A Day of New Experiences

Sunday, January 8, 2012

It’s Ciara’s birthday!!!  Two years ago Ciara spent her birthday in the Brazilian Amazon on an SMC Jan Term trip and now this one turned out to be equally spectacular and memorable.  See more on this subject further down in the post. 

And in other important news we actually uploaded text and pictures from camp this morning!  Might be a Sunday usage thing, but maybe we have found a way through the hassles of internet connectivity.

We headed off for church after breakfast with Wilson, the leader of the village where we are doing our water work.  He told us that church was 45 minutes away so we were bracing ourselves for a much longer walk because we have noticed that Tanzanians’ sense of a short easy walk sometimes differs from ours.  In this case, though, Wilson had asked us to leave early to give us time to meet the pastor, cool off and catch our breath before church.  We got there about 20 minutes early and wandered the grounds a bit before the service began.

Wilson sat us in the front few pews so we were quite noticeable in our presence there.  As is often the case when attending services in country other than one’s own, we noticed that much of the structure of the service felt familiar even if we didn’t understand what was being said. 

Two things that were different for us, though, were 1) much of the service was sung in a call and response manner and 2) the singing was more awesome than most that we have heard in churches back home.  As for the first point, we loved the song-and-chant based approach to the service, as it helped us enjoy it even more than we might have based on the fact that we don’t speak Swahili.  And on the second point, the singing was truly incredible.  Perhaps the key to the fabulousness of the sound was that each singer clearly was singing with all of his or her heart.  So even though the church was not completely full, it sounded as if it were.  It truly inspired awe in us to hear the music in church today. 

There were a couple of sermons that went right over our heads and then the pastor called our host Wilson up to the front to introduce us.  He brought Jesse and Shawny up with him and Jesse gave a short speech in Swahili about who we are, what we are doing here, and how warm our welcome has been.  The whole congregation got really excited about our group and especially about Jesse’s speech.  They cheered and went nuts when he finished, even throwing in a bit of ululation to express their enthusiasm.  It was a blast. 

When the service ended everyone filed outside and formed a big arc around the main door and staircase of the church.  We couldn’t figure out what was going on and when someone came to the front of the crowd with a live chicken we started to get nervous.  Happily, it turned out that some members of the congregation make their weekly offerings in the form of goods instead of cash and those goods are auctioned off at the end of the service.  Besides the chicken there were different sets of eggs that went up for sale and some large stalks of sugar cane, among other items.  Wilson bought some eggs for Shawny and Jesse then Jesse bought some sugar cane for Wilson.  We bought more sugar cane in honor of Ciara’s birthday and then hiked home through the cornfields. 

In deference to our hosts, we reluctantly decided not to work today.  They knew that we wanted to work but they convinced us that our local co-workers would not be enthusiastic about giving up their Sunday to continue the job.  We therefore decided to take a hike over the hill to Simon’s family home, which also serves as a place for explorers, tourists and visitors to stay as they make their way through the Kilimanjaro region. 

It turns out that Simon’s place is perhaps one of the most beautiful places we will ever see in our whole lives, no matter where we have already been or where we might go.  His patio overlooks a beautiful ravine where we got to frolic in a swimming hole that involved a jump off of a big rock and a swim under a waterfall. 

After our swim we ventured back up to the house for coffee grown and roasted right on the grounds and a very special treat: a birthday cake for Ciara!  For those back home, a birthday cake might sound like a trite (and predictable) move to make but here it is an exotic delicacy that is rarely seen.  Cooks don’t necessarily know how to make them but someone on Simon’s staff figured it out.  They came around the corner singing “Happy Birthday” and we all joined in.  Eating birthday cake from this amazing overlook in the foothills of Kilimanjaro was a fabulous treat for all of us. 

We all came back really, really tired.  We ate a late dinner, watched the videos that teams miraculously managed to produce over the last few days (still to be posted) and headed for bed early-ish (for us).  Tomorrow we get back to the worksite, as there are many more holes to dig!

Dennis showing his pictures to one of our new friends.

