd one and it is titled Feminists Organising - Strategy, Voice, Power. I am so excited to indulge in the readings and I hope you will too.
Postcards from Touws River
Hi loves! This past weekend the ISA Program, which I am a part of, arranged a weekend getaway to the Aquila Private Game Reserve. Having grown up in Tanzania, I was naturally sceptic of this whole trip because my whole student life in Tanzania involved going to national parks so I thought to myself, what could a tiny private reserve offer a girl?