Tuesday 26th April
Yet again this week has
passed pretty rapidly. Life in the house has a tendancy of flying past despite
the water and electricity going off fairly intermittently- definitely all part
of the experience, especially the rather chilly bucket showers. Several
cockroaches have also met a swift end to their brief existences at the hand of
one of my flip flops. This past week has been a bit rainy but only for very
small amounts of time each day, but when it rains here, it really rains.
Normally this takes the form of dramatic thunderstorms with spectacular flashes
of lightening, the rain is great because it cools everything down which is nice
as it makes a change form the usual 30 odd degrees it usually is here.
Last Sunday after a 2 ish
hour church service with lots of readings and almost entirely in Swahili there
was a small auction at the end in which a large variety of things were up for
sale, everything from fertiliser, sweet potatoes to a live chicken (which had
its legs tied together during the service and had been hopping around in a vain
attempt to escape). After that we headed
over to the lake where Graham took us to do a bit of rock climbing/ scrambling,
its quite liberating how there is no health and safety here. I also got to play
football with some of the other missionaries in town who take their football
fairly seriously even though it is only 5 a side.
This week’s projects have
been really great, with planning day last Monday we made sure that we completed
Samwhelli’s bed for him (I’ll try and upload a picture) and his two sisters so
they didn’t have to sleep on the floor. I think Graham said that he was going
to employ Samwhelli next year to help with the carpentry for projects at Go MAD
which is great as that will provide his whole family with a really good income.
The smile on his face and how thankful he was for us making him the bed was
really humbling as he was so thankful for something that we in the UK take
completely for granted. Also our first water tank is now underway after buying the
steel mesh and wire to make the frame we then had to mix concrete using just a
shovel which was really hard work in the heat as well as digging out he whole
for the tank and making sure it was level. After all that was done the frame
for the tank was concreted in place and the local fundee’s will finish it as it
takes a fair bit of technical skill and knowledge to construct the rest.
On Thursday the whole team
attended the Rafiki group meeting, which is the cooperative farming group that
organise which members get goat shed’s and water tanks next. Although this
seemed fairly chaotic at first with lots of members trying to loudly talk over
each other in Swahili it eventually got sorted out and it was really
encouraging to see the group take decisions and responsibility for their
members. They also have an idea to start a small scale soap factory which will
be a great source of income if they can get it off the ground. Friday was good
fun as myself and some of the other guys from the 6 month team went off to Boki and Moshi’s house to build them a veranda
whilst the rest of the 3 month team went off to Bunda girls school to look into
the education opportunities we could do as a team there. At Boki and Moshi’s we
had to put 5 trusses in and level out the ground which involved
moving 5 HUGE rocks which we did by levering them out or
hitting them with sledge hammers which was great fun.
Church on Sunday was again
very long especially with the rain storm making so much noise on the roof that
we couldn’t even here the preacher at times! There was also a small snake found
in the back of the Church which was exiting, although the locals reckoned it
wasn’t poisonous, but you never know with snakes. There are 12 types of
venomous snake found in Africa and all of them live in the area where we are.
Yesterday was Malaria awareness and we went to a big event organised by Hezbon
who often works with Go MAD and is really involved with health in the Bweri
area. This was such a good day as both teams doing games including parachutes,
puzzles but I was on Bucket ball which was quite challenging explaining the
rules with my very limited Swahili so it ended up being a lot of demonstrations
of how to play and trying to stop them al just wrestling the ball off each
other, but by the end it worked really well. Both teams also did a Malaria
awareness song to the tune of the Cha Cha Slide which I hope the crowd got
something from as it felt a little surreal doing the song in front of at least
1500 people.
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