Fresh water crab

Mt. Kilimanjaro peeking through the clouds

Sap oozing from a tree

The finer things in life (freshly roasted and ground coffee at Simon's farm)

 Another view of the waterfall on the way to Simon's parents home

Cows laying around watching the kids run around

Girls from Simon's village were playing on the lawn

Little village boys on the side of the road

 Some more children from Simon's village

The entrance to Simon's parents home

The kids wanted to follow Josh and Kyle all the way back to camp

The natural pool we jumped into to cool off in the Tanzanian heat

Trevor, Lily, and Dennis after they jumped into the cold water

A chicken being sold after Church to raise money

Heading back to camp after Church

Claire making many new friends on our walk back to camp

Starting the Project!

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Finally the beginning of our project has arrived!  Our camp was the rally point for our group, some of the community leaders that we have met and the students that are joining us on-site over the next few days.   They joined us for a fabulous breakfast that included our regular daily porridge along with bananas and mangos, sponge-y pancakes and bacon. 

The leader of the village was in charge of getting the group from our camp to the worksite and we took a slightly different route this time that cut through a cornfield, crossed a bridge in a beautiful valley and rose up again before leading us to the edge of the source that we are here to protect.  There were 40 or so postholes “pegged” (or “staked” as we might say) and our job was to dig holes in those 40 spots using picks, shovels, weighted flat blades and our own bare hands.  We have many more than 40 holes to dig, as you can see in the question and answer section below.  

Though we only arrived at the site at about 10:00 a.m. Tanzanian time, by noon we could see that we would easily finish those holes today.  There were glitches galore, including the fact that we hit some monstrous roots as we delved below the surface of the ground and that several trees had to be significantly reduced to make it possible for the fence to follow a relatively straight line.  On both of these points we deferred to the locals and their excellent (if intimidating) machete work.  They would climb the tree barefoot, take a few well-placed hacks at the offending vegetation and bring down huge sections of tree that smashed down to the road. 

Once the limbs hit, the locals scrambled to claim and sort the wood.  We discovered later that this wood was their compensation for volunteering to help us.  A few small skirmishes broke out as ownership rights of the wood got established but things were pretty orderly considering that the amount of available wood jumped exponentially in just the few hours that we were working on our postholes. 

We got along great with the locals and learned that we REALLY surprised them today with our hard work.  Before we worked together, they seemed to think that we were good people but not necessarily strong and disciplined people.  Now they would add those two descriptions to us as well. 

We actually finished 43 holes by the time we stopped for our late lunch and because the locals wanted to knock off for the day, so did we.  Some of the school boys came back to camp with us to eat and play cards while different ones of us joined them as we also took showers and did hand laundry. 

We are feeling very at home here and our routines are starting to take shape.  For the veterans of trips gone by, the most surprising change so far is that everyone seems to wake up on his or her own without an assist from Shawny.  Even without wakeups, everyone is up by 7:30 or so. 

Tomorrow we will attend church in the village where we are working and we will do another series of introductions and explanations of what we are doing.  We will see what the rest of the day brings and try to post more pictures, videos, and text to let you know.  Thanks again for your support!

_____

And before we close off our post today, we would like to answer questions posed by our third grade friends at Southwestern Elementary in Hanover, Indiana:

1.  How big is the spring and the area around the spring that you are protecting with the fence?  (Derrick, age 9)

Great question, Derrick!  We should have answered that one already.  But to answer it, we will have to give you a math assignment because Tanzania uses the metric system to measure distances.  (Maybe this assignment is better for the sixth graders of Happy Hollow Elementary in West Lafayette, Indiana, who are also out there following us.)  The fence will be 330 meters long with posts approximately every three meters.  We have already figured out how long the fence is in feet and how many posts we need.  Your class can have your teacher help you figure out these numbers so you can know the same things that we know.  (Special note: we need more posts than the math equation might predict, as at corners and ends of the fence we need to double the posts.  Get as close as you can and then we will tell you in the coming days how many we really needed.)

2. We want to see more pictures of bugs please!!!  (Kadin, age 9)

Don't worry, Kadin!  There will be plenty of pictures of bugs (and eventually lots of animals).  Trevor might be your best supplier of bug shots, so we will make sure he keeps them coming!

