foodwatershelter

2008-07-04T12:03:00.009+10:00

Congratulations my darling boy, my heart and soul, my rock and my life.

Revel in your bliss, as I revel in the honour of having held your human hand.

I’m so proud of you, my gorgeous, courageous, selfless Dazzie Pants.

You are my everything and always will be.

Biggest love imaginable,
Your girl forever,
Beck, xxx

I encourage any fws & dazza supporters reading this to post a comment in tribute to the legend that is dazza. He'll love it.

The Almighty Solo Whinge-Off!

2008-06-20T19:27:00.011+10:00

18.06.08

My challenge for this blog is to not whinge, but to detail objectively.

Strap yourselves in – when fired up, I rarely bother to locate the objective organ…Hence the sweet little disclaimer at the top of this blog. Mainly implemented because I said shithead once. I’ll likely be saying it again soon, probably many times, so sign out now if you’re not up for it.

And those staying, remember that I’m a whole person by myself. Real, live, just like you. Separate from fws. So separate me accordingly and read this blog as it is. A rant from Rebecka, that is likely to be highly unsupported by the calmer contingency of the fws organisation. I stand alone…in many ways, as you’ll see…

Right, onwards.

The whinge? For four weeks I’ve been trying to cope with the fact that Daz’s imac laptop, the one I use day in day out to run fws and to do a considerable amount of my work as kesho leo manager here has died. Kufa. Kaput. Ain’t Jesus, ain’t coming back. Catchya later, DelFONCE (not my real name, just one we use when we’ve stuffed up and think ourselves to be a bit of an eeejet). Imac gone, expletive, expletive, expletive.

I’ve tried to be graceful about it (apart from the expletives). As my friends and family will testify, grace is not a natural achievement of mine. Colourful, highly theatrical outbursts that leave bystanders scratching their head are more my speciality. Still, I’ve told myself that there is a reason for my computer dying the month I finally managed to feel like I was on top of things. On top, such an understatement. I was certifably going off, absolutely on fire, too organised to touch, kingess of the world. Catch me if you can.

Yes, yes, I back up my computer documents on an external hard-drive. Shoosh with that reprimanding. Don’t bore me with shoulda-couldas. I just didn’t happen to back up enough in the month of magnificent achievements and prolific creative genius, okay? Granted, nobody saw these 80 wonders of the world copyrighted to one Rebecka Mastermind Delf-not-yet-FONCE, for they were in my head – and according to an unspoken agreement with my imac – also backed up in his big desktop brain. Clearly my ideas were far too wieldy for him, lauded artificial intelligence of the future, to sit comfortably with. Obviously, my brain scared the bejezis outta his brain. I thought we’d agreed to support each other. Wimp.

I on the otherhand, am not a wimp. And my intelligence is not artificial. So immediately, I began to recreate, re-envision, re-disseminate. Silly me. I relied on another computer, a mere PC (yeh, hate ‘em – the world’s most cumbersome piece of tom-foolery mac-hinery. Tune in, waste hours, drop out, start again tomorrow, thanks Bill”), to pick up where my genius streamlined imac bowed out. Naturally, in-fighting occurred and the PC and I are at a stand off. The PC, who called Gmail and Microsoft software to unite forces against me, is lucky not to have been buried in the sloppy heap of cowdung that sits across the road.

Mountain, molehill? Your call. But first chuck this shoe on: try to preside over fws Australia from Tanzania without a computer or email. Do the volunteers based in Australia, whom I’ve asked many a deadlined favour from, wonder why I don’t return their question-packed emails? Do they write fws off as inefficient and disorganised? I would. Let’s hope they show more mercy. Do my parents and lil bro know I’m alive? (probably, but only because they’re psychic). Do my friends realise I’d like to respond to their terrific action-packed emails? (probably not, they generally think I’m theatrical, hard to pin down and unceremoniously rude).

This “specially just for you” frustration is a journey I’ve watched every one of the Kesho Crew travel through – alone.

Daz when he couldn’t think/find/research a solution to the “dodgey ply” drama… I listened to him lament, but I couldn’t solve his issues. Primarily, he suffered alone.
Ditto for Heather when she first arrived and had sooo much lesson planning to do and had yet to establish a relationship with the mamas – when they questioned her facts and information. Primarily, she suffered alone.
And now me with this stupid imac debacle.

We all work together but we are such a small team that we can only support each other to a limited extent. At the end of the day, the journey of frustration is ours to figure out ourselves. People can’t really feel your pain. How do we deal with the restrictions and limitations placed on us by events outside our area of control? Gracefully, patiently, courageously, ferociously, childishly? I’ve seen all gamuts. Clearly I’m sitting down the latter end of the EQ scale (emotional intelligence quotient) on this one.

And that brings the question: Must we all continue to try and find grace under fire? Or do we just say “Shithead, shithead, shithead, this is me, this is (apparently) how I act, three weeks down, when I’m completely utterly entirely bankrupt of finding a solution, what of it, shuddup!”?

And another, no less philosophical question might be: do technology designers really design things to break 2 minutes after their warranty is up? And pray tell, where might the ethics in that be? Is it even legal? Admittedly, I don’t care much when it’s corporate computers that are dying left, right and centre…but when you’re working for free, trying to do something useful in a developing country and the heads on your imac’s hardrive wear out, causing the whole hard-drive and all your work to be lost… by design…exactly one month after warranty expires, so you’re forced to buy another… you’ve gotta ask what morally bereft IQ-without-EQ types are running this technology driven world?

I’m up for your answers. Be as blunt as you like, and feel free to swear. It will make me like you better. (so mature!)

Okay, good news; the solo whinge-off has drawn to a close, died its natural death.

Aaaaaand even gooder news: While I’ve been wallowing in the mire, the project is going stunningly! Truly. Check the pix!

Positive blog coming up – next time, promise!

Beck MM DelFONCE. xx

The highs, the lows, the lot...

2008-06-11T21:16:00.008+10:00

the highs, the lows, the lot...

2008-06-11T00:28:00.010+10:00

7 June 2008

Well, it’s happened. The thing we were told would happen within the first month of building. The thing we thought we’d managed to avoid by our tenacious commitment to employing and assisting the local community. We have, it seems, had some building materials stolen by our own workers.

Product missing – cement bags. We don’t yet know how many. It could be 3, it could be at the very most 50. Now that sounds like we’ve been negligent, but not so. It’s more a case of our thieves being a little craftier than we’d anticipated – and thereby sneaking under our accounting methods.

What methods? Well, we lock our cement bags in our shipping container each night – the key of which is kept on Darren’s person. Every day the team of four labourers making the concrete sleepers for the Kesho Leo walkway, use three bags of cement. Daz, Nick, Robbie and Liz are on site all day – and don’t leave for lunch when the labourers do, so nothing goes walking then. And come home time, there’s first a regular pack up and check off as unused cement bags go back to the container each afternoon. Some afternoons there are no cement bags to go back, because they’ve all been used in making the concrete sleepers. Or so we thought. But what if the concreting team of four had joined forces with the site guard in this nifty little scam... Just say that some days, just two bags of cement are used in the moulds. What if, at some point during the day, the third was buried underneath the huge pile of sand that is shovelled into the concrete mix. Then after everyone leaves the site for the afternoon, one of the concreting team returns to the job, is let in by the site guard, digs out the bag of cement and walks off into the setting sun.

It’s a profitable plan. One 50kg bag of cement here costs $13.50. We are paying the locals more than the standard wage – which comes out at $15 each per week. So if they can pull this scam off once a day, once a week even, they’ve doubled their weekly wage.

It’d be nice to report that those involved are definitely spending their money on food, medicine and education for their children and wives. Maybe they are. Some of their behaviours suggest they are spending it on alcohol.

Yes, alcohol abuse is an alive and kicking issue here. This week, in separate incidents to the above, we dismissed two of our guards and one of our newly employed managers for arriving at work inebriated. And I’m talking seriously off their faces. Not that it would make one iota of difference had they been less drunk - we don’t adjust the rules to the degree of intoxication. But, to my Western mind, it’s a spin-out that all three of them, barely unable to walk, figured it best to show up to work in this state, than not show up at all. Is alcoholism so accepted here?

