Week in the Ville

This week has been a great cross section of what life is often like here so I thought I would do a discussion of major events of each day this last week.  This blog will hopefully illustrate some of the frustrations of being white in Tanzania as well as many of the frustrations with individuals/groups but it will also  hopefully show how some are really great as well.

Monday:  I typically stay in Singida, the nearest town, through Monday morning because when I need to purchase medicines it can only be done on Monday morning.  This particular week I don't need to buy medicines but I do have to pick up items for the site.  So I got up like normal at my hotel and had hot water for my shower but not much water pressure.  After that it is time to pack everything up in my two bags for the trip home.  One bag is nothing but the computer and it's accessories.  I don't normally eat breakfast on travel days just to prevent stomach problems so I was checked out and paid up at the hotel by 8 and headed into town proper.

I stopped first to purchase food especially bread.  This week the fresh bread were like small sub sandwiches so I got two of those.  Purchasing food is actually three stops at least.  One is the bread guy on the street corner and the second is an actual shopping store where I had to buy toilet paper for the site and some other food items normally the canned items.  The last food stop is fresh fruit or vegetables I get in the main shopping area which the best description I can give is the old farmers market when I was growing up not the cur18rent day ones.  It is a bunch of closely situated tables with people sitting around waiting for you to buy something and it smells from the large variety of items in such a closed area though it does continue on to different types of food shops as well.

Then it is the 1 1/2 to 2 hour drive to the village.  Along the way we have a two sets of warning strips that will shake breakfast out of you for every speed hump that if you approach faster than 30 km/hour (~19 mph) will damage your axle.  This is to slow you down for the 50 km/hour area at every cattle crossing and roadside house along the way.  Near Ntondo is the regular speed trap on this route so you have to do less than 50 km/hour for about 15 km because of a house.  Near Tumuli there is the current detour while they repair the road because it was worse than the warning strips (5 accidents I know of in two months).  The detour is pure dust or fine silt that covers everything.  One part of it is so deep in the dust/silt that if you are not careful you will get stuck.  When you hit it is like hitting black ice.  After Tumuli there are two sets of houses that are the peanut stops where women sit along the speed  humps all day to sell you a bag of peanuts.  When you slow down for the speed hump they start running towards your vehicle like you are stopping to buy.  This makes you slow down more to avoid them.  They cover both in and out of these areas so four different locations.  In addition their are women and children at the pull off selling onions where they sit all day waiting on a sale.  The peanuts sell for 1000 shillings or say 40 cents.  After that I have to turn off the paved road and head on the dirt road.  At the turn off are normally a bunch of people wanting a ride on a bus and about 10 motorcycles and their drivers who want to get paid for existing or anything else they can get paid for.  Normally they are lying across the road for some reason so you have to wait on them to move out the way while they yell things about me being a white person.  Parts of the dirt road are pretty rough similar to the warning strips.  There are sometimes a string across the road at the local "tax offices" to access taxes on what vehicles are carrying in or out.  I have to wait for someone to come out and lower the rope (they don't like it when I do it myself).  All in all I get to the village at 11 AM so I don't have to worry about the kids from the pre-school who don't seem to understand getting out of the way of the truck.

Monday afternoon is normally a little difficult to get much site work done, partially because I need to get reset on ville life and in part because I have to found out what has been broken since I left Friday afternoon.  So after I review everything on site and find most of the newly broken items are a relative easy fix.  After that I set out the camp shower to heat up in the sun so I can have a warm shower in the evening.  I fix some lunch with my bread and normally take an hour to let lunch settle.  

Then I decided it was time for the quarterly cleaning of my house.  Yes I clean it regularly like sweep every day and wash dishes every day type things but we are talking a spring cleaning but it has to be done every three months here.  This is because of the bats and other rodents but also because of the massive amounts of dust in the air and the fact we have screen windows now but the shutters don't really stop the dust from getting in.  I just did the kitchen and hope to do the bedroom next week.  This involves taking all the kitchen shelving units I built last year outside and scraping any rodent crap from various nooks and crannies.  

I burned off my trash from the last month.  I really need to set up a composting pile for some of the paper products but I honestly don't generate that much trash which is why I only burn it once a month.

