Happy Birthday, Trevor!

Saturday, January 14, 2012           

Today is Trevor’s birthday!  We couldn’t take the whole day off, as there were posts to be set.  So we headed off in the morning to finish off the pile that we have and hope that the last few we need would be delivered while we were there.  They weren’t. 

We only had to sink about seven more but it took quite awhile to do it, partially because we had to move some major piles of materials and partially because we were a little slow after our oversized day yesterday.  We got them all in and when we realized that the new ones weren’t arriving, we decided to go on home and eat lunch, then regroup from there. 

Before leaving, though, we did our traditional “thank you” speeches, with the Tanzanians wrapping up the day first and then our own birthday boy Trevor delivering our collective message of appreciation to our hosts.  Each work day ends with speeches like this and it has become a nice ritual to hear what people will say.

One glitch in the day was that a pole we set yesterday was broken off by a neighbor who chose to cut down a tree very near the post.  The neighbor turned out to be a young person who had been an orphan but who had been taken in by a family in the village.  Somehow the village leaders knew exactly who had cut that specific tree and therefore exactly who was responsible for the broken post.  The “adoptive” father had to come and make a formal apology to all of us for the behavior of his household and we just offered our forgiveness and our willingness to replace the broken post as soon as we can. 

Despite this minor setback, we still had a good work day and even discovered a shortcut that shaved some time off of our long (uphill) walk home.  We lounged around a bit, took showers then went into town to celebrate Trevor’s birthday over dinner at a hotel there.  Our food has been excellent so we were afraid that it might not be worth the bother to eat out, but when plates of fried chicken showed up, we were sold. 

The hotel even came up with a birthday cake for Trevor (actually a “bisthday cake” according to the writing on it), which, as we mentioned before, is quite an undertaking here.  It was not the greatest cake we have ever had, but we all appreciated the effort that the hotel made on our behalf.

We came home just after 10:00 and found the night sky to be so striking and awesome that we set up some speakers on the lawn, dragged air mattresses out and just took it all in for the next two hours or so.  There was a bit of giggling and talking, a bit of conversation about astronomy and astrology and a lot of “ooh’s” and “ah’s,” especially when shooting stars streaked across the sky.  It seems like all of our wishes are coming true here in our African home and even though we miss all of you back in the U.S., we remain very happy here still. 

Tomorrow we need to catch up on laundry, clean the camp, organize missing photos for the blog (assuming we can post, which has gotten more difficult once again) and then go back to Simon’s to swim in the waterfalls there.  Work restarts on Monday.  Stay tuned!

 A Chameleon

 Gabe attempting to take pictures

 Jesse taking a break in the forest

On our way to Trevor's birthday dinner

 Trevor blowing out the candles on his birthday cake!

 One of the little boys at the worksite

 Alec dancing to the drums

 An Avocado tree at Simon's farm

 Simon's coffee

 We finished painting the school!

 Wilson showed us how to grind coffee beans

 Two kids by the worksite eating lunch

 Annnnd Pose

All dressed up and ready to celebrate Trevor's birthday 

 Musician

Amelia and her friend making sweet beats with sticks on a tree

 Nice Hat

Adding a little flavor to the work day with some new accessories

Team Work

Matt and Jackson moving one of the last remaining posts into position

More posts

Friday, January 13, 2012

After a hard day of moving posts yesterday, our plan was to spend all day today painting the school near our camp.  We even let ourselves sleep in for as long as we could (which only turned out to be about 8:00 a.m. at the latest) so that we could get a more leisurely start to our day.  Because we were supposed to be waiting until Saturday for any more posts to arrive, this plan seemed ideal.  As we were having breakfast, though, Simon called to tell us that more posts were arriving in just a couple of hours so we had to shift our plan quickly to make some progress on the school AND get to the fence site to sink more poles. 

We spent the morning at the school all together, finding our way through painting the place when we didn’t have quite enough brushes and rollers for everyone in our group.  We chose bright yellow for the walls with a green “skirt” along the bottom and a lovely sky blue for the front face of the building, on which we had to repair (and cover) some big cracks.  We have some other colors to use on the letters and numbers that will be along the top of the wall but we didn’t get those colors out today at all. 