The immediate question fws is expected to answer is: YOU SAID YOU WERE HERE TO HELP THE COMMUNITY. SHOULDN’T YOU THEN ‘HELP’ THESE WORKERS? Sure. Here’s my answer: Yes, we’re here to help the community, absolutely, always, as best we can. And there-in lies the sting: Yes we are here to help the community, as best we can, but right now in these early days, no, we don’t have the manpower to put any newly hired workers we discover to have alcohol problems through a comprehensive program to help them eventually attain sobriety. I’m confident that one day, we will have the ability to do this, but as we stand, we’re too young and small to offer such nurturing. Of course, this is outlined explicitly to every person we hire, as we hire them. The brief sounds a little like this: fws is here for the community, and kesho leo is a home for vulnerable women, their children and orphans – so a lot of those living at kesho have been treated poorly by men, and particularly men with alcohol issues. Soooooo, fws is very passionate about ensuring the men we hire are not just able to do their kesho leo job, but also able to be great role models and father figures to the children, and to be good men that the kesho leo house mamas can trust not to hurt or scare them. Suddenly the significance of having alcoholic night guards and managers takes on a new light, hey? Suddenly, fws is forced to look at its objects – to provide SAFE housing for vulnerable women, their children and orphans. Can we be everything to everybody? One day, let’s hope – that’s kind of our plan, and where we can’t, we can certainly point people in the right direction (which is what we did in this case – accompanying the manager employee to counselling (which he elected to give up after two sessions) and giving phone numbers for the AA meetings in town). Can we be everything to everyone, right now? No way, not even close, speak to the hand

So, where to with our dodgy characters among our good men? Well, firstly, we’ll explain that they’ve simply stolen from themselves. Kesho might be a home to these women and kids but it’s also a community education centre and health clinic…for them and their families. These men have wives and children who get sick (and are administered to poorly by the local clinics) and their kids will grow up wanting the education we offer. The men know this – they must have forgotten. Or does mankind not develop foresight when he lives hand to mouth every day? Take what you can, while you can. You never know what trauma tomorrow may bring…

More immediately though, these men, who we’ve worked alongside and trained for 11 months, will be dismissed from the job – it’s not fair to keep them on when we have 16 other labourers who haven’t been dishonest. However, the real karma kicks in via their fellow workers. This process, purely by circumstance, has already begun. As it so happened, the Friday the hidden cement bag was discovered by Mudi, our assistant manager, Darren and I had taken off at midday for a weekend away. Upon being advised of the situation on Friday afternoon (via mobile), Daz asked Mudi to shut the job down on Saturday (turn all the workers away at the gate) and then to postpone paying all the workers their weekly wages on Saturday – so that Daz could pay those NOT INVOLVED in the theft on Monday, but in the meantime nobody would be paid. Our idea was that this would give us some time on Monday morning (and over the weekend to investigate, interview and nut out who was in the scam). As you can imagine, for the 16 or so guys who are most probably entirely innocent, this was a seriously frustrating mandate. No cash on pay day – and being forced to wait two days for it. Who do you think they got annoyed with? fws? Not so much. Their scamming colleagues? Yes. One uninvolved worker has already been reported to mutter, “What’s wrong with them? Can’t they just be happy with what they were getting?”

As you’d imagine Daz is disappointed but I asked him not to be. There are good eggs and dodge eggs everywhere you go and incidents such as these only help us halo the men with integrity and good characters – the men who will make fantastic role models and trustworthy protection for the residents of Kesho Leo. We’re whittling down that list – and it’s looking good.

Beck

Big Days and Big Weeks

2008-05-20T22:35:00.005+10:00

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.

2008-05-05T20:01:00.002+10:00

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

Beck's back!!

2008-04-07T17:18:00.008+10:00

For a while now, you’ve been reading our volunteer blog postings, instead of mine (thought I’d give you a break!).

Not true – I actually thought it might be good for you to hear how each of our vols is contributing and how committed they are to their area of the Kesho project. I’m sure their blogs give some indication of how, while we’re all working as a team towards a common goal, we all have a lot of ground to make individually in the areas we’ve come to volunteer in.

For instance, volunteer nurse, Heather, has had her hands full lesson planning and then teaching our Kesho house mamas about the various aspects of “health”. For three months, the mamas have been learning about nutrition, hygiene, anatomy, and health risks relevant to them (malaria, typhoid etc). Last week, we had one of our very bravest mamas request a HIV test. Heather spent much time researching for a clinic we could trust (not just to use new syringes, but to offer before and after counselling – our inimitable psychologist, Kelsey Wilson is yet to arrive…) After much to-ing and fro-ing Heather located the clinic and her and the house mama made their way in. We’ve been deeply gutted since. The test was positive. Now, we need to do some follow up testing to see how far along this house mama is. Naturally, we will support her, psychologically and physically (ensuring she receives the counselling and anti-retrovirals she requires). We can only hope at this stage, that coming tests show that HIV has not yet blown out to AIDS. We are positive, because this mama is healthy and strong, yet it’s still very hard to watch a fellow human being going through the process of trying to comprehend such devastating news, walking around in shock, moving towards anger…and then requesting that we tell nobody - as she doesn’t’ wish to be ostracised from her community and isn’t even planning to tell her one family member, a sister that lives 12 hours away in Dar. We all watched in disbelief as this mama then showed up to house mama lessons with her young family (who she plans to have tested in the next few weeks) and put on a brave face for all. Heather, our champion, continues to support this house mama, giving further ‘information’ counselling – and travelling to and from testing clinics with her. It’s been humbling to watch these two women progress together.

While Heather manages that, her multi-skilled partner, Nick Hirst, somehow juggles working full days at the building site (8am-5pm), heading up the team making the A-frames for the roof, while keeping our accounts in sparkling condition. Bear in mind that being bursar here doesn’t just mean you’re moving figures around in an excel document on the computer (while, of course there is plenty of that), but instead more often means negotiating with 5 or so Tanzanians a day – all randomly popping in whenever they’re in the hood, to see if they can borrow some money for a sick mother, late school fees, a pair of shoes for the kids, some medicine for malaria… Sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes it’s no. We only give these “pay advances” to our employees or house mamas, but get asked by all! Reasons? We first have to be convinced our staff have the means to repay us – and when they’re asking for $50, as they occasionally do, and their weekly pay is more like $15 (standard local rate), then the answers likely to be a no. Or a… “try making do with $5”. So far, all debts have been repaid, so track records are good. It’s hard though to have a true appreciation for a what a drain on you emotionally this sort of decision-making takes. Each case, weighed up individually, checked with management, documented in the bookkeeping, followed up weekly… No, none of us here envy Nick his money-man role, that’s for sure. Yet he keeps telling Heather he “loves” being a carpenter, so maybe that’s why he’s escaping to the site four days out of five! Go, we say, enjoy!

Corky, fws environmental engineer – has some great news. He’s hired Kesho Leo’s Eco Farm Manager. Fidelus, who is Tanzanian and 30 years old, has worked as a primary school teacher for 10 years, worked with a few NGOs, developed a mushroom farming project with one of them, a juicing type project for another. He's currently studying law(six years correspondence) and has his heart set on ... being a land lawyer. When I asked why he told a story of how as a child, a woman in his community had her land stolen from her by her ex-husband and the customary law allowed this to occur despite the statutory law stating she was entitled to half. He saw the ramifications of this decision and decided to fight against it – on behalf of all women and families that experience this loss. I asked him if he realised that in the future, he could quite possible work for fws on staff as a lawyer to sort out many such issues for the many women in Sinon who find themselves in this position and he grinned. Anyway, for now he's our farm manager and very happy to have the job. Corky has identified that while he's seems to be great with kids (saw him interact with kids for 2 days at recent Tumaini course in permaculture) that he is quite likely lacking in extremely strong farming/agriculture skills. Corky plans to teach Fidelus the eco-systems: biogas, rainwater harvesting, fishpond, etc but has spoken to Fidelus about fws potentially hiriing a farm-hand trainee (from Tengeru Agriculture College) to handle the permaculture/organic vegie gardens at Kesho. Fidelus likes this idea, and so does Corky. Corky feels Fidelus is quick enough to learn the new systems, but it would be good to have the support of a farm-hand to handle the vegie stuff... Fidelus starts next Monday and wil work with Corky on making compost and then towards creating lessons with house mamas on KL eco-systems...

