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.