3. We know you wake up with bells, but what time do you go to bed?  (Foster, age 9)

We don't necessarily get out of bed when the bells ring, as they ring between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning.  Everyone usually awakens by 7:30 at the latest (which is 11 hours different from our usual California time).  We eat breakfast at 7:30 and then leave around 8:30 or 9:00 for our work project.  As for bed time, it varies with each individual.  We make sure that it is possible for everyone to get eight hours of sleep, so people go to bed between 10:00 and 12:00 at night.  Because we are camping in tents, we have few lights at night, which means we operate mostly by headlamps once it gets really dark.  So far no one but Shawny has stayed up past midnight but maybe people will start staying up later now that we have caught up on our sleep from our long trip.

The reason people stay up late at night is that they are working on photos, videos, or other parts of this blog.  We have a small room that is like a little hut that has electricity, so four or five people can sit in there and do our media while others sleep.

4.  Do you plan on climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro?  (Evan, age 8)

Sadly, we will not climb to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, even though we are probably all capable of making it to the top.  It takes about six days to do the hike, which is mostly a matter of endurance as climbers carry heavy packs up and up and up for four or five of those days then down for either one or two.  (Remember before when we said that Simon had made it up and back in only nine hours?  Now do you see why that counts as a long-standing world record?)

Instead of spending six days climbing the mountain, we are going to spend those days working in the community around us.  At the end of our trip we are going to take a break from work, though, and go on a four-day safari.  We think you will really like to see our pictures and descriptions of that experience.

Thanks, Southwestern!  Keep those questions coming!

Alicia posing for the camera at the site.

Amelia posing for mom.

Dennis digging one of the many holes we dug today.

Claire playing with one of the children.

Everyone watching as the huge branch falls to the road.

Local woman carrying branches and leaves down the road on her head.

Moth in the forest where we were working.

One of the local children took a picture of Scotchy.

One of the villagers in the tree helping to cut down branches.

Our work today included clearing some trees to make room for the new fence.

The river we hiked on our shortcut to work.

Walking to work.

Getting it Together

Friday, January 6, 2012

As our readers can plainly see, our blog is a bit of a scattered mess.  We apologize for the clutter, but we also celebrate the fact that we have gotten anything at all to send to a place where you can see it!  It’s taken quite a few attempts to find a way to do so and even in the place where we have managed to have some success, it takes multiple tries to accomplish what we are trying to do.  Thus, we upload things and they may or may not show up, but when they do, we don’t touch them, even if they are out of order, as we don’t want to threaten the delicate balance that is allowing us to reach from our sweet and humble campground in Africa to the rest of the world. 

As some of our long-time followers know, we are making daily videos.  We just figured out yesterday how to get those to post but we didn’t have everything we needed with us to make it happen.  Sometime this weekend we will make another attempt to get them onto the blog but we will warn you that we have saved them at a rather low resolution to make it easier to upload them; we have higher quality ones stored on our hard drives so hopefully we will replace the ones we are posting now once we return to California.

One more technological note: for those family members and other loved ones that have communicated with us via our global cellphones, we need to let you know that calls and texts need to come to the numbers that we distributed before we departed.  Apparently the number that you see when you receive a text from us is not necessarily connected to our actual phones.  Thus, if you text one of those numbers we might get your text but we might not.  We are very sorry for the confusion here, but – as noted above – we feel very fortunate that there is a way for us to connect with you from here at all.   Thanks for your patience as we try to understand our options. 

So, now, back to our day.  We got our temperature problems figured out in the night (mostly) and we have quickly settled into absorbing and appreciating the sounds of our surroundings.  The morning bells seem quieter already, with many of us saying that we didn’t hear them at all.

This morning started before 6:00 a.m. as the sun was rising.  We noticed through some trees from our camp that the usually cloud-covered top of Kilimanjaro was clear and unobstructed so we walked up the road a bit to get the clearest view of it that we could achieve.  Hopefully you saw some of our pictures of it from yesterday’s post. 

We are surrounded by such immense and intense beauty that it is difficult to transcend the awe that we feel as we take in all that we see every day.  However, a natural wonder such as Mount Kilimanjaro can take us to an entirely different level and those of us who took in the sunrise view of Kili today felt it somewhere deep within our aesthetic souls.