Corky also did a mortuary run last week on a grandmother who lived over the back, looking after four orphans, we think two are her direct grandkids and two aren't... Anyway, we've now got the knock on the door - a mama has taken them in, despite having her own kids, but can't really afford them. We've filled out our “Kesho Potential Kid” form (which really should be renamed asap!) and will add it to the other form I filled in a while back about the kids. It’s sometimes difficult to not be able to take these kids in straight away and ease the burden on their new carers – and to offer the kids some stability in life – but at least we are here, and operating and will be ready to help soon.

Daz is a roof man at the moment. You can’t talk to him about anything else. He is so excited about having the roof on, the tanks connected up, the rain falling, the water splashing into tanks that he wakes me two, three, four times a night to tell me that it’s just rained 20mm (he’s become good at guestimating rainfall) and that can only mean we’ve just collected an extra how-many-ever-thousand litres in our tanks. He’s a bit like a mozzie, but at least he’s stopped jumping out of bed to leap to the window and watch the rain fall down in the dark… Last estimated: we’ve collected 85,000 litres.

Daz is also stoked about having his son, Robbie here. Robbie has been brilliant, helping his Dad up on site every day, building, sawing, hammering, fitting, laying – whatever’s required. He’s also shown a remarkable ability to simply land here and operate – no culture shock dramas for this one. I keep telling Daz it’s amazing that both Robbie and Daniel (Darren’s other son, who flew over for five weeks last year) are so adaptable. It’s a credit to Daz for rearing such beasty boys, I say. I mean, gawd, I’m only just now starting to feel like I’ve moved beyond culture shock, eight months later!

Even yesterday Corky and I cracked up because we were talking about when we’d roll out our potential plan to build huts for short-term volunteers. GAP Foundation in Canada are keen to send us a steady flow of green-livin’ volunteers on one-month stints… Corky and I were discussing how we didn’t really see how we could roll out such a big project in less than two years (big because you’d need a full time volunteer leader, you’d need to orient all volunteers, deal with culture shock regularly, often, always…by the time they’d get over their culture shock, they’d be on the plane home and the next lot would be arriving, rah rah). Then Corky put everything back into perspective by observing, “Well, of course, it seems a big project, but compared to everything we’re already doing here, it’s really quite minute”. Yes, a speck of dust, in fact! But maybe that’s not ‘culture” shock – but rather “oh my, I can’t believe this is all working, happening” shock! Of course, most days I do believe it’s all working and happening – in fact, I EXPECT it to all work and happen, but some days you stand back for a minute and the size and success of our project is kinda mind-blowing and overwhelming!

Anyway, what have I been doing besides overwhelming myself? Always such a hard question to answer. Well, namely I’ve been facilitating the mamas to sort out some of their needs. This usually proves hilarious. Take this one: Bibi Frank has been at me to buy her 3 grandkids school shoes. I haven’t seen these school shoes yet but got Volunteer Education Programmer Clare to appraise them before she left. Report was: school shoes falling apart, very bad. Then I said to Clare: are they worse than any of our other kids' shoes? (ie why should gorgeous Franky, Haji & Mary get priority...over other Kesho kids?). Clare wasn't sure. Later on confirmed via Heather that Bibi's kids' shoes are in FAR WORSE condition than other Kesho Kids...basically threadbare, shoe top falling off Franky's. Then we had Easter break, then past week of partial holiday (no contact with mamas), so not much got done. So two days ago, Bibi Frank, god love her, sends me a message through Kesho Assistant Manager Mudi to say that... Oh no, worst of luck, Franky's school shoes have been "stolen". TOOO FUNNY! Heather & I cracked up! AAAAAZ IF anyone would steal shoes in that condition. Like, they're not even shoes anymore! Oh how we larfted. Later, sent a friendly reminder back to Bibi, explaining that we'll get the shoes this week, but there's no need for such exciting embellishments. Tooo funny. One of my favourite African adventures.

Inbetween these random African adventures, I’ve been updating the website. Check out

the new story board at our photo gallery – www.foodwatershelter.org.au/photo-gallery.aspx
our updated shopping list – www.foodwatershelter.org.au/shoppinglist.aspx
our values (that we created in the early days but have only just thought to publicise!) – http://www.foodwatershelter.org.au/page11254140.aspx

An exciting visitor - fws board member Edwina Hammond, flew in from London with her teacher mate, Laura last week. This has been particularly exciting for Corky and I (who volunteered with Ed in 2003), so we spent much time saying "Oh it's just like old times..." only to have Daz look at us sideways. Ed wanted, of course, to be 'of use' (her favourite phrase ever since she read Cidar House Rules in 2003), so given we were on partial holidays (no mamas lessons & doing 'catch up' work for the girls - while the boys were business as usual all week), it was hard to help Weenies be 'of use'. When I explained that it was raining and we're doing catch-up computer work and reminded her that she doesn’t like computer work, she worked out she’d weed the shamba with House Mama Mary. Weenies did that and then joined Laura in helping Robbie’s girlfriend Allyce (who is volunteering here and wishes to be a primary teacher) bring together some lesson plans for the house mama's English lessons, which Allyce is taking over from departed volunteer NuNu. Ed traveled up to the house mama lessons and helped out Lucas and Aileen our teacher aides with the early-learning lessons. There was a game of pin the banana on the monkey’s gob (possibly not its official name) and some reading, and baby-animal play acting to facilitate the kids learning English. Ed and Laura also took time to hand out the gorgeous clothes they’d collected from the students at their school in London (Southbank Primary) – as the pix show, the Kesho Kids were absolutely stoked with their new gear (one item per kid, but there were no complaints!).

What else do we do in our spare time? Oh, you know, we host the odd Easter Feaster (which boasts more gourmet concoctions than a swish Byron deli!). Such a treat! Oh, but another must about Easter Feaster is that it comes complete with an “agenda” as opposed to a “menu”. The agenda, differs from a boring old menu, because it has times attached to it. This is necessary, explains Daz, because “I need to know what I’m going to eat when”. O-kay…relax

Easter Feaster also comes with a hat parade. NuNu appeared as Carmen Miranda but her fruit took the form of the self-professed “beautifully drawn” flashcards she’d been using to teach house mamas English “fruit” words. Heather came as Jesus (thorn of crowns made from our bouganvillea so her suffering was legit), Robbie came as SuperBoy and Allyce came as the embodiment of Generation Y, because we have spent many weeks teasing Robbie & Allyce that they are ‘pure generation Yers”. I came as Sadie The Cleaning Lady, with curlers in my hair – that were actually made from Pringles containers (Daz likes the odd Pringle chip), but in my estimation, by far the most creative and topical hat was young Nick’s. The photos speak for themselves – and yes, naturally, Darren needed to check if Nick’s A-frame Kesho roof could collect water too – not too bad, was the consensus.

Hope you all had a great Easter! Will blog again soon.

A nurse's thoughts

2008-04-07T16:50:00.002+10:00

I didn’t need much convincing. It started with a random conversation at a ‘hen’s night’ in Brisbane and 6 months later I was boarding an aeroplane headed for Tanzania. Volunteering in Africa was something I have wanted to do since I began nursing in 2001. But if you had have told me then that in 7 years from now I would be part of a team building an eco friendly children’s village for Tanzanian orphans and vulnerable women, hosting health education classes for the community, I would have called you crazy. But here I am, and there you have it. I just hope I can give much of the good fortunes I have had in my life, pay it forward as they say. I don’t accept that geography should dictate a person’s opportunity to life.

I’ve been here nearly 3 months and I’ve been spending most of my time preparing and delivering health lessons to our House Mamas. It is always a surprise to find out what they know and what they don’t know. I am often taken aback by the information that someone (possibly the doctors/nurses in the local clinics) have been providing – and not providing to the community. While malaria is a huge problem, there seems to be a reflex reaction to diagnose most illnesses as malaria, which results in an increasing tolerance of the malaria parasite to treatment and other illnesses not being cured. These are enormous challenges on which I hope to have an impact, however small, during my time here (9 months to go and time is running out!).

