Big Days and Big Weeks

Blog 18.05.08

Big days and big weeks.

For the second time since I arrived, I’m feeling thoroughly elated about this project. Normally, I feel: in-love with the project, in love with its concepts, in love with the volunteers helping us here and back home, but underneath all that icing, I still feel that we’ve so far to go, so much to do, so many people to help...

That’s not what I felt recently when I say I felt thoroughly elated. Instead, I’m talking about pure, unadulterated bliss. A feeling of “omigod, everything is finally, finally coming together!”

The first time I felt this coming-together was two weeks ago when I was unofficially advised that we had about $40,000 coming into us real soon. Yes, we’d received a big boost before that – with Cathy McQuade’s wonderful fwsa fundraiser - and while that certainly eased some of the niggling funding concerns I try to pretend don’t exist, it didn’t dispel them. While thoroughly grateful for (and gobsmacked by!) the efforts of Team fwsa, I still felt we needed a big kick on to get some more dosh in to see us through to the finish of the building stage. I began writing grants like a woman possessed. And it is one of those grants, which looks like delivering this $40,000. That $40,000 becoming so soon after the fwsa’s $60,000 really pushed me into a realm of “there’s no stopping us now”.

The excitement lasted a good few days. Not long eh? Why so short? Well, I snuffled the excitement by focussing on (slash “worrying about”) my next area of concern – the lack of builder volunteers coming over to assist Daz, Nick and Robbie. It’s so important to sit with and revel in your highs before you move on to tackle your next challenge, isn’t it?

Anyway, this week has seen my coming-together bliss return. From out of the blue, we’ve had 3 builders contact us and say they’re keen to arrive on our banana-straw doormat within the next month. We can barely fit them in our volunteer accommodation huts – we don’t care! Come anyway, we’ve said! We’ve converted the house kitchen to a bedroom (now named Kip In The Kitchen) and we’re sending out volunteer agreements and “can you please bring…” requests like we’ve not seen civilisation for the better part of a year! There is an electric vibe among the current volunteers (who now include Liz the hot – she makes me say that every time I talk about her - myotherapist from Melbourne and the Euro contingent – Irish Fairies named Laura (F1) and Zoe (F2), and Bex Krings (aka The German, Kringsy, or Kringa, whatever takes your fancy). We can barely fit our team’s food in the fridge as it is and the newly built out-door camp kitchen is fabulous but not the place to be at 7am if you want to keep your sanity. Make your tea at 8.30am, is my advice! In fact, the kitchen has become so crazy in the mornings, we’re thinking about rostering three-at-a-time breakfast making shifts! We’re already doing shift-time showers and evening meals (Yes, some grandmas like myself are now starting to make dinner at 4.30pm, daily) and I’ve been at Corky like a banshee to finish making the bench seat in the kitchen before these new vols (and their partners!) arrive. We’ve worked out, we have to ask this new lot to bring their own laptops – as our two laptop computers don’t stretch far enough now. And we are checking they’re okay with shared sleeping arrangements as we’ll be throwing them in with the fws vols already here. I shudder to think how our weekly grocery shopping expedition will fare. We already spend hundreds of dollars (of our own money, don’t panic sponsors!) and allocate a five-hour timeslot and four-person team to the task. I suppose we’ll have to consider shopping twice a week, which is kinda a hassle because it ties up the work ute for, not one, but two days per week…No, we’ll need to sort out another solution there, that’s for sure.
How will we all get into town to dine at Stiggy’s or Vama – a bonding dinner thing we do weekly? It’ll certainly be a split bagsing jumping the back of the ute, or having to catch a cab in. Previously we’ve managed to get everyone into the back of the ute so we can happily travel in packs and do a quick roll call before we head home together. Can’t see us pulling that off with a volunteer crew of 15-18. Cabs it is. How will our rainwater storage last? Well, it probably won’t. So we’ve just shut off the tap that we’ve been using for washing and now only wash our clothes in town water (when it runs) and only drink our rainwater. This will help preserve it during this “heavy capacity” period.

If I’m sounding panicked, I’m not. I’m just in preparation mode. I’m bouncing and super excited about all this help arriving, but it’s also one of my many jobs to ensure the helpers are happy! Having their meat go off because it doesn’t fit in the freezer, having no clean drinking water, or having too small a lunch serve (or none at all, as has happened here once), after labouring under the African sun all morning might sound like minor problems, but trust me, they’re not when you’re here in Africa, trying to cope with the thousand random events that fill your working day. The least we can offer our volunteers is comfortable accommodation, a reliable food supply and plenty of drinking and washing water. What, food water shelter? Yep, it’s number one for us Westerners, too!

Till next month

Beck

2am. Sticky situation 3072.

Blog 1 may 2007

It’s 2am and my guts are churning. I think sometimes when things don’t work out exactly the way we planned, we tell ourselves they’re working out wrong. And then stress. Which is just stupid. It’s highly probable that the universe is all-knowing and unfolds the way it does for the best, whether we are capable of comprehending that best or not.

So what’s not working out the way I planned? Ah…just little things. Most of them barely worth mentioning but you know how fingerlings become sharks at this wee hour. It’s like that Leunig cartoon, that has two pictures. The first he is awake in bed and his thought bubble shows three viscous sharks, hunting, hunting, bearing their teeth…The next, he is at the breakfast table and his thought bubble is three little fishies swimming around happily, harmlessly.