I finished up a little early for the shower so I decided to do a little reading first.  After that I haul my camp shower across the site to the shower building to get clean and then walk back to my house to start making dinner.  I went simple with beans with tomatoes cut up and some bread in the mix.  After that I decided I had spent enough time bending over cleaning and decided to watch a movie on my hard drive.

Tuesday morning:  So I got up around 7 to start my day.  I brush my teeth every morning using one of my water buckets with a spigot and a plastic catch pan which is also where I was dishes which is what I do next.  After breakfast I started setting up some of the weeks work.  I had been told the school was going to shut down on Friday for a week of holiday so I planned on getting things ready for that work.  The first thing we needed to do was get water into the plastic sim tank.  This tank has been leaking ever since I got here.  So far I have patched 6 holes and repaired the discharge pipe.  It did not collect any water because the kids unsupervised during recess pulled the discharge pipe until it broke.  So Isayah the person who cuts grass and helps me and I pump 1,120 liters of water into 20 liter containers, load them in my truck and carry them to the school and the unload and carry them up a ladder and dump them into the tank.  We have 8 of the containers so seen trips and it takes about 30 minutes of non stop pumping to fill them up.  We alternate jobs on the filling them up but at the tank Isayah always went up to sit on the top of the tank to pour them in.  I thought he may be doing this because he thought it was tougher to do.  But turns out he can't lift the bucket over his head.  I guess all those years of raising pigs on top of the hill with a water spigot at the bottom of the hill paid off.

We finished much earlier than I thought we would but it took a lot more out of me than I thought it would also.  I was disappointed to note water around the bottom of the tank so it probably has a leak again but I will have to let it sit so all the water we spilled has time to dry up before I know for certain.  We need this water for a couple of reasons.  First is to have water available for all the concrete work we need to do this week and for the masonry work the upcoming team will do and lastly they want the kids to plant some trees and be responsible for watering them so we needed water for that.

I had just enough time to work on making some concrete "stones" for one of the upcoming children's ministry programs the team will be doing.  They need 150 smooth stones roughly the size of a half dollar.  We have gravel.  So I decided to make them myself using basically a mortar mix and balling them up in my hand.

I had just gotten all my stuff out to do the work when Gifty our Lab tech comes to tell me I have to check my messages.  This is a William thing.  I don't carry my phone around because it could get damaged and honestly I have never had a message that could not wait until I check it which I do when I wake up, at lunch and after work until I go to bed.  William however likes me to respond immediately to his requests so he sends staff who spend all day on their phones to hunt me down and make me stop what I am doing to answer him.  Honestly he has done it so much I normally don't stop and just wait until my break.  Normally he does not want anything important.  This time I did stop and this time it was something semi important.  Erasto, his buddy and the local elected official who is supposed to be in charge around Yulansoni, has been in the hospital in Kimboi which I knew but he was released and needs a ride home to the valley.  Everything was presented as we need to do this right now.  So Isayah who also got the message because he had to show me the way stops work to go take a bath and I stop and put everything up.  After we commit to that we get a message we don't need to pick him up until 3 pm because he is asleep.  Typical scheduling here.  Instead of getting everything back out I just take lunch early and since I did not want to start a project I could not finish after lunch I did my laundry instead.  Between drawing water, hand scrubbing everything it took about an hour.

Isayah and I drive to pick Erasto up and bring him back.  I find out he is actually at his mother's house and not the hospital.  They require I come in and sit down (typical culture thing here).  His mother wants to pay for me driving him but I don't accept money for the ambulance service so she insists I take a bag of eggs.  It turned out to be three small eggs (most are small here) which I now have to transport over some rough dirt roads and some off roading to get to his house and then back to site.  This is not a complaint.  I love getting eggs.  I had decided a long time ago if I was ever forced to take money which I really doubt will ever happen I will put it into the truck operating fund like I should.  But eggs don't do well in an operating fund so I got to eat them. ;-) The surprise was the 5 other people who got in the vehicle all carrying bags of stuff.  If I had known one of those bags were the little fish like sardines, I would have said no.  The truck still smells.