Today was an unusual “in-between” day as we are sure what we are about to do but we are not yet getting started on doing it.  The reason we needed to wait to begin is that we need to make sure we have buy-in from all of the relevant constituencies in the surrounding area.  Simon has been very diligent in connecting us with local leaders, including Council members, village leaders, doctors, teachers, students, local residents and members of the Rotary Club that is our main connection into this community. 

Today, then, we waited for a quite awhile to figure out what the next steps of the project should be.  A few of us made a run to a very slow internet café to try to get the blog posted and had minimal success.  We also stopped at a supply store to get some lumber to build the frame for the water purification system that we will install in Himo.  We can’t build the stand for the solar panel yet, as we don’t know what kind of roof we will encounter at the site.  We will adjust angles and orientation of the panel on-site and build that component there. 

Eventually, a few local leaders arrived at the camp and Simon joined us to help facilitate a conversation in which we could express our desire to form a relationship with our neighbors and to help them complete a project that they have long hoped would materialize.  The leaders today represent the school nearest our worksite and the village itself.  They gave speeches of introduction and asked us to do the same; then we asked questions of each other that all demonstrated our mutual respect and enthusiasm for the project.  As our meeting was winding down, some more guests arrived: students from the local secondary school.  Ranging in age from 14-16, they shyly introduced themselves and told us about their favorite subjects in school.  They will join us on our project and we will visit their school when it resumes classes next week. 

After the community meetings were finished, a small subset of us (the video team for the day, Shawny, Jesse and Lily) headed down the hill a bit to attend a Rotary Club meeting and introduce ourselves there as well.  We were in the presence of a former Member of Parliament, a retired ambassador to the United Nations, the wife of the former King, and a number of other impressive civic-minded folks, including Simon.  We got to talk about our project, our prior work at other locations and our reasons for choosing Tanzania as this year’s site for our January work.  They were very warm and welcoming and they expressed excitement about our presence here and about the project that we are supporting. 

The hotel where the club meets is also the place where we finally achieved internet success so we will see how often we can make our way down there to post more entries to our blog.  It will be very exciting to see what our readers think of our experiences here so we encourage you to post comments when you can. 

Thanks again for your support and your patience.  We remain happy and very excited about our experiences here so far.  Please keep checking back; hopefully our entries will become more regular soon!

Our first days

We are having huge problems with internet access so we are posting as much as we can today.  We will keep trying.  

Thursday, January 5

Well, guess what?  At night, in Tanzania, it gets . . . um . . . kind of cold!  Some of us were ready for this possibility, some of us weren’t.  Thus, there was a small amount of silent suffering, a flurry of nervous giggling, then an all-out frenzy to find every warm thing in our bags to help the ones who were freezing combat the chill.  It worked well enough to get through the night and now we will take some strategic action today to reduce the pain.

We will also need to get used to the sounds of the African night as well.   No hyena howls or monkey calls, but lots of birds and insects whose sounds we have never heard before.  Also, there are Islamic calls to prayer that start with the ringing of bells at 4:00 a.m. or so and then recur at least once before we would have otherwise agreed to awaken.  We are going to try to commit to awakening when the bells toll, thinking thoughts of gratitude or blessing, then going back to sleep.  But we might find ourselves struggling to do something other than complain. 

If we need something to complain about, we can focus on the roosters.  It’s cute and all to have the rural experience of hearing a rooster’s cock-a-doodle-doo, but the roosters here don’t understand the concept of waiting until sunrise to start making their noises.  Thus, they do their thing almost all night long and we will have to just adjust to it, as there is no way those roosters are going to get quiet any time soon. 

Our main job of the day was to survey the layout of our water protection project.  We went with Simon and a local council member, an architect, and a retired doctor to see the water source and get a feel for how the fence will improve the water situation for those who live close by and for the 30,000 or so beneficiaries of the spring that live downhill.  The water source is about 2.5 kilometers (just over a mile and a half) from our camp, meaning that walking to and from work every day will be about a three mile trek.  It involves both uphill and downhill portions, all of which are surrounded by beautiful visual imagery that we are thrilled to encounter.