Hoe down the nfareji

2008-03-30T02:44:00.002+11:00

Every week, or every other week, or once a month (don’t know if there is a schedule) 50-70 of Engo Sengiu's men get their pangas and hoes and spend half a day tidying up a section of the nfareji.

The nfareji is the traditional irrigation system, which is a network of trenches varying from 50cm to two metres wide into which the water from Mt Meru flows (via Arusha town before reaching us). To irrigate your farm you dig a connecting trench from the main line into your own network of trenches in your farm. I’m guessing there must be some etiquette surrounding its use because it would be too easy for someone upstream to hog all the water. The nfareji is also used as a rubbish bin (rubbish floats away - out of sight out of mind) and a toilet. Many of the illnesses around are a result of people drinking or being exposed to the typhoid and cholera laced nfareji water. The town water, which is on for about 30 minutes each morning is also pretty dodgy, and it is often too expensive for people to boil their water. This is particularly a problem now that coal burning for cooking has just been outlawed. The old Masai women who carry bags of coal on their donkeys to sell, have had their coal confiscated by the government. And no policies for alternative fuel sources appear to exist.

So, one recent Saturday morning, Corky and myself headed off to the meeting point for this round of nfareji work. We’d been warned that this week was going to be ‘nfareji kubwa’ (big nfareji). So, armed with a panga I found myself in the front group preparing to launch myself, boots and all, into the swiftly flowing water. For the following 3 hours, I and 30 other men waded upstream hacking the grass, plants and branches away from the sides of the nfareji. The murky grey-brown water littered with rubbish and excrement would splash up into my eyes, mouth and gradually increasing number of cuts in my arms and legs. Mightn’t sound like much fun and it no doubt put my vaccinations to the test, but the scenery we passed on our (roughly 2km) wade up the nfareji was like something out of an Indiana Jones or Tarzan movie. Dense banana trees (and a thousand other types of plant) overhanging the nfareji, the steep slopes of the hill we traversed overlooking the shambas (farms) in our village and surrounding areas. When we reached our end point we stood in a line in the water and gathered the rocks off the bottom and piled them on the edges (we only did this for about 10 minutes before everyone got bored). We then strolled back down to the village and sat under a large shady Acacia for the nfareji meeting. The meeting discusses who didn't show up and what to do with the fine (for not showing up) money - they decided to build 4 mini-weirs around the area to better manage the water flows.

We are probably one of the first mzungu to ever have helped work on the nfareji and the appreciation it earns us goes towards the security of our accommodation. The more people we can have on 'our side' then it is less likely that any organised raid of our house and land will happen. Which would be a good score for anyone successful in doing so given the number of laptops in this house and wealth that surrounds a group of wazungu.

Some words from Darren....

2008-03-24T19:47:00.000+11:00

My son, Robby and his girlifriend Allyce have been here a fortnight now and are really enjoying themselves. Robbie has been helping me with the roof and Allyce is helping training the mammas who will be our carers and their kids with their lessons.
She wants to be a primary teacher so this is a good opportunity for her.

I finally got the plywood I needed to build the roof for the children's village so I started that 2 weeks ago. The ply's pretty crap quality here so the engineer and architect have given me a fixing technique that will help it from de-laminating and it is working well. Plywood beams go off they are crazy strong even with this inferior product.

The trusses I'm making are 15 mtrs long and it takes 15 men minimum to place them
It is by far the most epic thing I have built, especially 'cause there are no cranes and everything needs to be done by hand. Not to add that I don't have any carpenters or builders to help me! But Corky, Nick and Robby are seriously capable and have been making a huge difference to progress. The locals are really spinning out now at the super-structure we are building. After we lifted the first beams the other day
they told me that I had "diamonds in my brain" to be able to think of all of this and make it work (now that they can finally see how big the roof is and how much water it will catch.)

I couldn't take all the glory so I explained to them that the architect and engineer are the ones who design it an make it work ,we are just building it off their design ,and they are the ones with the "diamonds in their heads"
Although it was still nice for them to be able to see now how it will all work and have a bit of faith in what we are doing.
When I first started working with them, 6 months ago and I was setting out all the 600 diameter holes for the piers They thought I was mad. Then when I started setting out the 2 meter round holes for the tanks one of them said " they sure do build stuff different in Europe "

This cracked me up but also made me realise they haven't seen anything like what we are doing… they’re going to be so proud of what they’ve helped build, when it’s all finished.

Volunteer Blogs! (Warren and Clare Hopley)

2008-03-14T23:10:00.003+11:00

Warren says:

Everyday is full of surprises and there are always millions of things to do. As Purchasing Officer I drop into town (Arusha) most days for picking up building supplies and everyday shopping items. It has been very rewarding to free up the two builders in order for them to do what they do best. AND their best is astounding! Most morning I drop off the builder and water supplies to our Children’s Village and in the afternoon pick up the teachers and our nurse from the Village.

The trip into Arusha is only 7 Km but it takes 25 minutes. First and second gear can only be used because the road is full of pot holes and is very dusty. It is used more as a pedestrian area than a road. The trip consists of lots of greetings and giving locals a lift.
In between running around with the ute this week, I also helped to move one of the mamas and her 3 children from a very poor one room home to a newly built 2 bedroom house on a small farm. Other odd jobs included :reconstruct the chook pen, paint window grates, build a gravel path, help build a B-B-Q, make two blackboards, spread soil and spent a few hours with the children’s education sessions.

Clare says:

“You put your arm in, you put your arm out, you put your arm in and you shake it all about. You do the ………….” Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be singing the ‘Hokey Pokey’ on a Tanzanian plateau, with beautiful children under a warm afternoon sun.

The Mamas program consists of me, along with 2 other volunteers, Lily and Janelle, the Tanzanian interpreter, Lucas and sometimes my husband, Warren teaching and playing games with the children while, the nurse, Heather, who is here for 12 months, takes the Mamas into a nearby Lutheran church for their health classes – they cover topics such as ‘washing hands minimizes disease’ and ’our skeleton’. It is held from 2pm to 5 pm each Monday to Thursday.

As a break in the health class, the Mamas join the children in a game. The aim is to help develop the Mama’s skills in English and provide opportunities for them to interact and play with their children.

For the afternoon break at 3.45pm everyone washes their hands, is given a drink of water and a serving of salad (usually cabbage, capsicum, tomato, mango). It is served on a cleaned banana leaf. Over the afternoon, several children join us from surrounding homes. They thoroughly enjoy the food that is served and join in our activities. It has been satisfying to see how many activities we have come up with despite very limited resources.

Life is an amazing journey. I am privileged to have had this turn in the road.

Kesho Leo begins operating!

2008-01-29T21:26:00.001+11:00

Well, it’s Australia Day and we’re operating!

Amid the acacia thorns, mini Scarlett-O’Hara dresses, 20L buckets of clean drinking water, skipping ropes, mango-beetroot-avocado salad, woven baskets filled with plastic cups, soccer balls, picture card games, balloons, Maasai blanket and recycled cement bag rugs… among all that we, yesterday, welcomed the Kesho Leo house mamas and their 17 odd children to their first life-skills lessons with the Kesho Crew.

While Mum underwent her fourth chemo treatment back in Australia, I steeled myself not to cry during my welcome speech. It’s an emotional thing to have someone you love doing some hard yards, while you’re not so close, and it’s an equally emotional experience to stand on a patch of prickly grass, with the Kesho walls rising behind you, as you explain to 12 Tanzanian women and their fatherless children, that finally, all that you and everyone involved with fws for the past three years, has promised will now begin to happen. Delivering on promises…can’t say I do it often (as most of my friends and family will attest), but I’ve turned myself – and just about everyone I know – inside out to deliver on these promises. And I can say proudly that today, we were delivering.