So in recap a trip that could have taken me an hour took roughly 3/4 of the day.  Got back in time to take a shower and start cooking dinner.  I used the eggs and some of my single packet spam along with the cheese that comes in a wheel like Happy Cow to make an omelet.  After that I did some reading before going to bed at 9:30.

Wednesday:  Again up semi early at 7 and the normal routine though I washed dishes the night before.  I started the work this morning by making those concrete stones as discussed on Tuesday.  I made 75 and they ranged in size from quarter to about 1.5 half dollar.  This took longer than I thought but mainly because I made the mix a little wet so I had to mix it longer and work the stones a little more.

I used some of the extra concrete I had been mixing in a bucket to try an idea I have had for a while.  Actually I saw a picture somebody did making a concrete stool using a 5 gallon bucket and some dowel rods.  Here there are no dowel rods though I could have bought some plungers and used the wood from that but I have what is called furniture pipe.  That is about 1/2 inch schedule 40 pipe (a little bit thinner wall than that but not schedule 20).  So I cut 3 lengths that you then shove into the concrete near the center and lay it against the wall of the bucket giving it angle.  Now I set this up on the porch of the tool room which no one is supposed to be around except Isayah and myself.  He was off cutting grass on the other side of the property.  Somehow the bucket got moved every time I went to do something else.  So I am afraid the legs may have moved a bit before it set up enough.  I will buy some bicycle handlebar grips to slide over the bottom of the furniture pipe to prevent damage to the floor of my house.

I did lunch and a couple of advil because all the bending over the last couple of days had my back in a knot. 

After lunch I started digging out the area where I was going to pour my foundation pads on Thursday.  I put off digging the actual holes until Thursday so I could do the actual pour Thursday afternoon when the kids were out.  So I finished up the afternoon cutting boards and making the simple forms for the pads.

I finished up around 6 that evening and hauled my water over to take my shower and cooked dinner.  Wednesday night is pasta night and I had bought a can of tuna a week ago along with some mushrooms so I made a large batch and watched a movie on the hard drive.  An old western classic:  The Professionals.

Thursday:  On the day I had so many things planned to do at the school.  The morning was going to be about final prep for the pour, getting the gravel moved, getting all the other materials over there and digging the post holes for my metal pipes.   I wanted to get all this done so I could pour the concrete after school let out since they would not be any school the next day.

Again typical Tanzania scheduling got in the way.  We allow a church to use our Pre-school building for free to meet on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights.  So I got up early Thursday morning to make sure I had time for everything.  The night guard greets me saying the Pastor is there and needs me to make him a sign (not will I make them a sign).  Let's look past the point my function here is not to work for his specific church but to take care of our site.  Let's look past the point I have a lot of work to do this morning.  I pull out some old scrap metal left from the gate I repaired last year and part of the ceiling board that was damaged by ants I replaced several blogs ago and make him a sign.  It is a simple sign where I cut the ceiling board to clean the edges and make a rectangle out of it and fastened it to the metal using rivets.  Then they proceed to use my work station (the table frame I made) to write out their sign message using one of my magic markers I had to go dig out for them because everything else I gave them was not what they wanted.   This takes about 30 minutes to write three words and an arrow. They then proceed to ask if I will weld up a frame to keep it standing so I have to explain they need to take a hammer and drive the posts into the ground and it will stand on its own.

So after that I get Isayah who I explained several times this week what we were doing every day including the work at the pre-school today.  I have noticed at this time no kids are arriving.  But I remind him what we are doing today and he says we can't.  The pastor is having a meeting at the pre-school with a bunch of ministers from other areas and needs the area all day. Several thoughts crossed my mind at this point none of which I shall repeat here since small children may read this.  Not a person had told me this despite my telling others what I was doing and my plans for working there this afternoon.  Not one person at the site and not William in Arusha who I assume knew about this though not about my plans.

Ok plan b or c or whatever.  I spend the day making the items for the posts which I was going to do later.  One set of posts needs a sit backrest and one set needs the backrest and framing for a roof.  The pads and posts are part team will be making while here.  Only one needs a roof because the one near the future soccer field is under a tree for natural shade.