Even though the schoolhouse has wide open windows all along the walls (when the shutters are open – there is no glass), that much paint being spread in one room makes for some serious fumes.  We had to take regular breaks to get out onto the lawn and just take in some fresh air.  Doing so meant that we got to have a lot of fun watching the whole feel of the space change while applying fresh paint and then we also got to stand around together outside and just talk casually as we removed ourselves regularly from the task at hand.  A lot of our conversations are pretty task-oriented during the day, so it is nice to have times when we are being productive but exploring other topics as well. 

We broke for an early lunch and left a small crew at the school to keep painting with our local consultant Daniel.  The rest of us hurried back to camp, ate, packed a lunch for the school workers and then secured a ride in a truck from one of the camp workers to get ourselves to the fence site faster than we would be able to walk there.  Four people took the lunch to the school and then watched for the truck to come by to drive them down to the site.  The rest piled into the truck bed and started to drive. 

Surprisingly, the truck did NOT drive toward the work site.  All of us in the back had no idea where we were going and even Jesse (in the cab) was a bit confused about why we were heading in the opposite direction of the camp.  We drove on some roads that we haven’t seen in the daylight and eventually found ourselves at the hardware store at the “junction,” which counts as the center of town.  It turned out that the driver knew that we needed more cement at the site so he just had us all ride along to get it. 

The ride was really fun, even if unexpected, but it took about 40 minutes to go to the junction and back, which definitely undermined our plan to get to the worksite quickly by going in a truck.  The four who had walked ahead were totally confused, as the truck just never came by to get them.  They went on to the worksite and got thrown into the task at hand with the locals while everyone waited for the bulk of the group to arrive. 

When the truck finally came, things were in full swing at the site and the goal was to sink as many as possible of the 53 new poles that had arrived.  The biggest obstacle to this goal was that the holes for these new poles were all in the deepest part of the forest and therefore the farthest from the road where the sand, gravel and cement were delivered.  So our first collective job was to establish a concrete-mixing station out in a small clearing to get the mix closer to the places where it would be used.  Doing so meant carrying these heavy materials through the brush, which we did by setting up a long bucket brigade where we dumped buckets of materials into empty concrete bags and passed them down the line. 

Moving literally tons of materials can be quite cumbersome and exhausting, but something about our bucket lines (even when they are bag lines) makes the work kind of lovely.  Everyone is involved almost equally (though certain ones of us have  “bad” spots that involve shoveling the materials into the bucket, lifting the bags from the ground in the first place, operating under intense direct sun exposure or maybe needing a short uphill climb to connect the load to the next person).  Still, we are all in it together and therefore no one complains; we just plug away until the job is done.  We also laugh together and sympathize with each other about the task at hand, which makes the whole potentially awful experience a rather nice one instead. 

There was another Rotary Club meeting tonight so a few of us had to leave early with Simon to go do a progress report there.  The rest stayed to finish all but about seven of the poles, which we will finish Saturday morning, working until the last shipment of posts arrives.  We can see how our jobs are going to unfold over the next few days and we need a clear idea of the trajectory because we leave this area next Saturday to begin our exciting safari.  If we can stay on track, we should easily complete all three jobs in a way that doesn’t leave too much (if anything) for the locals to finish. 

Saturday is Trevor’s birthday so we will work as hard as we can in the daytime but then go into town for a celebration in the evening.  We’ll keep you posted . . .

Amelia painting one of the two doors 

Everyone working together outside

Josh painting the outside of the school 

Kilimanjaro peeking out of the clouds 

The first coat for the outside completed

On the way to the surprise visit to the junction 

One of the kids relaxing in a wheelbarrow

Part of the long road back from the junction

 Scott getting comfortable in the Helix

Wilson taking a much-deserved break

Carrying on

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Thanks for your offers to help pay for some of the projects we are discovering on site here in Tanzania.  We had a budget to cover the main agreements that we made, but we have found several other worthy projects that would benefit from your support.  Here’s how to make a donation if you would like to get involved:

Click on this link:

https://wwws.stmarys-ca.edu/forms/giving-to-saint-marys/make-your-gift/index.html?cid=supporttanzania. 

