Kising'a Water Project

Fall of 2012, Sajen Mtengela, one of our sponsored students, showed me a spring water source on a ridge that he had found and had laid 2 km of pipe to bring water to the edge of Kising'a.  The source was still producing in spite of bursting pipes in 2013 and in January 2014 a group of Engineers from University of Minnesota came to Kising'a to design a water system.  St Paul Partners implemented their design, with stronger pipe to withstand pressure and a 10,000 liter tank to store water at the distribution point.  We visited to inspect the cover for the intake and officially hand the project over to the village.  The water is being used without treatment and is very clean. I tasted it and it was refreshing. The tank is full all the time and more water is available.  This is the rainy season and some households use water collected from the roofs of their homes but demand will increase in the dry season with people from farther away coming for water.

Intake with village supplied cover.  The black pipe in the center carries overflow when the tank below is full.  Flow from the overflow pipe stops when people start drawing water from the tank.

Ball Valve on top of full tank that shuts off flow to the tank.

Sajen applying a label acknowledging Winter Wheat as one of our donors for the project.

Official hand off of project from Hanael with Sajen on left and Pastor Wihale on right.

Primary students fill buckets at the end of each school day to fill a smaller tank at the school for porridge the next morning.

Parade of students carrying water to the Primary School.

Villagers fill buckets in the morning and at the end of the day.

They carry the water up a hill to their homes and almost make it look easy.

Kiponzero and Itengulinyi Villages

Peter and I went to two villages about an hour drive from Iringa to inspect 12 wells that were sponsored by an organization called Water to Thrive.  These wells had some issues when first made and we wanted to follow up on corrective action and apply a metal plaque to acknowledge the donor.  The main highway has many trucks hauling shipping containers from the big port in Dar es Salaam to landlocked countries, Malawi and Zambia.  I noticed this truck proudly displaying 3M reflective graphics.

Notice the 3M on the yellow rectangles

We first met with the water committee at the village office.  Water committees are groups of village members who are involved with site selection and trained in sanitation and hygiene.  After the wells are installed, they are responsible for maintaining the wells and collecting fees for future repairs.

We wanted to try using 3M VHB (very high bond) adhesive for attaching the metal donor plaque to the pump instead of trying to weld.  I looked hard for rubbing alcohol to clean the surfaces of the metal but there is none in Iringa.  They use methylated spirits (ethanol containing methanol, blue dye, and other things to make it undrinkable) instead for surface disinfectant.  I brought a bottle of Konyagi, a pure 35% ethanol in water beverage to use instead and created some shocked expressions when I pulled it out (drinking alcohol is not considered a Christian thing to do here because it too often is just for getting drunk and not as a beverage, why else would someone drink Konyagi).  I put the tape on the four sides of the panel and we applied it to the pump surface after cleaning with Konyagi and scrubbing with Scotchbrite, another 3M product.  It appears to work very well.

VHB tape on back of plaque

Plaque applied to pump

We visited all 12 wells in the two villages and saw that the concrete bases had been rebuilt much larger at 10-13 feet in diameter instead of the original 5 feet.  All the pumps were producing water and the wells ranged in depth from 20 meters to 42 meters.  I tasted water at several of the wells because the villagers were concerned about orange iron deposits on some of the bases.  The water tasted like hard water you would have on a ground water pump in Minnesota.  The villagers have been using the water untreated with no water illnesses from maji wadudu (water bugs).  At the last well we visited there were four children filling buckets.  The smallest two could not lift the buckets off the ground but with help were able to carry the 5 gallon pails on top of their head. (5 gallons of water weighs about 40 lbs but the smaller kids poured a little off that would have spilled anyway.)
Tomorrow, we go to Kising'a to see their water project and I will bring library books and stay the weekend.

Children taking water home at the end of the day, the little girl looks worried, either about the water or about me.