We got to walk with Simon and learn tons of information about his life, his family, and life in Tanzania in general.  Because we are hurrying to make this blog post, we can’t pass all of our great new insights along but we will try to incorporate them into our pictures and videos in the coming days.  Sorry we have been so slow to post but we are finally working about our technical issues (we hope) so we can catch up soon. 

Let us wrap up this post by mentioning that we are all in a state of total euphoria.  We love the atmosphere, we love the food (more on this later), we love the people we are meeting (or just passing along the road), we love each other (luckily) and we just plain love the awesome experience of being in Africa.  No sickness yet, no injuries, and no problems at all.  Thanks for checking our blog.  Please check back as we improve our entries in the coming days (we hope!)

Wednesday, January 4

Special note:  We are having big problems with internet access at our camp.  We are posting today’s entries from an internet café that is a taxi ride away and if things work, we might have to use that method to post our entries for the whole trip.  Sorry for the delays; we will keep trying.  Also, we will work to improve picture quality but for now we are trying to post them in their smallest visible form. 

And now to our blog:

Though we left SMC on Sunday morning, we didn’t arrive at our Tanzanian home until Wednesday afternoon.  Let us begin by saying that we are safe, we are happy, we are tired, and we are THRILLED with all that we have seen since our arrival at the Kilimanjaro airport. 

Our trip over was a 35-hour saga with close connections and lots of sleepless hours, but who cares?   WE ARE IN AFRICA AND WE LOVE IT!!!!  We shared a plane with another SMC group venturing to Ethiopia and parted ways with them as they disembarked at Addis Ababa.  We flew on to Tanzania and stepped out into the 90-plus degree weather full of curiosity and high expectations.  Our curiosity continues and our expectations have definitely been exceeded. 

We made our way through visas and customs with the small glitch that a couple of our guys had forgotten their immunization records and therefore got shots on the spot at the airport.  We piled our massive loads of luggage onto two vans and then made our way through the city of Moshi, where we stopped and exchanged currency and drank mango nectar before heading up to the base of Kilimanjaro to find our African home.  We are in Marangu, not far from Moshi. 

And we must say that our African home is PARADISE!  It is verdant and green and fully equipped with everything we need, including showers and flush toilets, plenty of room for our tents, and a sweet and wonderful cooking crew that is helping to teach us Swahili.  The only things that are not perfect are our access to electricity (we get about 12 hours a day, but there is no predicting which hours they will be) and our access to the internet (we have it, but it is so slow that we can barely stay awake while waiting for any page to load.  Opening an email takes about ten minutes or so and we haven’t even tried to send one yet). 

We also met our primary host, Simon, who is an exceptional and impressive person that, among other things, holds the world record for the fastest trek up and down Kilimanjaro (up and down in approximately nine hours!).  He lives near us in Marangu and he runs the expedition company that has arranged our upcoming four-day safari farther West in Tanzania.  Additionally, he is an officer in the Rotary Club chapter here, the focus of which is community service to improve quality of life. 

Simon has already helped us reach a massive awakening about what we are doing here.   We had told him long ago that we are not interested in imposing any ideas on his community but we are hopeful that we can help the community achieve some priority that it has already established.  We have carefully established our approach to development work through our readings and retreats in the fall.  Along the way, we have been communicating with Simon and his colleagues to get a sense of the ideas that they are most interested in pursuing, without asking them to commit to any particular project until after our arrival. 

At the same time, we were learning introductory information about Tanzanian history, culture, religion, etc., as well as different theorists’ explanations of why development efforts are often ineffective.  We found all of these lessons coming together in our conversation with Simon. 

He told us of the ongoing water problems that the Marangu community faces, including the reduction of the snowcap on Kilimanjaro, the lack of civic infrastructure to provide safe tapwater, and the tendency for people to use waterways as dumping grounds.  The combination of these three issues has led the community to declare an unusual top priority: fence the area around the water source.  The source is an underwater spring and the area around it is being overly utilized to harvest firewood, to discard unwanted goods and to make use of the available natural resources in a range of other ways.  This particular spring flows down to provide water for about 30,000 people and – perhaps most importantly – to serve as the primary source of drinking water for five schools, including three secondary schools and two primary schools.  The need for the water in those schools to be as safe as it can be is the motivation for the community’s focus on this project.