From there, click on “Direct my Gift to a Specific Area” then select “Other.”  Type “Tanzania Project” into the box under “other” and your gift will be directed into our budget. 

Many thanks for your support, whether financial or otherwise.

Now on to our blog:

Morning arrived a little too early today but it turned out that everyone had gotten a pretty good night’s sleep so we awoke pretty happy anyway.  We actually noticed that there are still dozens of roosters out there making their rooster sounds but we don’t even hear them anymore until after we have awakened.  Our ability to sleep through the night might be challenged tonight, though, as we heard faint sounds of the mongoose in the daylight this evening.  We’ll let you know . . .

(Special note: It is important to say on behalf of Kyle that the animal in question is NOT a mongoose.  He saw it on the night of the big noises and is convinced that whatever it is, it is not a mongoose.  He is no doubt correct but for simplicity’s sake, we are going to continue our mongoose jokes for the rest of our trip – and beyond.)

Today brought two big milestones: 1) we cleared out all of the available materials for the fence (for now) and can’t make any further progress on it until Saturday and 2) we got absolute clarity on our third major project, which is the installation of a water purification system in an area with contaminated water.  Additionally, we made a bit more progress on the nearby schoolhouse and now have it prepped for painting tomorrow (probably all day). 

On the fence project, we thought we had a pretty short job ahead of us, as we had set 27 posts yesterday and only had 23 more available to set today.  Thus, we believed that our newly-acquired skills in post-setting would pay off and help us complete the smaller post pile even more quickly than the larger one from yesterday.  Not true.  For whatever reason, the holes to be filled on these 23 posts were much more daunting than the ones from yesterday, meaning that we spent quite a bit of time retrieving loose rocks from the creekbeds and roadsides to fill each hole while attempting to reduce the amount of concrete to be used.  Carrying around huge buckets and bags of loose stones is an exhausting way to spend the day. 

In addition, today’s posts were inconveniently located away from the dirt road in the thickest stands of trees and brush.  We don’t mind crawling back in there to get to where the posts need to be, but we DO mind trying to get buckets, buckets, and more buckets of concrete into there (not to mention bags of filler rocks and the heavy posts themselves).  We got it done. 

A small subset of us (Shawny, Scott and Trevor) missed the pole-setting today and went to check out a new site in a nearby town called Himo.  There we found a small Catholic school that was established to help address extreme poverty in the region.  The school began as a nursery for underresourced local children but then transitioned into a primary school and is now on the way to incorporating secondary instruction too.  Though it was only established in 2007, it already enrolls more than 550 students. 

All schools (including government ones) bear costs here and private schools are generally considered preferable to public ones.  This school (which has a very long name that includes a reference to Saint Mary) offers education at the same cost as government schools.   The costs include materials, lunch and water for all students.  At present, the school’s water source is a pipe from a tank that captures water coming downstream from near the area where we are building our fence (a different source than the one we are protecting).  Though the original underground spring water would be safe to drink, there are many opportunities for the water to become contaminated before reaching this part of Himo. 

Thus, the current practice is to have a staff member spend all day tending water by boiling it in huge pots (producing 50 gallons a day for the use of more than 500 students), transferring it to a dispensing container and rationing it for student consumption.  The water is boiled through the use of firewood, which unavoidably contributes to continued deforestation of the Kilimanjaro region.  The firewood, of course, requires splitting, which means a second staffer is occupied by keeping the firewood ready for the person to boil the water.  Like many issues here, all of these facets are intertwined in ways that make a complicated situation even more complicated in its interconnection to other problems. 

