Piga lipu

We have been so busy building the health post that I forgot to update our blog! We're already in the finishing stages now-the major one of which is plastering the interior walls, or 'piga lipu' in Swahili. A few of the trials and tribulations we faced along the way have been: 1) Getting my mobile office (backpack with laptop and files) stolen out of the side window of our truck-while driving 2) Having our 27ft long custom made trusses on the health post blown over in a big wind storm 3) No rain-this is actually good for construction but bad for everyone around because they depend on the food they grow. On the whole, everything is going much smoother in our second big project because we had a plan BEFORE we started it! We learned a lot from building the school.

They're here!

Students and teachers...are now on campus! Almost 400 students are walking an hour or two less a day to get to school since they relocated to Ntulya Primary School after it officially opened around July 10th. It's exciting to have the houses being lived in and classrooms being studied in after all the effort we've been through to get them built!
Next-up: "Health Post." We're just finishing up plans for the next Africa Schoolhouse project in Ntulya. A "Health Post" is a clinic where basic medical aid such as first aid, treatment of common diseases, and pre-natal care will be provided.

If you build it...

The school year in Tanzania starts in January so we're hoping that students and teachers may start to utilize the buildings that are finished. The school is not finished but with two teacher houses complete, a latrine for students, one for teachers, and five classrooms complete with windows and doors we hope that the facilities can start to be used. It should be exciting to have students and teachers on campus!

Social Change

Last week we had to get a lot of small change in order to pay the villagers that crushed over 7000 buckets of aggregate at 355 Tanzanian shillings per bucket. After failing to find sufficient amounts of change at local 'dukas' or shops, and even knocking on the church's door to see if they had change from their collection (it was Friday so we we too late), we headed back to the bank to make a final plea to the teller that had told us the bank didn't have change...He agreed that there was change but we would have to sort through sacks of old 100 shilling coins to take a minimum of 100,000 shillings worth of good mia mia's. It took two of us about an hour to make the count (1000 coins!) and by the time we left with our large sack of money, worth about 80 dollars, we had made good friends with most of the staff in the bank!

Back online!

A year and two months after the last post and...(don't worry we made it back into the country) we have a campus of 14 classrooms and 10 teacher houses in stages from foundation to complete. Next up: 'choo.' Choo is the Swahili word for latrine. With the help of local experts, we devised a design for a self-composting pit latrine! Now we just need to dig the holes for 3 toilets before before the rains get heavy.

Week Twelve August 31 September-6- Getting kicked out of the country

After meeting with the immigration officers in Mwanza, they confirmed that we will need to leave Tanzania this week in order not to overstay our visas. So we are going to Rwanda for the weekend (Road Trip) ha ha----in order to get new visas.

Week Eleven August 24-30- THE WEEK OF PUMBA

After weeks of running around like crazy people, we finally had a chance to focus serious efforts on how to make our job site more efficient. Without getting into the details, we got our workforce more focused on specific task and had each worker specialize in a particular component of the project.

And now to PUMBA.

Pumba is rice chaff, which is the by-product after winnowing rice. It is also the material that locals use to fire bricks. The search for Pumba is a serious endeavour that only the determined and unrelenting individual will succeed. Pumba is always in high demand and usually is purchased a week or even month ahead of time (which is very rare in this part of Tanzania). After much frustration, we heard talk of a possible supply, several villages away. So, we dropped everything and went to investigate this lead. Fortunately our sources were good and we were able to secure a supply of Pumba to get us started firing bricks. No champagne cork popping yet, the search still continues….

After Eleven straight weeks of eating rice every night we asked Kishosha if there were any other kinds of food that we might buy to cook for dinner. He thought about and said, “What about rice mixed with lentils?” Last night, we had rice again for dinner.