With Mudi translating, we welcomed these women to their home (still being built!) and to their new life (starting today). We explained that we would begin to deliver a “training allowance” each week, starting today – via our sponsorship program (two wonderful people have put their hand up to contribute – so we’re still looking for another 10 – visit www.foodwatershelter.org.au/sponsorships for more info). The “training allowance” is really just to allow these income-less women to receive a small but regular contribution towards feeding themselves and their kids – if they are in our lessons 4 afternoons a week, that’s 4 afternoons they can’t be selling their vegies or chapattis. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We’re also using some of the sponsorship money for resources (butcher paper, textas, exercise books etc) for their lessons.

We also explained to the house mamas that we intend to offer them another opportunity – to farm the bottom 1-acre of farm land next door to the fws volunteer village. We explained we’d be happy to advance them the $25 for the ploughing, the $200 for seed, and that they could form a shamba co-op, just like our labourers have (their garlic is due to harvest in a month or so...) and pay us back when the crops, whatever they decide to plant, come to harvest and are sold in the market. They seemed pleased with this idea.

Heather, our wonderful volunteer nurse, then got up to talk to the group about the type of health lessons she intended to cover – water & hygiene, nutrition, how our body works, recognising sicknesses, positive parenting and teamwork to name just a few.

We explained that it was our idea that house mamas and children would arrive at 2pm and split from their kids. House mamas would accompany Heather inside the Lutheran church (we arranged to use it with the church officials last week – we’ll need to think of a gift we can present to them, a new bell? Some curtains? More pews? Happy for ideas, all!). For the first hour, health lessons would happen inside the church, while kids lessons would happen outside, under the tree and under the guidance of the inimitable Clare, who is quite the energetic teacher! Then we’d reconvene, joining mamas and kids for some playing, interaction, positive parenting games and refreshments outside for an hour… and then the final hour would see the mamas head back for a final hour of health education and the kids be calmed with a story book.

We did our best to follow this format, and despite it being the “first” day, we went pretty close. We had extra help from volunteers, NuNu (last week she was known to us as Janelle but this week, we’ve met NuNu!), who was a huge hit with the kids and mamas - and Lily (who managed to nurse crying babies, play soccer with the young boys and still photograph and take the name of every kid attending so we could later work out which kids belonged to which mamas!)

We broke the ice early on, by someone’s (Clare, Lily, Nunu’s?) genius idea of playing skip-rope. Too easy, the mamas and kids were in and amongst before we had our second swoop going! Energised and laughing, we headed up to the Kesho Leo site, where with Mudi’s help I gave a brief rundown of what each of the rooms we are building would do – education centre – give lessons to the mamas, their kids, the orphans they take on, the wider community. The massive communal kitchen – allow the mamas to cook together, and eventually perhaps even run classes, the dining room with killer views of Meru and Kilimanjaro, to allow this big family to eat together, and to double as a second education room. I talked briefly about the fantastic rainwater harvesting system that would ensure that the water they drank was clean and healthy – and would not make them sick like the water they drink now does… and on that note, we headed back to our Maasai rugs to begin a huge fanfare about “washing our hands” before eating. Heather headed this one up, asking mamas and children to queue (not an African behaviour!) to wash their hands in clean water, and with soap, one at a time. Hands washed, we served up a salad of cabbage, beetroot, capsicum, mango, tomato and avocado with orange juice dressing. We knew it would have mixed reviews, but we also know that these women and children haven’t exactly been pouring the vegies into their systems and we decided a super-nutrient boost wouldn’t go astray. Why not? Like many Tanzanians, these women live on ugali (polenta – ground corn), rice or potatoes, so this instant introduction to full-on nutrition was quite surprising for many of them. Some liked it, some weren’t so keen. One commented that she had never eaten capsicum uncooked (it didn’t look like she wanted to repeat the experience!) – and of course, the kids did the job of kids all over the world and avoided the cabbage at all costs. Maybe we’ll have to introduce “fresh, crisp, raw” veggies that haven’t had the goodness boiled out of them, and that aren’t purely carbohydrate, a little more slowly… a little more strategically. They’re not going to sell well until we explain what beneficial effect colourful, nutrient-packed veggies will have on everyone’s health, says the ex Weight Watchers magazine editor. Anyhoo, I digress, suffice to say, I personally felt pretty good watching the carrots, beetroot, tomatoes and avocados make their way down a few gullets!

Sad bits? Absolutely. Little Patrick the nine-year-old son of Elizabeth, who has been in hospital for days with malaria and typhoid (yet still managed to make our lesson despite being extremely weak). Patrick has been handed the role of caring for (feeding, washing, clothing, taking to school) his three younger siblings Satina (7 years), Diana (4 years) and Nanci (2 years). When the soccer ball came out, Patrick couldn’t quite remember how to have fun… he’s been burdened with the responsibility of looking after his younger sisters for so long, that he’d … really forgotten how to have fun, how to play. We tried to help him relax, stop worrying, and feel free, but didn’t get too far. This one is going to take a little bit of time.

We observed a similar situation with Joseph, who is an orphan, taken in by Ester, and yet he’s clearly the main care-giver at the moment. He looks after his two tiny sisters, Gladness (3 and a half years) and Grace (4 months0… Ester has had mastitis so while Joseph was dead-keen to play, hecouldn’t quite onpass his baby sister to anyone – every time she cried, she was brought not to her mother, Ester, but back to Joseph. He kicked the ball a little, and was clearly overjoyed to do so, but he kept being called to his “duties”.

We’ve also committed to stepping up the pace of getting Bibi (“grandmother”) Frank a home closer to the Kesho Leo lessons, as she’s having to walk too far to attend at this point. Lucas seems to think he’s located a closer home – we’re going to check it out on Tuesday, so hopefully Bibi Frank can move in with her three grandchildren and they can all return to their hometown of Sinon…

Many jobs to do, all of them urgent and rewarding. Many hands to help, all of them willing and capable.

I feel so proud and privileged to be involved in the impact we are making on this community, the help we are giving these women and children.

Happy Australia Day!

Beck

Australia Day - yep, we had one too!

2008-01-29T19:57:00.000+11:00

Our guys worked till midday. We then treated them to a sausage sizzle, sang the Australian anthem, asked our workers to sing the Tanzanian anthem, and then ate our snags together as we discussed Australia's fairly dodgy history as far as our indigenous population goes. They wanted to know about aboriginal history and how we white people came to live in Australia - were we really just British? - and how we live today with our indigenous family. Did we fight for the land we now live on in Australia's? What with? Why didn't the aborigines fight back? Why did we take indigenous children? What religion did the Aborigines follow before we came? Why are we teaching indigenous history in schools - isn't that just creating anger in our indigenous population? Why isn't Indigenous Australia seeking their revenge us on white people now, as the Maasai surely would?

We let Daz handle most of these with Mudi translating. We ended up this intense, and extremely sombering conversation, by assuring our workers that the Australians standing in front of them are very sorry for our ancestor's role in Australia's history as far as our indigenous population goes, and that most of our fellow Australians and us are hoping for, and working toward creating a better future together... just like we, black and white, right here now on Tanzanian soil, were working together to create a better future for the community of Sinon.

The guys agreed, and we suggested they might want their weekly pays now...

At 3.30pm, we'd organised for all the Aussies (and a few stray Kiwis and Tanzanians!) within coohee to head down for a Australia Day barbie, game of cricket, chuck of the Sherrin... coulda sworn I was at home...

It's baaaack... (the blog, the blog!)

2008-01-22T03:05:00.000+11:00

Okay, now that you’ve started emailing me directly, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. The blog will be written NYOOOOW!

So … there was Christmas.

Picture this: hampers!
We surprised our labourers with a “Christmas hamper” that combined an individual framed photo of them on the job with us, a loaf of bread, a small tub of margarine, and lollies for their children. They were pretty stoked, particularly Paulo, who is a father of 7. He spent a long time simply staring at the photo we’d given him before coming up to Darren and I and telling us (with Mudi interpreting) that now his children would always know and remember him long after he was gone.

