G'day Corky, we're almost outta the ground!

Corky arrived today. Some call him Robert Cork, fws environmental engineer, but he’ll always be good old Toughen-Up-Skirt-Corky to me. Well, that’s what he said to me when we met in Tanzania in 2003 while volunteering at The School Of St Jude. I was whingeing about something not very important, and he turned to me and muttered “toughen up, Skirt”. For some reason, I took no offence, thought he was hilarious, and have liked him ever since. He’s been volunteering in Cambodia for 12 months, implementing all sorts of environmental engineering solutions from rainwater harvesting systems to model farms and vocational skills training. All the while, he’s been answering the 7,000 fws emails Daz, Kels and I fling at him daily. I’m very excited to have him here not just because I like him but also because he’s been here before (means he’ll skip all that orientation-culture-shock stuff you get the first time you visit a different culture) and because he’s going to get working on our enviro-systems. That’s the aquifer (which was his idea, but he seems to have gone off it lately – can’t wait to argey-bargey with him about why!), the drip irrigation, permaculture, grey water, biogas…all those things. Some come before others, naturally – and in fact, he’s only here for two days before he heads off across the Serengeti to Musoma, near Lake Victoria, in Tanzania’s north west, to complete a 2-week permaculture course. Truth be known, I’d love to attend with him but I’m not for two reasons:
1) the means of travel – a 15-hour non-stop ‘local bus’ trip across the Serengeti. Sounds nice. Isn’t. No loo, no food, no water, no air-conditioning, no seating space…Er-yuk. I’ve done it once before and swore never again. So see? Corky’s right – I probably do need to toughen up, Skirt. 2) The second reason I’m not going is a bit stranger. It revolves around the fact that I feel glued to somewhere I’m not. I feel a bit glued to FWS Australia – despite the fact I’m here in Tanzania. See, I’ve spent the past two weeks, working via email with Ben and Kels (who are based in Melbourne) to put the final touches to our new website. We’ve been working on it for a year, and well, I want to be around (near my inbox that is) when people start contacting me to say that it looks so fantastic and professional that they can’t wait to donate their life-savings and beyond to our awesome cause. Yep, that’d be the type of email, I’d be sad to miss! So I wait.

I also wait, along with the whole Kesho Crew, for our shipping container. We've even dug out the area it will sit on the block (we're about to add some reinforced concrete as a slab for it to sit on). Yes, it’s going to make life easier. At the moment, Daz is getting a wee bit over loading up the ute with picks, hoes, shovels, wheelbarrows, chainsaw, grinder, ropes, buckets for drinking water, chains, a generator, spades, trouls, nails, nuts and bolts each morning to drive 1.6km to the block and then spend 20 minutes unloading it all… days work…and then locating it all and loading it into the ute each afternoon to drive home. We really want to find ourselves a half-decent shipping container so we can use it as secure on-site storage and whack all this junk into it each night before slamming the door shut and locking it all up. We’ve had about 15 call-outs to looks at trashed versions – one even had the roof eaten away by rust – so hopefully now with Corky coming today and two new volunteers – Eamon and Brendo coming tomorrow, we might get a shipping container squad happening. Aim: clean, slick container on our land, being used as storage by the end of the week.


Up on the block, we are almost-almost out of the dirt. Woohoo! Our volunteer carpenters Jai and Blair have been cutting, sawing, grinding away to create the floor joists for the common room. Upon these will sit our floor. Imagine…Kesho with floors. Just a hop, skip and jump away from Kesho with walls! Hard to believe we’re already there in just a few months! Daz, Jai and Blair have slowly been introducing power tools to the Tanzanian crew. A bit scary. Having worked hard for everything their entire life, the Tanzanians don’t quite get the idea of not putting their full body weight behind a power tool…which of course, sends the power tool reeling off in all sorts of fast and frightening directions. Some guys showed a bit more promise than others, so they’ve been getting “lessons” while the others go on with their other jobs. We’ve got Mudi 3 on the grinder (he’s cutting out tin plates to go over the bottom of our footings to help prevent termites) and he's doing great. Mudi 2 is doing a wonderful job of pouring the concrete his crew mix, into the straight, clean timber moulds Jai & Blair made. This so far has resulted in the most delightfully smooth concrete sleepers for our walkways that you could possibly imagine. “You couldn’t even buy them this clean at home,” reckons Daz.