During my work a large group of people have gathered around my workshop because the area behind it is where people cook.  So they are cooking a meal for this meeting.  I am constantly being stopped to ask where something is or if I could make or buy them something for their meal.  Then I notice a guy has an old knife rusted beyond belief and is trying to sharpen on the side of my tool room concrete wall.  I take the knife from him and get my file out to work off most of the rust and damage then get the sharpening stone and let him try that.  This knife is what they used to butcher the goat with for the meal.  I really felt sorry for that goat-he died slow.

I completely build up the frames before lunch.  Today like everyday is more sandwich for lunch.  The afternoon I start working on some additional metal projects I need around site.  When the day is over I got our sharpening stone back, mainly because Isayah uses it so he was interested in getting it back.  But the magic marker and two of my buckets are gone.  They did offer me some rice which I avoid due to it being bad for me as a diabetic, but they did not offer me any of the goat which I would have taken.

When they left at 4 pm I went to work digging out the post holes for my metal frames and moved them to the site.  I also shoveled up two loads of gravel and hauled over.  I finished up at 6:30 realizing I had to do concrete tomorrow morning before I could leave to go to town.  This hurts because I wanted to go to town early to get the truck looked at because it still pulls left.

I spend the first part of the evening texting people about my changes in plan and changing my meetings in town as needed.  Then shower and dinner this time oatmeal and some hot tea to try and relax after a bad day.  I took my second dose of advil for the day wondering if the first every went to work or not.

I started working on the directions to make some of the items for the playground for the team coming over and went to bed at 9:30 again.

Friday:  I had told Isayah we had to start early to make sure we got the concrete  pour done  as early as possible.  So I got up at 6 and was outside at 6:15.  No Isayah.  So I take some sunrise  pictures though they are never as good as the sunsets.

By the time Isayah gets there at 7 I have everything set up to start mixing the concrete and all the tools set up.  I have set the metal framework with supports to keep it from moving and everything is leveled and squared.  He then tells me he has to take the motorcycle to mbuyni for something for the staff.  At this point of this week I just say go.  So I did most of the concrete by myself until he showed back up and hour and half later.  Bad thing is he is the hardest most reliable worker I have on site.

The top wood pieces are to attach the roof to.

When he did show up I had finished the first pad.  So he helped with the second one.  First points question:  Five points if you can tell me why I have to add more water than normal to the mix here.  Normally I have to add about 25% to 30% more water to our mixes here to get the same workability I would get out of the same mix with less water in USA or even Peru.

Now for what may be the funny part.  The reason I wanted to pour on Thursday afternoon is because the kids would not be back on site for a whole week.  Wrong again, school was open Friday despite what William had told me.  First thing I had to do is chastise the teachers because the students were standing up on the swing seats again which is what caused one of the children to get injured last year.  They normally don't want to oversee the children or supervise them when they are playing.  The bigger issue is when I find both teachers outside, sitting at a desk they pulled out heads down and the kids inside the school building.  This is a typical teacher thing here regardless of what grade level.  So again we have a little talk that will do no good and I go back to work.

After I finish I clean all the tools and put everything up, wash up myself and change out of my work clothes and pack up. A good thing about being delayed Friday is that I get to give Jeanette a Peace Corp volunteer a ride in.  She finishes her day of teaching at 11:30 on Friday and I pass by her school on my way in.

I take her into town and I stop off at the Stanley motel for my normal coke zero and chicken meal.  They are out of Coke Zero!!!!!!!!!  Not a great day.  After that I take the truck over to the mechanics shop.  I take it to SEMA which teaches vehicle repair.  They are the most consistent with their bad repairs.  They were one of the groups that could not fix the horn.  This is the second time to take it in about the alignment.  It takes about an hour with my swahili to get the truck scheduled for an alignment.  Mainly because no one works in the office area.  You have to stand around until someone shows up.  They then have to find a mechanic for you to talk to.  Most of the mechanics visible are only students.  the teachers are all taking naps somewhere.