Image Secondary

I visited Image Secondary for a couple days to bring some books and computer resources and discuss plans for a new library building at Image.  Joseph Uhemba was one of my IT students in 2010 and is Project Master at Image.  I brought a small raspberry pi computer server loaded with RACHEL educational content and a projector for showing that content to more students.  They plan to have a computer lab in the library that students would use to access the materials.  I also brought a collection of books for pleasure reading to encourage reading English and Swahili and some DVDs that they can listen to English with English subtitles to help them understand.

Image front gate

Form II students watching a segment on Seasonal Forests from the BBC Planet Earth DVD.  They had just had forests in their Geography class and the video generated lots of interest and questions.

Form II students in front of the new Library building donated by Peter King Foundation and Incarnation Lutheran Church.  The next step is adding tables and chairs, books, and computers.

With teachers officially accepting the materials I brought for the school.

Many of our groups visit Image and receive a warm reception but few get to stay an entire day and see the students routine.  Their morning starts at 7 AM with morning prayer led by different students each day.

Classes start at 7:30 AM and continue until 10:10 for a 30 minute break for Chai (tea and mondazi donuts, their first food of the day).  Classes resume until 2:10  when the students assemble and are given assignments for the rest of the afternoon before going to lunch.  This is the time that they exercise, clean and wash clothes, and do chores on the campus. 

Dinner is at 6 PM and on most days consists of ugali, a staple made from corn flour that resembles mashed potatoes, and maharagwe, beans but at the school with more broth than beans.  On Sundays they receive rice instead of ugali for a change of pace and once or twice a month they will have meat, chicken or fish.

They served 3 of these big ugali pots with amazing rapidity

Image runs a generator in the evening and the students return to their classrooms at 7 PM for private study.  There are a couple teachers on duty and the students are reviewing and copying notes from their lectures.  They stay in their classrooms until after 10 PM and then return to their dorms with girls dorms on one side of the campus and the boys dorms on the other side.  Some of the students were napping in the classrooms and I can understand why, their school is a pretty grueling pace.

Tricountry Partnership

I made it to Iringa Saturday evening after a nice ride with Miraji.  Miraji is constantly signalling to other drivers to slow down when there is a police stop ahead or if there isn't, he tells them they can speed up with hand signals.  Every time we would see a police he would go on about how corrupt they are.  He knows where the police usually are and we never got stopped.  Saw lots of animals in Mikumi, especially giraffes.  I am partial to tall things.

Miraji and his Japanese Noah Car

Having pizza at Tan Swiss outside of Mikumi NP

Sunday was settle in and go to an English language service attended by Iringa expat residents.  Monday morning I met with Peter and Hanael who I will be working with on water projects.  All of a sudden, Peter got up and ran out the door.  Turns out he saw Pastor Wihale visiting the Diocese offices and wanted to catch him before he got away.  Pastor Wihale is our partner pastor in Kising'a and he was with a pastor friend and a Lutheran pastor from Sweden whose church also is in a partnership with Kising'a.  Sue and I met Pastor Mikael Sjodin with a group by chance in Dar 5 years ago and now we happen to meet again. 

USA - Tanzania - Sweden Partners Shoulder to Shoulder

Mikael had just returned from 4 days in Kising'a and was leaving the next day.  It was great to see him with a chance to talk and we went to dinner together that evening.  He reported that the water system was working great and that Anna, Pastor Wihale's oldest daughter and one of our sponsored students, was managing the library with the books we have sent.  The books are popular and really getting used.  I will be going to Kising'a on Thursday the 26th staying over the weekend, and can hardly wait.

Pastor Yohna and Pastor Wihale

 The church in Rodon, Sweden is also a partner with Kilolo parish and the former pastor of Kilolo was with them.  Pastor Yohna and Pastor Wihale made a trip to Sweden a couple years ago to visit their partner.  They went in winter, went skiing and ice fishing, and had a great time.  Mikael told me at dinner that he had asked Yohna what could he bring back from Sweden to make his wife happy, thinking he might ask for a dress or something.  Instead, he thought the thing that would make his wife most happy was a chain saw.  Turns out his wife has a timber business and pays men to cut timber so a chain saw would increase production and profits.  This trip Mikael tried to pack a chain saw in his luggage and was paged at the airport in Sweden and told that he couldn't bring a chain saw.  They said that it would be confiscated at Shiphol in Amsterdam so he sent it back home.