Daz, Shona and I have started having morning “toolbox” meetings where we plan out what we each need to achieve each day, who needs the car, who will take the house keys, who will be contactable by phone (one of us is always running out of credit), who will be here to let Agnes, our cook, in, who will be home in time for Daniel to return from school…who is going to do the week’s shopping (always one of the girls, it seems!), who is going to return the soda bottles to the local duka (small store), who is going to give Elizabeth all the clothes we need washed, who is going to take photos of the building progress, who is going to buy steel or cement from in town… I’m not sure why we thought we could progress efficiently without these meetings, but now we’re having them, stress levels are reducing, as we all know what to expect from each other. Looking back, I truly can’t believe we tried to operate without them! Even so, Shona and I have still been having some fairly emotional experiences. We knew we’d come against some bureaucracy in the Tanzanian system, as we tried to finalise getting all sorts of permits and documents, so the slowly-slowly mode of operandi was no surprise. What was a surprise was when Shona turned around to one official, smiled sweetly and then said, ‘Ah yes, slowly-slowly in Tanzania, but we have been trying to sort this since April. It is now October, so that is slowly-slowly enough, I think.” Too funny. Cheeky but always polite. Anyway, I think Shona somehow made her point, as things seemed to move a little bit more quickly for us in that office, after that comment.

Another very strange thing we’re finding is that you can speak to the government officials here. You just ring their mobile number. True. Last week I spoke to some minister in Dar Es Salaam about our NGO status. He gave me a mobile number for the State Attorney of the Ministry of Home Affairs, who I will ring this week. Imagine ringing some department of the Australian Government and being told you need to speak to Alexander Downer, here’s his mobile. So one minute things move slowly-slowly, and the next you stumble upon a shortcut you could only dream about at home. And this is how we live with it. For every obstacle, we find a miracle around the corner.

Case in point: Yesterday, I wanted to get money out of the ATM. First ATM, no. Second ATM, no. Third ATM, no. Fourth ATM… seemingly yes, but then no, and no indication of whether or not the transaction would come up on my statement – I feared that since the transaction was mainly processed, I’d get a bank statement saying I’d received the $400 I was trying to take out when, in fact, I didn’t get. This meant I had to go into the bank. Queue. Talk to banker who didn’t care very much about my dilemma – preferred to pretend that I just wanted to get out more money. Then, finally getting point across, I was told I needed to wait another hour until they counted the cash in the ATM machine at the end of the day. Went out to break bad news to Shona, who waited outside. In telling her the news, I spotted a vehicle out of the corner of my eye with the “Selian” logo on the side. Shona and I have wanted to find this NGO for two weeks. We went and sat by the car for an hour until the driver returned. We waved her down, told her how we thought maybe Selian could work with us (they do HIV care) – and of course, she’s an Aussie too, and stoked to be tackled by us in the middle of the street. Would love to help us out. See? Without the bank dramas, we would not be meeting Sarah from Selian next week for dinner and info-collecting. This type of stuff happens to us 80 times a week. I love it. Every time something seems not to be going ‘right’, you just remind yourself that the universe is just preparing to dish up another spectacularly useful “coincidence”.

House gossip?

1. Breaking gossip: It’s probably top secret, but a blog’s a blog’s a blog. So here we go: Jai seems to have met himself a ‘girlfriend’. Well, nobody knows if it’s serious enough to venture into “girlfriend” territory, but he is not sleeping at our house every single night. Make of that what you will.


2. Daniel had a great “cakey-o-cakey-o” birthday last week. Here they sing “cakey-o-cakey” instead of ‘happy birthday” which I think is fitting. Most people only care about the cake on your birthday anyway, so why pretend otherwise! We took him up to a yum-as chicken place I remember from being here last time and we gobbed down marinated chicken, chips, sodas and cakey-o-cakey. Daniel also got a spin of the ute under Dad’s guidance (not bad for a 14 yo) and got some bow & arrow lessons from our guard, Januari. One of his more unsual birthdays, he reckons. He’s also been going to school down the road at Edmund Rice Secondary, where he’s been teaching instead of studenting. Why not? He came home with cool sayings and taught us how to say “muzuka” (cool) instead of “nzuri” (good) when people ask how we are. So now we’re heaps hip and totally down in the hood, etc.








3. Nolasco’s wife Getruda and her neighbour Elizabette, came to teach us to make chapatti. I wasn’t really up for it because Edwina and I spent the entire year of 2003 having our neighbour Josephine try, try, try to teach us to make chapatti. Every weekend we would patiently, open-heartedly, once again, aim to learn to make chapatti. No good. Anyway, I got involved with the shenanigans and did all the twist, plumping and pushing of dough required, and admittedly they were yum-as. But it’s a trick. I know it’s a trick. As soon as the African disappears from the room, so does the success of the chapatti. This I know. So if Shona starts talking about how we can make chapatti, I’m going to have to suggest you ask her to give it a burl on her own to prove it. I wish her every success, but honestly, I’m not feeling positive… take care, and keep an eye out for this container with me!

Beck

PS Shona and I bought three hens and called them Kelsey, Anne and Edwina, so really the FWS girls are all here in Tanzania.