I walk back into town to check my mail and get a haircut.  I went to the place I have been going most of this year that is ok.  Only when I get asked something by a person working there I can't hear what they said because they always speak to me like my mom does in such a low  quiet voice no one can hear them.  When I ask for them to repeat, they assume I can not speak any swahili.  For the entire haircut he goes on and on about how a white person should speak their language.  I let it go and finish the hair cut then since he was using mzungu to say white person but it actually means european I tell him I am not european but from the USA all in swahili though a bit broken (my sentence structure remains my weak point)  I then tell him my problem is my hearing not my swahili.  He does not apologize because making fun of someone different here is not seen as being bad just fun.  It is a cultural thing.  After so many years of being the target (as a white hetrosexual male) of everybody who is offended I get a little $%#@&*^ at all this.  So when he says come again I just turn look at him shake my head and say NO.

That night I met up with several of the peace corp folks for dinner, they still don't have coke zero (though my hotel did have some).  We played a really weird game but eventually fun after I figured it out.  It is a sushi card game.  

I walked back to the hotel to do a little work and relax online before going to bed.

Saturday:  Up early to get some work done.  Normally I sleep to 7:30 in town but I got up at 6:45 this morning.  After my hot shower without having to haul water I was walking into town to meet up with some of the peace corp folks for breakfast.  We ran into some German minnintes (sp?) that were high school aged.  One of the volunteers was shopping for linoleum flooring so I went along for that trip before I headed back to the hotel.  Spent the morning watching some Clemson football hype videos on YouTube as well as listening to the Warrior song to get pumped up.   I started working on this blog then.

Got a text from the German doctor and medical student that they were going to be in and wanted to have lunch.  So went back for lunch and still no Coke Zero.  During lunch a friend tells me that the NBC ATM near where I was eating was dispensing 5000 shilling bills.  This is a rarity and a big deal because so many places in town don't have change.  I have had to walk out with buying something numerous times because all I can get are the 10,000 shilling notes and they don't have change and I am not giving them 10,000 shillings for 4 or 6000 shillings of items.  Unfortunately the guy in front used four different cards to withdraw money so I was only able to get a small amount but hopefully enough to handle giving the team members change when they arrive.

 After lunch I started walking to the mechanics place.  Along the way a car pulls over in front of me and the "postmaster" for Singida branch hops out of the passenger seat.  He comes to great me and tell me I got a package in but he has not done the paperwork on it so could I stop by Monday.  Nice Guy.

So I get to mechanics shop wait on someone to show up at the office and this time it is the cashier/accountant.  He gives me a list of parts they want to buy for the truck totalling 764,000 shillings.  Well we are going to have that kind of day.  Worst part is we are talking technical items which don't always have similar words to use between languages.  In other words I may know the US english word for a part but they are using the swahili word for a British english word for the part.  He speaks no english and neither do any of the three mechanics who enter into the argument that went on after that.  They were quite shocked when I wanted to be shown all the bad parts on the truck they wanted to replace.  So over the next hour I proceeded to use all my swahili and vehicle knowledge to argue with the four of them.  Turns out they doubled up the number of one of the items so instead of needing 40 there are only 20 on the truck.  Not all needed to be replaced.  In addition several items I disagreed about their needing to be replaced and the most senior mechanic agreed with me.  The most expensive single part those was damaged and the price they quoted for it I could live with so then it was just arguing over the price of the 16 pieces that needed to be replaced and I though they were way high.  Turns out they were not way high just a little high.  In the end we were down to 440,000 shillings.  I now had to walk all the way across town to get money out of two banks (the limit is 400,000 shillings) and walk back across to town to pay for the parts so they could have it done by Monday.  By the time I walked all the way back across town to my hotel I had done over 6 miles of walking just in the afternoon.  


While I was walking around getting the money I came across a guy who was making replacement bushings for motorcycles out of old tires.  What caught my eye were the following:  

Five points if you can tell me what I plan to use them for when making the music station (xylophone and can drums)

No time to rest because now it is 6 and time to call home.  After we finished all that up I was too tired to go meet the new peace corp volunteers but that was ok because I never got a text about where to meet up.

I wanted to stay up and watch the written description of every play of the Clemson vs Auburn game but it started at 4 AM my time.    When I woke up at 6:45 Sunday morning though I saw the game was still going on.  So watched the description for the 4th quarter before going for church at the rocks and breakfast.

Today I am finishing this blog, writing more descriptions for the team members to make some of the items on site and writing a newsletter article.  That is my week.