Bongoyo

The boat to Bongoyo is a wooden Dhow and the trip takes about 45 minutes to one of several islands offshore.  Bongoyo has a nice beach with a simple restaurant that serves a crab or lobster lunch for $6.  There were about 25 people out on the island, almost all from Norway and Sweden.   Tanzanians have beaches, like Coco Beach, where they can go for free. The boat ride and park entrance to Bongoyo only costs $20 but that still is more expensive than free.  I didn't have shorts or a swim suit with me so I was severely overdressed.  I took a walk on some trails to an old German building with a young women named Mary as a guide.  The walk was almost 2 hours and there wasn't much to see but it was fun to talk to Mary who is a student in college.  I came back to the beach for lunch and drank about a liter of water and soda.

Boat heading to Bongoyo

Beach at Bongoyo

Mary the trail guide, I was the only one to leave the beach

Restaurant at Bongoyo serving Crab or Lobster lunch

Dugout notice the wool cap and he was bailing continously

The boat returned to slipway late afternoon and I had a beer while Vivian and Brian were taking the bus to join me. Brian and Vivian were living in Minnesota and members at LCP before returning to Tanzania in 2006. We took a taxi to a very nice restaurant with out side dining on the edge of the ocean.    Brian doesn't get much chance to eat in restaurants like that and took full advantage, ordering spare ribs, salad, chocolate cake, and chocolate brownie with ice cream for dessert. It was great to see them.  We took a taxi back, dropping them off at their home which is on the way to Wista's Inn.

Kilimanjaro Beer after a hot afternoon

Brian with his milkshake

Dar

  I have had a nice few days in Dar before heading to Iringa.  I have a driver, Miraji, who is exceptional, comes early, knows where everything is, and has a nice car.  He will take me to Iringa on Saturday too.   Wista's Inn is also a very comfortable place to stay, nice beds, good air conditioning, plenty of hot water, great breakfast, and robust wireless in your room, all for $40/night.

Wista Breakfast

 The first day I met with someone at the Embassy about a Community Self Help grant for a water project at Lukani Dispensary.  This was one of the 2013 UMN Engineering projects and a good bore hole has been drilled but we still need a submersible pump with solar power system.  I met with a nice woman named Mike, perhaps a daughter of Johny Cash, who had very helpful suggestions for improving our application. In the afternoon, I stopped at TPH Bookshop and the manager there helped me select books, mostly in Swahili, for preschool, primary, secondary, and village adult.  Some of these I will bring to Kising'a using funds LCP donated a couple years ago for books and others will go to a preschool at Kihesa for Betty Wolf's group, the Huruma Orphanage, and Image Secondary and Namnyaki Secondary school for Maasai Girls which I will be visiting later.

I by chance had two former students come up to me, pretty amazing to run into two students in a town of 5 MM people.  Nelson is working doing graphic design for an Ad Agency in Dar and Patrock is doing web and IT support for a NGO working in Iringa.  I saw him at the Wista's restaurant where he was visiting someone from the NGO staying here.  I thought to take his photo after forgetting to take a picture with Nelson.  I had 80 students in the two semesters I taught at Tumaini and it makes me feel good when I see or hear of them finding good job opportunities.  I still chat online with at least one of them each week.

Patrock

The second day I met with the Peace Corps Coordinator for Tanzania to discuss a position with St Paul Partners for extending Peace Corps Volunteers.  PCVs serve a little more than 2 years in a primary assignment either in Education at a secondary school or as community organizers for health and environment or sustainable agriculture.  There will be 40 Education volunteers finishing in September and about a third of them are interested in extending with a NGO like us for another year.  Lenny gave me instructions for putting together our job posting and we hope to be able to hire another volunteer.  The Peace Corps pays salary, handles visa and medical insurance, and we just need to provide housing.  We have had three volunteers work with St Paul Partners and the experience has been great for all involved.

