First Days

Saturday, June 30th

Another late post, because I didn’t have the adapters to charge my laptop in the Amsterdam airport.

Tanzania so far has been really surprising. It is fairly cold since we’re up in the mountains and surrounded by trees (oh no!). What strikes me most is how friendly the community is; many strangers welcome us to the town in passing, and everyone we have met has been eager to offer help and/or friendly conversation.

For breakfast this morning, we had bread (mkate), peanut butter (peanut = karanga, butter = siagi), tea (chai) with milk (maziwa) and sugar (sucari), and roasted/salted bananas which are delicious and remind one of salted seaweed. The food here is very simple but flavorful; they don’t use any spices except for a bit of salt, but the combinations of vegetables taste pretty amazing. P would like it. :p

For dinner the first night, I had beans, rice, and cabbage very finely shredded and pickled. Then for lunch today we had potatoes boiled with some peppers, along with avocado slices and leftovers from last night. Tonight we had beans, chapatti, avocado slices, and potatoes. The beans (maharague) are straight from the field; before being cooked, they are a very light purple color and grow in tan pods – we saw them drying outside in the yard.

Over dinner, I found out that our Mama is a government school teacher and grandmother (of 3, I think), and she’s taking her final two exams for her Master’s in Education next Monday. Her daughter is an IT teacher at the Maasai Girls’ School, a local boarding school. Many of her other children went to university abroad, and several are teachers and engineers in various places throughout Tanzania.

Kiswahili I learned today: (much fewer than what I asked how to say, but these are what I could recall afterward)

Shoe: kiatu

Pair of shoes: viatu

Stove/kitchen: jiko

Wood: kuni

Potato(es): kiazi (viazi)

Metal: chuma

Thermos: chupa

How do you say: Unasemaje

I don’t understand: Sifahamu

I don’t speak: Sisemi

I don’t know: Sijui

Store: duka

Face(s): uso (nyuso?)

Tree(s): mti (miti)

Person (People): mtu (watu)

Meat: nyama

Animals: mnyama
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Pole: Sorry (for your hard work/harm) or bless you

Ni: is

Kwa: for

Ya/za/la: of (this is confusing)

Au: or

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We were supposed to be picked up by Quinn from IEFT today and shown around Monduli, but she was busy meeting with trip leaders from the Groton school, a private high school in MA that brings a lot of students to visit Orkeeswa every year, and were scheduled to arrive today. The Groton families are an important source of funding and sponsorship for the students, since tuition is free.

Instead, at Staff House 1 (the “top house,” because it’s at the top of the hill) we wandered in upon Andy and Ming, volunteers (originally from England, but most recently from Cambodia) who have been setting up the computer labs. They live as technological nomads, having few possessions and wandering the earth as they see fit, volunteering their expertise to those in need. Very cool.

We checked out the top house for a place to put/mount the antenna. There is a tall wooden power line pole in the back of the house that we could use if there is enough cable. There seems to be a clear line of sight from there through the trees roughly in the direction of the school, but we can’t be sure until we have our GPS units working. There is also a water pipe to attach our grounding wire to, and ventilation holes in the walls (though we’ll have to seal up the break in the screen we will have to make). If we can’t use the tall pole, we’ll have to mount a pole of our own either on the side of the house or some distance from the house, with a sturdy base somehow secured to the ground.

We are also considering using Staff House 2 or the Monduli office as our starting point for the Internet signal, since rumor has it that reception is slightly better there. We will have to check it out.

Afterward, we walked into town with Andy and Ming. While at the grocery store, we happened to see Peter’s truck (with Quinn in it) drive up the road towards the staff houses, so we walked back up the hill to Peter’s house to see if we could catch him. He was still in a meeting at the staff house when we arrived, so we left a note on his door asking if we could exchange some USD for Tzsh with him. He eventually sent a Form 4 Orkeeswa student named Saing’orei to our house (which was next door) with 50,000 Tzsh to keep us going until we could go to Arusha to exchange money. Saing’orei took us into town, helped us bargain for a new cell phone (bringing down the price from 45,000 to 38,000 Tzsh), helped us figure out how to get a sim card and credit, helped us find a good Internet café, and walked us home as it was very dark when we finished. In a word, he was awesome.

The sparseness of the trees and absence of buildings makes the night sky look very big.

After dinner, J and I hung out with the women cleaning up in the kitchen; they very good-naturedly taught us more Kiswahili. Apparently I am too quiet; this is partly because I don’t know the language very well (not even basic grammatical structures), but I’m also not incredibly talkative in English either, especially with garrulous people around already filling the airspace. Which is funny because this blog is very verbose.

Tomorrow we are going to Arusha to exchange money and hopefully buy a 3G router and some USB-modem Internet access, so I can post these late blogs. Yay! Also going to buy electrical outlet converters, and toilet paper… Yeah… Kesho! (Tomorrow)

Monday, July 1:

Reality check

On Sunday, many shops and businesses in Arusha are closed; a very large portion of the population is Christian, so they go to church instead. We’d heard this from an IEFT volunteer, but had heard information to the contrary from an Orkeeswa student, so we decided to go anyway. We were disappointed to find that KrakiT Computers, the store we knew sold a 3G router, was closed. But we had a very lovely lunch and tea with Seth, who gave us a lot of useful context about the school, and showed us a chai place in a hotel with complimentary wireless Internet access!

But more on disappointments, just because I’m feeling that way right now.

We visited Orkeeswa for the first time today, and spent almost the whole day cleaning disgusting, moldy, foul-smelling rotten old chemicals out of beakers and soaking things in soap solution to try and make them acceptably usable for the science lab. There is now a bucket labeled HAZARDOUS WASTE at the school which when opened emits a strong odor of rotten dairy products. Apparently neither science teachers nor students consider it their job to clean up after doing experiments, because there’s no one assigned to the duty and no policy in place to hold someone responsible for equipment care.

There’s a larger property management problem at Orkeeswa, which we’ve been recruited to help devise solutions for. Since the school appears rich compared to the surrounding Maasai, there’s a small percentage of students and community members who walk off with school property; they borrow supplies like shovels, shoes, and books without asking, and those things disappear from the school forever. We’re trying to come up with a policy and mechanism for keeping supplies secure without having to hire an additional person to keep track of everything for Orkeeswa, which the school can’t afford. There are many ideas floating around, but we’re all hard pressed for the time we need to sit down, discuss, and agree on a policy.

Moreover, while looking around the school for a good spot to mount an antenna, I realized that there is a small hill next to the hill that Orkeeswa is on along the line of sight to Monduli that is just barely tall enough to block it. CURSES!!! I am extremely unhappy about this. It doesn’t look like a relay from Dr. Danny’s will help because the area around Orkeeswa is quite hilly, and the elevation profile shows that two hills almost or just barely block the line of sight between Dr. Danny’s and Orkeeswa (although we’ll definitely check in real life to make sure). A third hop would be too costly in terms of throughput. Even two hops is doubtful with the slow Internet speed in Monduli, and it would be hard to maintain and secure a repeater station on that blocking hill (even with its proximity to the school) where equipment would be out in the open for people to see and steal.

There is a tiny ray of hope that if we can get Internet access on that small hill (which is like a 5 minute walk from the school), IEFT will contribute a little funding towards making a small enclosing for it on the hill, or to moving this shipping container currently being used as a storage room to the hill. Then we’d either get it wired up with solar panels, or use this huge lead-acid battery pack that only works for 7 hrs at a time. Or we could even have the students set it up themselves every time they wanted to use it- it’s not that hard. Or cry! I’ll have to think of something.