I have a list of about 3 foolscap pages of “things we’d do differently next time”. I keep adding to it, but interestingly, it’s all the Western stuff. All the planning, implementing, support, reporting, funding procedures – and most of the ideas on the list stem from this being the first time we’ve done this. When I reflect on the suggestions in daylight, none of them take on the overwhelming horror that they seem to take on at this shark-bait hour. In fact, mostly I feel proud that the 3 foolscap pages aren’t 3,000. They could well be, except we put enough planning (4 years) and expertise into this project. So most times, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction about how smoothly our project has been running. I attribute bucket loads of that success to Dazzie Pants (who obstinately refuses to allow obstacles to deter him from charging on), yet the fact is the whole team here does that – every minute, every day – so I’m being biased in attributing this quality to Darren only.

But he is on my mind right now, because he has just been woken by our across-the-road neighbours – a grandma, mama and her husband. The mama has her mouth slashed. 2am. It begs some questions, but of course, with our limited kiswahili, we’ve only managed to half understand. The cut has been made with a spear. We don’t know if the husband has done it. All we know is, once again, we are being asked for the use of our car, our wits and our hearts.

We have a policy that, for security reasons, none of us EVER are to go to the front gate at night. The guards are meant to handle all night-time queries to avoid us being tricked into an ambush or something… Well we broke that policy when our guard Elle Macpherson (we added the prefix to this wise, old Tanzanian’s name to give him some Australian flavour!) mentioned Nolasco’s name in trying to explain our car was needed to help. (You’ll know that Nolasco is our friend and village elder, someone who is very dear to us). Daz ventured up to find not Nolasco but this family, with their urgent problem.

On returning to our hut, Daz explained the little he’d managed to work out and then headed up to the car with his keys and phone in his pocket. I phoned him to check whether the slash was a hospital type problem – or maybe something we could wake Heather about and ask her to address. “Definitely hospital”. In moments, Daz was again, back at our hut – looking for his wallet – there was only a skeric of petrol in the car.

So this is where the list comes into play. We can fix the “no petrol in the car in an emergency” situation. I’ll just explain again tomorrow that we’d like whoever uses the ute to fill it up before they embark on the 40-minute trip home, but this time I’ll have a reason to prove it’s important. In emergencies, we MUST have fuel in the car…everyone can appreciate my nagging when they finally see a reason for it.

That’s the “Western” side, the bit I’m comfortable with, the bit I feel is fixable – even in this black of night. The bits that I’m forever at a loss to navigate are the African bits, the “Tanzanian life” bits… those seemingly random eventualities that make up life for our African neighbours. How does a young woman get a slash across her mouth at 2am? How do we help her from experiencing similar situations again? How many corpses of our neighbours has Corky delivered to the morgue – we have a neighbour die every month. And don’t go thinking I mean old, long-lived, happy-to-check-out grandparents. I mean 28 year olds. People younger than ourselves, with life ahead of them and young families relying on them… How many kids does one of our most upstanding labourers look after now his brother has abandoned his family – 13, or is it 14? Withdrawing his meagre savings two months ago, he’s still supporting them. He’s not yet asked us for help, but he will – the current system is unsustainable. How many knocks at the front gate do we get to tell us about newly orphaned kids we need to know about? How many mamas find it difficult to get to our meetings during this wet season because either they themselves or the kids are sick – as a result of eeking out a living in a mud hut with flooded floors when it rains day and night? How many kids are sent home from the local primary school because they haven’t paid their school fees – we see the droves of them wandering home at all hours every day. How many problems need our help in this community alone?

Innumerable. And sometimes it’s just a matter of time (the Kesho mamas will enjoy next year’s wet season –their new home will be dry!). Sometimes it’s a matter of money (I look forward to the time when we give this worker supporting 13 kids a full-time job at Kesho Leo as a farmhand or something of the like), and sometimes it’s just a matter of using our car (we’ll continue to run our dead neighbours to the morgue, it’s our service to our community)…but oh, how my heart bleeds and my guts cramp when I see problems I’m not convinced we can fix. It’ll be almost impossible to find out whether this woman’s slashed mouth was a result of her husband’s hand (Tanzanians don’t readily discuss these things and it would be extremely rude and culturally inappropriate for us to ask. We’ll need to make discreet enquiries through Nolasco. And then it will be culturally inappropriate for us to address the situation. Nolasco will need to on our behalf…if he has time. Fortunately, he is at least, one of the few Tanzanian men that solemnly believe it’s wrong for men to hurt women physically). Even if the husband is responsible, in this country it’s no big deal anyway – its traditional culture for a man to beat his wife whenever he wants, even if this type of domestic violence has recently become illegal in statutory law. And I mean recent – I’m talking 5 years max. How do I help here? How do I help the woman that looks after her 3 kids, her sisters 2 kids and her dying sister (who has HIV-AIDS) but doesn’t live in Sinon, so doesn’t fall into our described area of beneficiaries? Yet her local priest, a lovely Irish man, keeps ringing me for assistance – “she’d really be able to help these kids, if she just had a hand,” he says… What can I do to help here? A few months ago I began calling these Tanzanian situations “Sticky situations 3072s”. I can’t think of a better way to describe them. All my Western situations with this project are so simple and solvable – they number into the thousands also but there’s no counting them because instead you just solve them, quickly, cleanly. All my Tanzanian 3072s seem so complicated and dare I say it…unsolvable.

And yet they are the very reason we are here. So while my stomach churns, I guess, all I can do is address the 3072s the way I address other problems. One at a time. Even if the time is 2am and I’m guilt ridden because I’m not the one actually at the hospital. Darren is.

Beck