Of course, we struggled at first to embrace the idea of dropping a fence into the forest in this beautiful place, but the more we learned the more excited we got.  The water at this site is coming out of a natural underground spring and counts as “good water” here and it is preferable to the other sources that people downstream might use.  Simon and his colleagues have already built some of the fences like the one we will build in smaller areas and they have seen remarkable improvement in three ways: 1) the areas around those water sources are cleaner and less polluted with litter and other things, 2) the vegetation has recovered from overcutting, and 3) the water flow downstream has actually increased dramatically, mostly because the increase in shade at the source has reduced evaporation, the main cause of water depletion. 

Though all of this is quite difficult to explain, we can assure you that hearing it from the leaders of the community and then walking the terrain to see how the plan would unfold makes the project quite appealing.  In fact, for most of us, this discussion on the first day was an extremely moving experience.  Again, we have spent the entire fall trying to learn how to approach this experience in a spirit of true collaboration rather than as “rescuers” who are “saving” our hosts from some difficult situation.  Instead, we aspired to immerse ourselves in the community as much as possible as quickly as possible, and now this project seems like the perfect opportunity to make those things happen. 

As some of our readers may know, we intend to install a water purification system in a different local community.  We brought a solar-powered system created by our friends at AquaSun International and donated by long-time supporters of our Jan Term travel experiences, Karl and Mary Beutner.  We expected to install the system on our first workday here, but we have to wait for the proper battery to arrive from another nearby city.  That system will help overcome the problems that contaminated water cause for school children in a small community lower down the mountain.  We will report on that project later in our trip.  

Here are some pictures taken by each group.

The Colors of Nature

Simple Beauty

The sun rises as the rooster crows.

 Bee pollinating a flower and keeping the Circle of Life going.

Local school

 Mount Kilimanjaro

Enjoying our breakfast at camp

The Tree of Life

 Junior and Gabriel, two kids hanging out with us at the worksite

Loading the van in Tanzania

Beetle Bug - Matt snapped a shot of this beetle as he was walking back to camp.

Joeseph and Mount Kilimanjaro

This morning at 6 am Joesph walked a few of us to a nearby school so we could get our first look at Mount Kilimanjaro. Here, Joesph looks toward the snow covered peak.

Mount Kilimanjaro
This is Mount Kilimanjaro, only visible at 6 am and 6pm when there is no haze.

Near by local school

This is the water source we will be protecting with the fence.

 Fence - This is a fence surrounding the seciond water source, this will serve as a proto-type for the fence we will build.

Hello! - This is a boy we met on our walk to the work site.

Walking to a water source that is already protected by a cement fence.

Walking above water.

Our fearless leader, Gabe.

Simon - Simon showing us the already protected source.

Walking to the worksite

 Local home on the way to the worksite

One of the kids we met along the way.

Trail to the worksite

Hanging out during our downtime at camp

All of our luggage sitting in the middle of camp

The airport we arrived in in Marangu

Filling out forms for our travel visas

An 'I love Tanzania' bumper sticker

Gabe and Lily sitting together in the bus

Putting all of our luggage into the vans to head to camp.

Waiting to get into our buses

Riding to Moshi in the bus

Almost Ready!

December 16, 2011

Finals are over at Saint Mary's and we have completed our last overnight retreat in Hagerty Lounge on campus.  Today was our media crash course, where we put together a video about our rain capture/transfer system and then each team made a video about itself.  We hope you enjoy the posts and we hope you return in January to follow our travels in Tanzania!  See you in January!

But for now, check out our teams and our project at the garden.

Here's our rain capture/transfer project:

Here is Klachi: Erin, Ciara, Trevor, and Kyle!  (Kyle, sadly, was unavailable for filming . . .)

Here is Ndizi Mbivu: Zoe, Darcy, Scott, and Matt!  (Matt is studying in Copenhagen, so his team made the best of it . . .)

Here is Team Chatu: Amelia, Claire, Dennis, and Alec!  ("Chatu" means "python," in case you are wondering.)

Here is Team Kaimati: Hilary, Josh, Gabe, and Lily!