Sad and Joyous news

one of my favorite balboa trees with leaves.  valley in background

This week was mixture of sad and joyous news.  Let’s get the sad out of the way.  The female puppy (Bonnie-the brown one) died overnight on Tuesday.  I noticed she was not eating that night and looked sort of frail.  The next morning she was discovered and buried.  Clyde is still doing well though they found him a new home on Friday so I did not even get to say bye.  He was doing well.  Sitting on the first command about 60% of the time and instinctively went to heel when walking to stay out from under my feet.  Hoping he is at a home that will love him.

 

 On the better side we got some rain Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.  It was one of those nice slow rains well designed for the crops and grass.  It never really came down hard during the roughly 12 hours it rained off and on.  Thanks for the many prayers for rain in our area and please keep them coming.  While this rain saved many crops that were on the verge of dying off it is not enough to save the season yet.

One thing I forgot to mention in last week’s blog was the bat that tried to crawl underneath the blankets with me on Friday night.  I am assuming it was about to die itself or have baby bats.  I hate to say but I was pulling for the former.   They were very active again last night keeping me up for hours.

Last weekend a couple of things happened I thought you may be interested in.  The first was while sitting at the Stanley I had a good view of a truck that I have seen there over the years.  I cannot remember if this truck was there in 2001 but I definitely remember it from 2006.  It was in roughly the same condition it is now.  Occasionally over the years I have noticed a sign for an insurance company hanging on one of the doors or for a mining company. 

Ever since some small nuggets of gold were discovered, many “mining” companies have come and gone.  The government would actually control any mining operations as they do with the Tanzanite and gas exploration off the coast. 

Second is how they get gas out to the small “gas stations” I have shown you before that are basically a wood stand with old water bottles filled with gasoline for the motorcycles.  Well while riding into town each and every trip with a large bus full of people we pull into an actual gas station and fill up.  This time they unloaded a bunch of barrels and other type plastic containers and filled them all up and stored them in the luggage compartments underneath the bus.  Many of these containers don’t have actual lids but a piece of cloth stuffed in the mouth.  Apparently they do this and then take them to remote areas and sell them to the motorcycle gas stations.  (yes for those wondering this is extremely dangerous).

This week I started to get back into a work routine.  Tuesday and Thursday morning I painted the exterior of the ward shower house we built last year.  I will have many more mornings of painting that building as the concrete plaster just sucks up the oil from the paint.  Wednesday it rained most of the morning so I crocheted some cards for kids and thank you notes.  Every afternoon I did my walk to the bus stand and back.  After a morning of painting it was a very tiring 6.4 miles.  While my pedometer does not record the up and downs of the ladder my daily average was still around 7.4 miles.

Monday I used the taxi to go back out to the village so I could carry my new gas tank for cooking as well as some more plastic tables and chairs that I purchased so I could set up one in my house to get my food off the floor and have a place to eat at every day.  I also got one to set up an “office inside the medical clinic for days I need to do accounting and write reports.  The only difficulty there is listening to the kids scream when they get shots like I am doing right now on Friday morning.

Wednesday night is still movie and real meal night.  This week I went back to tuna pasta with cream of mushroom sauce.  The movie was Iron Man 1, always a fun romp.  Since the day had been light due to rain and I had finished all my household chores (mainly cleaning up all the bat crap) I did a second movie-Arthur-The Clive Owen telling of the King Arthur legend.

Normally time has a way of flying by here as there is always something that needs to be done.  But the needed rain also slowed down life a good bit as much of the work is outdoors.  It was a bit of a lazy day in an otherwise work work work lifestyle here.  Most people here have to do hard labor every single day so when it rains you can see them relax a good bit.

This morning was a fun trip in.  Apparently someone has decided the metal bridge used by transport trucks and the buses I leave the valley on can no longer hold the weight of the buses (no word on the transport trucks).  So they now have one bus take people to the bridge where they get off and walk across the bridge and board another bus.  This means a bus had to be taken out of the routes to make the run to the bridge.  Yes it was my route so everyone wanting to go to Kimboa and Singida now all board one bus instead of two and where they would normally split, all of us going to Singida get off and run for the few Noah minivans and climb in all over each other.  To give you an idea of how crowded it was-I had to put my feet on top of each other and only had space for half my hand to grab the overhead rail.  That for and hour and half over dirt roads.  Then in the minivan everyone had to have someone sit in their lap or in the minivan I had today they did that until they got the sunroof open and then they stood up through the sunroof.