Kesho Leo House Mamas & Sponsorships
Kels and Shona delivered some pretty fantastic Xmas news on the 22nd December when they asked 12 single mothers to the {fws} office to break some pretty awesome news – they had a job for the next 15 years as of next year! They were, naturally, thrilled, especially when we advised that their training (in positive parenting, health and English language) would begin on the 25th January 2008. We are looking now for supporters to sponsor this training for the next three months, at $30 per month. For more info about this – and to read profiles of our mamas – visit www.foodwatershelter.org.au/sponsorships

The Old 25 December 2007.
Knowing that we had between 15 and 20 guests arriving, I’d ordered a 10kg turkey (bit big in hindsight!) which Daz put his hand up to cook (literally, in the end!). Daz's mum Neroli came to the rescue with some Jamie Oliver tips the night before and to be double sure, when we rose at 7am (turkey to go on at 7am to be ready by 1pm), we googled “How to cook a turkey" and came up with some more tips - about weights and time-lengths. I put myself in charge of seasoning (not sure why - not like I was ever smart enough to actually watch Nan make hers!) and then had to google “turkey seasoning”. I found a Canadian Living magazine which had a recipe (no amounts - had to guess) for a sounding-delish apple and walnut seasoning. We had most ingredients (not really - but the main ones... except walnut!... ie i had an apple) so we went for that. It was... not bad. Everyone seemed to think it was great, but of course, none of them have tasted Nan's seasoning so they're all amateurs and not to be trusted if you ask me. I've told Corky that I’m going to make it my mission to be able to make Nan's seasoning by February (10 days to go!

The day was pretty good - guests arrived at 2pm, we served lunch at 2.30pm - turkey was cooked absolutely perfectly - moist, succulent, tasty. Daz is such a capable boy - he just decides to do something and then does it, expecting it to work out - and it always does. I watch him do this day in, day out with the building, so it's not surprising that he managed to make the turkey so well on his first time ever. Kels was on fire too. She cut up a kabillion veggies the day before with the help of Ben, visitors John and Lani – and all were roasted till crisp and crunchy. Corky was going to make the “world’s most delicious orange, egg and onion” salad until the last minute when I heard him muse that maybe it wasn’t “as delicious as he remembered”… it seems our fine kitchen efforts might have intimidated him somewhat!

Debbie (short white hair in pics) made us a trifle (quite posh!) and Linda (wonder woman shirt, friend of Shona's) brought us pudding from Australia and made us custard. Shona made a fruit salad (exotic, African style - mango, banana, watermelon and plums). And some legend (don’t even know who) brought us heaaaaaps of Cadbury's HEROES chocolates (small mars bars, crunchies etc) from Australia.

All ate, drank and played cricket – and enjoyed getting drenched by a whopping thunderstorm afterwards.

New Year 2008
We worked in and around the actual Christmas and New Year’s public holidays and in fact, Daz and Corky both worked on NYD. What would possess them to do that? One) we were trying to get our volunteer huts finito-ed for the impending arrival of volunteers! And two) they both enjoy working, doing the handyman type jobs, on their own without having to direct 20 always-surprising Tanzanians.

Ane ever since …
It seems like we’ve been welcoming the Kesho Crew 2008. Very exciting! It’s been volunteer after volunteer (and one hut finished…and soon another will be). It’s pretty bloody terrific for these wonderfully brave people to give up their time and money to fly to Tanzania and help us out – I feel totally, unconditionally supported. “I just want to be useful” – they’ve all said it to me in their own words over the past few weeks. It’s amazing to have people come here without anything on their mind except to help. Naturally, I’m taking them up on their offers, left, right and centre – the jobs have been flying thick and fast. Here’s who’s helpin’:

This year, we first welcomed Jenna. She began by de-mangoing our laden tree and then moved onto writing a few email replies for me, doing job descriptions for our staff, creating pinboards for the office, cooking us all a delicious spaghetti bolognaise, doing some fact-checking with our house mamas, doing the shopping and generally just helping out with any job thrown her way! Thanks again Jenna – karibu tena! (“Welcome again!”)

Lily, has been fundraising for {fws} in Australia – Melbournites will know her from the Comedy night – Chekesha. She’s here for three months and has taken on the role of Volunteer Leader – whereby she basically runs the volunteer house, ensuring we have food, toiletries, social gatherings, someone to debrief with, etc. It’s a full-time job, yet somehow she’s managed to write us a terrific Emergency Evacuation plan and Risk Assessment. Soon she’ll be helping out with running the kids and house mama lessons..

Nick has arrived as our bursar, and man, I enjoyed handing the day-to-day running of accounts over. Numbers, money, petty cash, kitty, reimbursements, cheques, IOUs, wages, pay advances, saving schemes, accounts… all yours, son! He seems to think it’s all simple and easy and doesn’t break a sweat about it, which is nice to see. Better him manning the day-to-day accounts than me then!

Heather has hit the ground running as Kesho’s volunteer nurse. She’s programmed the health education classes for the mamas – they start with water hygiene and washing, then move onto anatomy, recognising diseases, nutrition… on it goes. Today, she spent the day with one of our mama’s children. The mama left for hospital three days ago with malaria, having no choice but to leave her children at home to fend for themselves. The oldest is nine. When Heather arrived to check on them, she found them trying to make themselves some ugali (polenta). She ascertained they hadn’t a carer and hadn’t seen their mother for three days and quickly arranged for Lucas, our Tanzanian jack-of-all-trades employee to stay with the children for the afternoon, buy them some food for dinner, cook dinner with them and care for them over night. We’ll see how that one goes tomorrow when Lucas reports back. We think we might get Lucas to head out to the hospital with the kids tomorrow to see how the house mama is faring – and to let her know her children are being cared for… we’ve begun our work here in earnest.

Warren, a school principal from Australia, got thrown into the ute and told to drive without killing goat, child or donkey. He did well and so he got the job of {fws}’s purchasing officer. This means he will go into town and buy buy, buy building materials for Kesho Leo – and food, food, food for the volunteer team! He’s also put his hand up for a few gardening jobs around the shamba, a few handyman jobs.

Clare, Warren’s magnificent wife, is here to set up an education program for our house mama’s children. It will kick of next Friday and will involve mama & child game playing, learning language through craft activities and story reading…Clare, working as a teacher with hearing impaired children in Australia is also interested in visiting local schools, and in particularly Sombotini, a centre for physically challenged Tanzanians. We’ll arrange to get her out and about as soon as she’s ready!

Janelle is our all-rounder, here to help with a bitta this, bitta that – and we’ve put her to the task. She’s going to assist Warren in his gardening clean-up jobs (sheering lantana, moving the tools to our make-shift garden shed, cleaning the banana showers, emailing a bit for me, assisting Lily with the weekly shopping, helping Clare and Heather with the house mama and kids lessons. She’s also offered to clean our fridge every Sunday (“label it or it gets chucked!”) and to cook us all a big, community, bonding meal each Wednesday. Too good!

So yes, our volunteer village is operating full speed ahead. We’re putting the final touches (rendering and paint) on the last hut this week … then next week, we reckon we’ll be back up on the block, picking up where we left off with Kesho Leo children’s village, but the real excitement is naturally all around this Friday – the 25 January 2008 - when we start doing what we came here to do…

Woohoo,

Beck, xxx

Multiple Choice

2007-12-11T23:23:00.001+11:00

Question time. To see if you’ve been paying attention …

(Cheats will find some answers in the pix I’ve attached).

1. Shona is in the process of visiting how many Tanzanian single mothers to find our 16 house-mums for Kesho Leo Children’s Village?

a) 2 - She’s found it hard to locate vulnerable women and children in Sinon village.

b) 76 plus – all of whom rocked up to last month’s Kesho Community Day.

c) 0 – we’ve decided it’s all too hard and we’re going home. See Yas Soon!

2. Corky’s volunteer village huts are:

a) bricked up to the roofing level, as of this week

b) being washed away in the torrential rain (not really but only b/c we tarp them daily!)

c) eagerly awaited on by new arrivals Ben & Kels, who are currently sharing a room with Shona!

3. Daz is desperately keen to get what on the Kesho Leo building site?

a) volunteer carpenters

b) traffic lights

c) volunteer carpenters (know any? Contact them for us please!)

