Over half way

Wednesday 25th 

Pit latrine, pit latrine and more pit latrine. As you can probably guess the last 10 days has been a lot of work on the pit latrine. Everything from making and fitting door frames into the concrete foundation to block laying so that it now looks like an actual built structure.

There have been some real highlights this last week, one of them was going to Samson’s for lunch last Monday where we had soup and bread with him and his family. Samson works for Go MAD but had a really serious accident about 4 weeks before we came out where he fell from a trestle and caused serious damage to his spine, which meant that he had to go to Dar es Salam for surgery which Go MAD supported him through. We also did carpentry for making the doors and finishing off the door frames for our pit latrine which was very productive.

Tuesday was a fun day off as we went to Mwanza, Tanzania’s 2^nd biggest city where we went for a swim, had a walk round some of the market stalls there including one where some really nice hand carved wooden gifts were on sale. Wednesday and Thursday was more work on the pit latrine fixing door frames into the foundation and the start of block laying. Block laying is much more technical than it first appears and to get right without the whole structure falling down takes careful use of a spirit level and string line. On Thursday afternoon we went to Jipe Moyo which is a home for vulnerable and abused children in Musoma where we played football, parachute games and painted some faces. We also spent some time praying with the children, all of whom had really hard stories.  Also to celebrate Isobel’s birthday (who is one of Andrew’s friend’s from Lewis) we had another Ceilidh in the evening which was good fun just because everyone was so bad at it!

Friday and Saturday were our mid term safari, which was ridiculously awesome. On the Friday we headed over to the Serengeti Game Reserve which is just before entering the national park itself and stayed overnight at Ikoma Lodge. Upon entering the game reserve

we saw Impala, Zebra, Ostrich and Baboons at which point I got very trigger happy with my camera which set a trend to continue throughout the safari. Once we got to Ikoma we went for a bush walk where we saw Tope and some other antelope, but it was the sunset that was the coolest part of the day. The next morning we were up early to get as much time in the national park as possible and on the way there we had already seen 2 Giraffe. We got to the Serengeti ( which means endless plain in the local masai language) park which is apparently over 14,000 square kilometres. Within 10 minutes of entering the park we came across a herd of well over 1000 Wildebeest as we had arrived right at the peak of the migration in which over 300,000 Wildebeest migrate south, following the rains. We kept driving through and just kept seeing thousands of Wildebeest  and Zebra, but we also got very close to Giraffe, Lions, Hippos, and Elephants. We even got to see a Leopard which was quite far off but we were very lucky to see one at all.

We then went to the Serena hotel for food and a swim which was halfway up a hill so the view was amazing right across the plain and we could see the for miles across the plain.

Sunday was Church at Mikiringo where Joseph translated, Joseph is a really skilled translator from Marsabit  in Kenya and is training with Go MAD to make water tanks so he can take the skills he learns here back to Marsabit where he can replicate tanks to provide clean water. This is so important because Marsabit is basically desert as it is very close to the border with Ethiopia.

Monday and Tuesday this week have been mainly more block laying on the pit latrine, sometimes with varying degrees of success!  We also have started our second goat shed  this week but in order to start we had to take down Edwardo’s old goat shed that was in such disrepair, which involved hitting it with hammers and pick axes which I have to admit was very fun. We then spent the rest of the time digging the wholes for the posts and cutting the wood to size. Its soup for lunch today so had best go and grab some of that as everyone seems to be heading downstairs already.