Thus, this site is an ideal place to receive the solar-powered water purifier that we have carried with us from the U.S.  Donated by Karl and Mary Beutner, the filter will provide as much as 500 gallons a day of pure water for the use of the students and their families.  There are a few extra components that we need to complete the system, including a 2000-liter tank to serve as the input for the filter and steel frames to hold the solar panel and the tank itself.  (We usually build these frames out of wood but pervasive termites here would destroy those frames in less than a year.) 

So to clarify, we are continuing the construction of the fence that will protect an important water source here in Marangu, for the benefit of 30,000 people (including five schools).  We are also working to restore a nearby school so that it can be put into use again.  Finally, we will install a water system in the Catholic school mentioned above to free up their resources and labor in ways other than managing water.  Not bad for a three-week stay . . .

 A book about Indiana (Shawny's home state) at the school in Himo.

Classroom name at the Himo school

The cups for the water at the Himo school

The faucet where the school gets all of its water.

 A broad view of the school

A local boy chillin' in a wheelbarrow

A truck ton of corn

Adorable kid who hangs out with us at the worksite

Alec holding a post to be set.

Zoe and the kids

Josh and Darcy taking a break on a hard day of work

Dennis snapping a photo of some kids during a break

Local boy watching us work

Praying Mantis

Home-made wheelbarrow that we use to move rocks and sand

Setting the posts

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

All quiet on the mongoose front last night.  We hopped up ready to work on our fence project but learned that the truck carrying the fenceposts had broken down and that they were not delivered this morning after all.  We immediately shifted gears and sent a crew off to buy the things we need to help us spruce up the small one room schoolhouse nearby.  We bought cleaning supplies and paint, having gotten the okay to apply the color that Lily chose for the interior: yellow.  

Once we got organized with our new purchases (sort of) we sent a small crew to the school to clean and prep it for painting while the rest waited until we heard that the posts had finally arrived and hurried down the hill to start setting them into our freshly-dug holes. 

A good number of the village volunteers on this project were on site when we arrived, moving the heavy concrete posts into position and setting up the components to mix concrete.  We organized the first of many bucket brigades to move rocks from one place to another (mostly uphill, of course), to get water to the mix point and to move the concrete itself up to where it was needed.  We love our bucket brigades because they mean we all get to work and no one’s burden is too awful to bear.

We are glad to be getting to the bulk of the fence project and we are equally glad that we have another place (the school) to put in some productive time.  We have had painful amounts of downtime in the last couple of days, which is just not our style.

It is our style, though, to answer questions from the third graders in Mrs. Hamilton’s class at Southwestern Elementary School in Hanover, Indiana.  Here are their most recent questions and our answers:

1.     Have you seen any snakes, and will you take pictures of them? Travis, age 8 and Zane, age 8

We have not seen any snakes yet.  If we do, we will definitely try to get pictures.

2. Is this the only way to sharpen machetes?  Eli, age 9

No, people also sharpen them with hand files right out on the worksite.  The contraption on the bike, though, gets them much sharper much faster.

3. How did they get the sharpening bike out to the worksite? Jennifer, age 8

They carried it out from one of the houses nearby.

4. How deep do the holes need to be? Logan, age 9

The holes are about two feet deep and a little more than a foot wide.  Once a pole gets in there, we fill it with lots of rocks before pouring concrete in to set the pole.

5. Why did you decide to eat the slug? Tim, age 8

Some of the females challenged him to do it, so he did. 

6. What flavor was the birthday cake? Kasper, age 9

Chocolate.  With strawberries, but no icing.  

Bucket Brigade

Darcy hard at work.  Check it out, Noodle and Doodle!

Dennis chillin' like a villain: so fresh and so clean

Hilary getting some help from Elisha

Lily getting to know some kids around the school

Moving cement with a bucket brigade

Muscles -- Working together to move concrete uphill

One of the locals mixing concrete barefoot

Our friend Martin's grandson

"Professor Shawn"tossing buckets with perfect form

Setting one of 27 posts

Sia getting water from the river

Sunset

Teamwork: Martha and Praygood trying not to get cement all over themselves

The day begins

The roots of the tree of life

Work in progress: The posts we are putting up to support the fence