4. Kels brought plenty of good stuff with her but the most appreciated is:

a) her casual-sexy-in-Africa outfits

b) Ben

c) our straw hats

5. Shona, one extremely fit individual, has just added which notch to her mountain climbing career?

a) Mt Kosciusko

b) Mt Aconcagua

c) Mt Meru

5. Ben, normally comfortable tapping away at creating websites, has taken up:

a) writing his own travel blog for Lonely Planet - www.lonelyplanet.com/blogs/travel_blog/2007/12/road-to-arusha.html

b) helping Daz build our banana-leaf wall showers…

c) both of the above

6. Rebecka’s dog (for nobody else will officially accept ownership – although Kelsey seems to be warming to the idea) has achieved the following this week:

a) learnt to chase the annoying hens off the concrete (so they can’t ippsy on it), launching himself off all fours, flying spread-eagled through the air to land on a rooster and scare himself by his own success

b) attended two tai chi classes run by Darren, turning figure-eights between attendees’ legs and growling as they tried to hold poses

c) both of the above.

7. This week Corky, in attempting to convince Shona to pack her sleeping bag into a plastic bag to keep it protected from ice, during her mountain climb, said:

a) “Shona, you’d better pack your sleeping bag in a plastic bag or it will get wet and then you’ll be very cold.”

b) “Shona, have you considered what the thermal properties of wet down might be?”

c) I know Corky personally – so it’s definitely option “b)”.

8. The Kesho Crew received their first ever in-country donation thanks to a lovely Aussie who stumbled across us… The legendary gal parted with:

a) 40 Tanzanian Shillings ($0.40AUD)

b) some great advice, but no dosh

c) a whopping $300USD – a fantastic amount to go towards officially opening our USD bank account with. Yeeebah!

9. Kelsey has begun the mammoth like process of getting FWS a USD bank account (less fluctuation in the currency). This process is:

a) very simple – the Tanzanians require hardly any forms or photos or resumes or references or passport copies or work visas or proof or residential address or certificates of NGO status in Tanzania at all. Total breeze!

b) excellent for the environment – hardly any wastage of paper at all.

c) Booooooooooring, laborious, trying on the patience, but unfortunately, kinda necessary.

10. After presenting Kesho’s water-harvesting system to three local Rotary Clubs this week, Corky plans to next speak to Rotary about:

a) Human ippsies and how our composting loos will deal with them

b) How many different shapes your mum can cut your vegemite toast into, in the 80s, when you are home from school, sick.

c) The thermal properties of wet down.

Goodnight, see you next week!

beck

A flippin’ fantastic week in Africa...

2007-11-24T04:34:00.000+11:00

Visited by Aussies, Ausies, we love Aussies!
We are beaming! Why? Well, you will of course, by now know our feisty, vibrant, sassy lass, our one and only corporate sponsor liaison, Ms Janine Moodley (oh, and she’s my old school captain as I love telling everyone)…well, well, what a feat Ms Mooders has pulled off for FWS this week.

Yes, yes, who does she send to the Kesho Crew’s doorstep but Australia’s most generous man when it comes to giving overseas aid? I’m not going to name him, but suffice to say he spends his life traveling the world, hooking up with and funding philanthropic projects he likes. Don’t get too excited – while I think he and his lovely wife liked us, I also think he’d like to see how FWS travels a bit before he whacks out his chequebook and we whack out our armchairs! Fair ‘nuff! He is, after all, a businessman (and we are, afterall, unlikely to enjoy living life from an armchair!). But imagine, what a verging-on-hilarious situation – our very first visitor to the project! I soooo thought I’d be welcoming Corky’s mum to Tanzania well before I was welcoming [warning: name drop coming up] … Tim Costello’s mate. But there you go. [And I’m sure I’ll enjoy welcoming you Mrs Corky just as much as I enjoyed welcoming our celebrity visitors).

Now, apart from all that money rubbish, part of the fun revolved around us finally having an opportunity to show someone – anyone! – our work so far. We were asked some straightforward questions: what plans do we have in place for one half of our mammas turn out to be ‘bad’? What will our running costs be? What ratio of mammas to kids are we going with? Who will be the male role models for the kids? Why do we think Tanzanians will afford to buy their own rainwater tanks at $180USD a pop when the Tanzanian GDP is bloodyhell-cant-remember-but-a-whole-lot-less-than-180USD?

And we mostly had answers…
• “bad” mamas. Well Shona reckons given she was interviewing them all individually and taking much time to get to know their life situation, getting them to gossip about each other (true!), that’d she’d have a higher success rate of getting great Kesho house-mums, even an 80% success rate, say. Rebecka added that it’s also about determining what a ‘bad mother” is anyway – is most ‘bad mothering’ coming from a psychological place? Yes – and the Kesho Leo manager, Kelsey Wilson is a social worker doing her psych major… so it’s just a matter of nuturing and counsellling…not of hiring and firing…
• Running costs: $30,000, why haven’t any of you asked us this one? That $30K is one of the fantastic figures Mark Biz helped us come up with his stay here in August. That’s why we call him The Bizness.
• Mamma to kid ratio is 1:5. Which our visitor thought was pretty good, saying research shows 1:4 is perfect…
• Male role models – Mudi, who is remarkably Nelson Mandela despite his 28 years, has always been our showcase here – what a spiritual, honest, compassionate man and what a love of children he has. We will go out of our way to make sure the other men we employ at Kesho – gardeners, farmhands etc are of the same mould.
• Water issues - Corky reckons the argument for promoting individual water tanks for each household in the community revolves around convincing farmers that the long-term costs of treating health issues offset the loss of purchasing a tank. He says 20% of income in developing countries goes towards health and a very large percentage (he forgets how much) of health issues are water-related. Cost wise, he says that a practical savings scheme (where FWS might match the savings of locals) would ensure our neighbours could buy the $180USD tanks. We’re gonna continue doing our sums on this one…

Admittedly, it was also pretty exciting that our visitors were Aussies. Man, we love Aussies. You forget how much you love Aussies when you’re actually at home, being one. But it’s my experience that it only takes a short trip away from home to remind you!

Now you heard me mention NGO status… And you may have been wondering why we would be raving on to Seleina and Ron about how to get there’s when we hadn’t even got ours yet. Well, no we didn’t have ours when speaking with Seleina but… we do now! Official, official, official! We are legit, legit, legit!

Global Fund For Children Grant - Letter Of Enquiry Finally got this application for cashola off. Very excited. Next week is “applying for solar panel grants” week. Then the week after annual report.

Kesho Walls The Kesho walls can continue to rise (see pix – and note too the special pic of the rubbish ply and how it’s turned into a wafer in the rain!)…

Kesho platforms Daz has laid a few of the concrete sleepers as pathways around the early-learning room to see if they work. Affirmatory, as our greatmate Coolio likes to say (often!). Affirmatory because: they look fantastic - really strong, really neat. At first they bowed the timber a little bit but Daz has fixed that up by bracing the timber (the bowing was expected and unavoidable - it happens because there is no grading system of timber's strength in Tanzania like there is at home, so different planks are different strengths, and you don't know what you're getting.) Very exciting to see these pristine concrete moulds actually start working together to make something - our pathways! (see pix)

Shona Sorts Herself for 2008 Shona realised that she will need a job next year and has begun asking bold questions of those she has working relationships with - she's designing herself the perfect job that will fit nicely around her real job - fws-ing.

Corky's Volunteer Huts Corky' (he of the shaving with my kuku friend Kelsey fame) got the foundations down, with the steel safes securely inserted. He's laying the first row of bricks this morning (sounds easy - but you cannot imagine what he's been thru to actually get those bricks to the site! Picture this: bricks at bottom of hill, truck at top, brick quarry owner wanting an extra 20c per brick to get them to the top of the hill…oh the negotiations took an age – all the while the owner threatening to kiln the bricks so he didn’t lose them in the rainy season which is upon us – we don’t want them kilned – we’re keeping it real & local…but truly, what price for sanity?). So delighted that the mud bricks actually went down today, Corky took off into town this afternoon to do a spot of window shopping...literally. Seems he can have windows any size he wants, but he just has to wait a bit for them… No probs he reckons, he’ll lay the concrete foundations for the third and fourth huts, for his open-air showers (yes, they’re gonna be interesting!) and his compost loos… not like he’s short of a job!