We wanted topographic maps to support our water projects and help with well site placement.  We heard that they could be purchased at the Government Mapping Office and this led to an adventure in inefficiency that took the rest of my day.  I first went to the Ministry of Land building and although no one spoke English they did understand 'map' and a Muslim woman with a beautiful dress and head scarf took me up a few floors to sit in an office until someone speaking English came and said I needed to go to another building.  He sent me with a young man that was experienced in GIS and very interested in job opportunities and who took me to an office in another building with 7 or 8 men at desks with computers.  I sat next to an older gentleman who had maps and map indexes on his computer.  What I was looking at was digital tif maps about 1 GB in size that they sell for about $17.  I could not tell from the index very well which maps we would want and I asked him to email me a copy of the index file (I had to help him use gmail and add an attachment).  I tried to use the index file with Google maps to identify the ones we would want but could not get cell reception for internet in this big building.  He explained that to purchase, I needed to go to him to select maps and get an order sheet signed that I can use to make a deposit in the Government Bank of Tanzania account, then come back with the pay slip and he would prepare the maps but I would need to bring a big flash drive or a bunch of DVDs.  We really wanted paper maps and somehow I talked to someone on the way out who pointed me to a little building in the back with a sign that said Map Store.  There was a man at a front desk and a dingy back room lined with rows and rows of paper maps with maps for all of Tanzania.  Paper maps here were 6000 tsh, about $3.50, and just what we wanted.  I asked for a block of maps (48 maps in a 6x8 grid) that would cover all the areas we work in.  He went back and started pulling maps and miraculously he had 45 of them in stock.  He filled out a order form and sent me to Bank of Tanzania to pay, or so I thought.  BOT was closed for lunch so Miraji and I went back to the book shop and picked up our book order.  I went back to BOT and went through security and upset a guard because I had returned 10 minutes early to get in the expected line.  I finally found where there were tellers and only a couple people.  The BOT bank building is a massive tower built by a Danish company and as fancy an office building that you could find anywhere in America.  To get into the room with tellers, I had to step into a door in a round tube which caused the door behind me to close and momentarily I was in a tube with just enough room for me and my backpack until the inner door opened.  I went to a teller and she told me that I cannot make a deposit here, only the account holders can make a deposit to their account.  This didn't sound like what I was told, or at least understood but after a few consultations with others, she sent me back to the Ministry of Land.  Once there I found they had a branch for NMB bank where I could make a deposit to the BOT account.  This meant sitting in a line of chairs and advancing one each time someone went to the window.  I got my valued pay slip and was told to go to another window for a receipt but after standing in another line for a bit found out that I was supposed to go back to the Map store instead.  While waiting in line, I saw a public service announcement given by an albino man asking people to not harm albinos.  Africa still has witch doctors which tell people that body parts from an albino bring good luck, kind of like a morbid version of our rabbit foots.  The video had pictures of fresh wounds of Albinos with missing fingers and limbs for graphic effect.  They also had a lot of video of a horrible bus accident near Iringa where 42 people were killed when the bus swerved to avoid a pothole (potholes here are major) and collided with a container truck.  The container crushed most of the bus.  Fortunately, the road to Iringa has been improved and is much safer but not a fun thing to think about 2 days before hitting the highway.  I took my precious payslip back to the Map store and the man was not there but I could see my maps carefully rolled up into a nice bundle.  Someone went to get the man and he took my slip and gave me a receipt, the last important piece of paper, and I left with my maps 20 minutes before he closed.  The desk at the map store was stacked with maps requested by others who didn't manage to complete the process, probably for people with less patience than I.

Map Store

Today, I am going to take a boat out to Bongoyo island to check it out as a R&R place for future group visits.  I will meet Vivian and Brian at Slipway where the boat returns and we will go to dinner at one of the nice restaurants on the pennisula where high end Tanzanians and Embassy people hang out.  Vivian was a member of LCP quite a few years ago and Brian now is in Form III (9th grade) in a UK curriculum program.  It will be fun to see them, then tomorrow, Miraji and I will travel to Iringa. God Willing or Insha'Allah as they say here.