Week 3 update

Monday 2^nd May

Time seems to go so fast in Tanzania, this last week has yet again flown past. This week has been varied quite a lot in terms of the different things I’ve been involved in since last Tuesday. Although I thought I’d write a bit about Musoma and other bit’s and bobs that aren’t directly to do with project work. The house that I and the rest of the teams live in is just outside of Musoma in an area called Bweri (its about a 10 minute drive). We often go into town for lunch at the Anglican hostel which usually serves rice and beans with fish or meat (Samaki or Nyama in Swahili), however sometimes we get Ugali which can only best be described as eating  Play-doh made of maize and Boga-Boga which is like a mixture of spinach and cabbage. The hostel is right beside the Anglican Cathedral, which Graham helped design and build and was supported by the Anglican diocese of Wakefield, its funny how you can travel over 4000 miles and still be reminded of somewhere that’s just down the road from you at home. Rehema is also right next to the Cathedral and its an ethical clothing scheme that Go MAD have been really involved with since its inception and is aimed at helping women in exceptionally difficult situations by training them to work in the café or in the workshop and so provides them and their families with income. We often eat there on a Saturday which is usually both team’s day off.

Getting around is always interesting, being  thrown around in the back of a Land Rover on the tracks to the villages requires a certain amount of effort to brace yourself in order to stop yourself falling onto the person sitting opposite. Dala Dala’s are the main way of getting into town when there isn’t a Land Rover to give us a lift. Dala Dala’s are essentially a hollowed out van with seats and exceptionally cramped. On Saturday there were at least 22 people crammed into the one Dala Dala, which was a rather sticky experience especially seen as how the engine was located less than a foot below the seat I was sitting on and was constantly pumping warm air into an already humid vehicle. Most of the locals either use Dala Dala’s, Piki Piki’s (which are essentially motorbike taxis) or bikes, the amount of stuff they can put on all these things never ceases to surprise me, anything from 4 people on one Piki Piki to a 6  foot stack of plastic chairs.

Project work this week has mainly been the start of our pit latrine which will be for a local school, digging the hole and making the form work which is the frame which the concrete will be put into. Its very satisfying doing the carpentry work as the results of the work you put is so tangible and I’m getting better at sawing, drilling and using an impact screwdriver. We also had do a lot of odd jobs that Graham left us with before he went back to the UK such as delivering tap heads for water tanks, cement mix,  taking Babu into hospital to treat his Elephantitus, and adjusting guttering on houses so that they work properly to make sure rainwater definitely goes into the water tanks. Helena and Fi also finally got our goat (and named her Clive) to go in the goat shed and attached the final piece of corrugated iron to complete the Goat Shed while the rest of us did work on the pit latrine on Wednesday. Thursday was more carpentry work for the latrine and whilst the rest of the team planned their teaching for Bunda Girls School, I went off to the 6 month team’s pit latrine who are further on than us to help mix the concrete and cut the steel supports for the lintels which will be the foundation of their latrine. Cutting steel with a hacksaw is ridiculously hard work but Phillipo who is employed by Go MAD as a professional carpenter made it look easy and put us all to shame considering  how much slower we were at doing it than him. Friday was Bunda for the rest of the team and so I spent the day working on the veranda for Boki and Moshi’s house with some of the other 6 month team which is now nearly finished after we mixed an awful lot of concrete with the help of Fabian and Nickols, two of the German missionaries who we play football with on a Sunday. Saturday was vet day which meant that we went round the Rafiki group (which is basically all of the subsistence agriculturalists in this area) where the vet checked all the goats health and gave them medicine to stop worms and other parasites. We also had to record all the goats tag numbers and if they were pregnant or had recently had kids, who they belonged to and if any of the owners had problems with their sheds. All this information is really useful for Go MAD, so we can fix any problems with the sheds and stop interbreeding of goats as well as making sure that the goats are healthy and producing milk. We did this in Mkiringo, Nyanbeshi, and Nyankanga and all of the Rakfiki group were so grateful to see us and were so welcoming which was really encouraging.

I shall try and upload some more pictures of projects and stuff its just last time it took about 40 minutes to upload 4 pictures so they may have to be a very select few!