Mission Rabies Tanzania 2025 - The Halftime Show

Arnold Plotnick
Dec 21, 2025
2 min read

Thursday, Oct 2 / Friday, Oct 3

Week one is in the books, and the numbers are looking good. Last year’s team managed about 4,400 dogs in two weeks. We’ve already hit 2,400 in just one week. If we keep this pace, we’ll top 4,800. Not that it’s a competition… but it’s hard not to feel good when the bar gets nudged a little higher.

This post won’t be a long one, because while most of my fellow volunteers headed off on the classic two-day safari (the unofficial halftime show of Mission Rabies), I stayed behind. No lions, no elephants — just peace and quiet.

I listened to my audiobook. I caught up on a podcast. I actually read an entire magazine without distraction (unless you count the beautiful bird songs that have been the soundtrack here). I wandered up to the produce market, where I waved hello again to the woman whose photo I took last year — I’d given her a print earlier this week, and she remembered me. Small town charm.

Meals were low-key: a surprisingly good pizza with Fran on Thursday night, breakfast together Friday morning. Lunch was supposed to be prepared for us in the dining room, but the staff forgot. They were mortified; we shrugged it off and headed to the Tanz Hands café instead. Honestly, no complaints. The couches there are dangerously comfortable, the sandwich and fries hit the spot, and I ended up sinking into a corner couch with my magazine for the afternoon.

The most “productive” thing I managed? Finally getting all my photos edited. So, while I don’t have safari shots of my own, I’m raiding our communal WhatsApp group for this post, and maybe a few from the safaris I went on in 2021 and 2023. The other volunteers have been generous with their images, and the animals they spotted were just too good not to share. Not sure if I’ll post the video of the hippopotamus spraying diarrhea everywhere. I do have standards.

Enjoy the safari through their lenses — while I enjoyed a safari of another kind: two blissfully quiet days with books, food, and a couch that was nearly as comfortable as my bed.