Well that’s about it, except for my strong but polite demand that all our thoughts be with Mum, Dad and Little Bruvvy Joshbo this week as Mum’s just started her chemo. I know you’ll oblige me – and I also know that as mum wryly put it in a recent email she’ll “probably survive”… [you have to say it as if you are dragging your feet around the house and have just slumped in the lounge chair – there must be NO ring of confidence – or even joy in it - at all]. She obviously doesn’t want us to get our hopes up! Well, bad luck Jill, our hopes up. Till next week, Beck

Good news!

2007-11-14T20:18:00.000+11:00

Quick update. A weird (but excellent!) thing happened yesterday (just the universe keeping in tune with Bongo Flava week, I guess). In the morning, we had to go into town to get the grandfather who died a few days ago from the mortuary to bring him back for his funeral. All our Tanzanian fundhis wanted to take the day off to attend his funeral so we decided we'd pay them for the day off and Daz would take a day off himself.

Except Daz never takes a day off. So instead, he drove into town with Shona to the meet the guy who sold us the dodge plywood. To our surprise, the guy seemed genuinely interested in our dramas and talked through all sorts of solutions, after agreeing not to charge us for the 50 sheets we hadn't yet laid (but he'd maintained the fee for the sheets we had laid). Towards the end of the meeting, Daz walks into the guy's showroom and sees all masses of brilliant hardwood planks - grevillea or cypress, take your pick. All of the planks were cut into tongue & groove so they slot together easily when you're laying them. The perfect solution for the Kesho floor - and maybe even the walls! When Daz got the quote for them, he quickly worked out they'd be only slightly more expensive than the plywood we'd planned to use (would look HEAPS better)...and far less expensive than the Kenyan plywood. It will be easy for us to plant grevillea to offset the non-eco-friendly purchase - in fact, if you've been reading this fluctuating little blog, you know we're already growing about 100 grevillea seedlings that we saved from being ploughed up by the Faming Co-op boys. We think we might still use the green Kenyan ply on the roof...Or ask this guy to make us more of his Tanzanian ply but to make it with the proper glue (ie not water-based glue!) - a great suggestion from our always-there eco-tect Rob-Not-Dentist Watson. Anyway, we're no longer walking the plank! Instead we are buying the plank - and thanking our lucky stars that a funeral set us on the right path... As Daz said, "I would never have taken a day off work to go and look at wood right now... so I would have stressed about that for a month!"

Of course, strange that the guy selling us the ply didn't at any point mention that he had a whole showroom (at a different site to the one Daz first went to) of alternative timber products...but anyhoo!

Back on top,
Beck

xx

Bongo Flava

2007-11-13T16:38:00.002+11:00

A strange week. Very Bongo Flava.

For anyone not quite hip to the groove (me, last week), “bongo flava” is, of course, the 80s rap-disco-reggae type music that Africans seem to lu-lur-lurve. Personally, I think it’s just weird-as – everything in, all at once, making no sense. Exactly like this week…

Bongo Flava Event One: Shona drove our “dead” neighbour to the mortuary.
Put yourself in Shona’s shoes at 8am on Thursday morning – Shona thought she was simply driving into town to run some errands…

“Firstly, let me say, what I love about living here is that every day is different. Unlike at home, where you can plan your daily routines, here, as every hour passes there is a chance that an unexpected daily event will be thrown in your path. One such experience occurred last Thursday.

The usual busy day was planned with the morning to be spent ploughing through the job applications for the house-mum positions (all 76 applications!) with Lucas, followed by a trip to town to pick up and pay for cement, steel, wire, and nails.
I received a call from Daz on the job explaining that our truck was needed to take a sick neighbour (grandfather of some of our workers) to the hospital. Hamna shida [no problem] - as I could coincide this with my trip to town.

This was followed by second call from Mudi saying “pole [sorry], but we are going to be a bit longer bringing the truck down from the job for you to use in town as “that man, the grandfather, he is dead”.

The news of death here is still passed on far too easily for my liking and I find it doubly upsetting that I am actually getting used to it. The truck arrives with Mudi and two of our workers Joseph and Peter, and we head off to the home of “that one who is dead”. This is when I learn that we are actually taking him to town to Mt Meru Hospital and are in fact, a funeral procession.

I drive to the grandfather’s ‘boma’ [home] to be greeted by wailing mamas and a large group of men standing around. We unceremoniously back up the truck, then wait. The wailing women all move away from the house and the men bring out a mattress which is plonked into the tray of the ute. I try to make myself invisible behind the door of the truck as I’m not sure if I should be wailing or assisting with the mattress. Then a dirty, crumpled blanket, containing the body is carried out. Unfortunately, the blanket is not quite bit enough to cover the dead man entirely.

The mamas proceed to decorate the truck with bougainvillea and as eight men jump into the back with my unusual cargo, I am instructed to turn on the hazard lights. Mudi heads back to the worksite at this point leaving me to finish the neighbourly job.

We drive to town slowly as I am aware that every bump on our very rough road may well send the body bouncing. After a few wrong 20 point turns we arrive at Mt Meru Hospital to an area a bit like a drive-through bottle shop. A few of us wait with the body while others go inside. This is quite an uncomfortable wait as I want to show respect by shaking hands and saying “pole” but the smell of the mattress and the body is unbearable – I mean really bad.

Soon after I am presented with a piece of paper which strangely is written in English and gives all the grandfather’s details including his age which they guess at 105. I am then instructed to go to the mortuary. I drive to the back of the hospital to a very dodgy looking area and again, am asked to back up the truck to the door of quite a nice white building.

The mattress and body are carried out and taken inside onto a table. The room is full of tables upon which lie other recently deposited bodies. To a person like me, who has not seen a lot of dead bodies before, this room is a little overwhelming. I again try to turn into invisible woman and hide behind the steering wheel even though I am actively welcomed inside.

Finally, I drive out somewhat relieved and head to the “dula dula” [local bus] to drop off the men who’ve accompanied me, as I now have a hardware shopping frenzy ahead of me. I pay for their bus fares, for which they are grateful, but they see the mattress (yes the stinky thing is still in the back) as a problem and would like me to keep it in the truck for later. Okay.

I head off the get some diesel and oil from the service station to another unexpected situation. As I am getting the jerry can out of the truck the attendant asks me why I have a mattress. After I explain he quickly backs away from the truck. He then calls over many other attendants and then they all back away leaving me holding the jerry can and very dirty oil can. Finally, one of the men relents and assists me – he obviously is not so afraid of the disease or dead spirit.

I make my way to the hardware and spend an hour or so ensuring that I have ticked off Daz’s list. On paying, I realise I am about one million shillings short ($1000AUD) and I’m forced to if I can make a down payment today and follow up with a final payment later. Luckily, we have been giving Aim Steel heaps of business so they are happy to oblige the very dirty, slightly bedraggled girl alone in the hardware store.

As I drive off to the supermarket to grab a few household items, I notice that my hands are shaking and I think that I had better stop to have a cup of tea. I receive a thoughtful phone call from Daz and text from Corky checking that I am okay, and it is then that I acknowledge that I am in a little bit of shock and may need to sit for a while. I sit in a wobbly haze sipping ‘tangawise [pr: ‘tangarwee-zee, translating to “ginger”] tea’ in the Bamboo Cafe before driving home, stinky mattress in tow. I return home to witness a beautiful storm brewing and gladly stand out in the rain to wash away some of the dirt and dead smell.

The point of my long-winded story is that I really thought I could handle such a diverse day but the ‘dead body’ bit just really took it out of me.

Everyday is different here and I love it, but I am smart enough to know that I need the support of the fws team here and at home and contact from my beautiful family and friends to handle these differences.

PS I also had malaria last week – so that could have accounted for some of the emotion and weariness.”

Bongo Flava Event 2: The heavens – and Daz – cried.
The drops are right on time this year, despite there being no guarantees of rain in the wet season anymore. We also found something else out about guarantees this week. Daz has undertaken extensive research into the plywood to use as the Kesho Leo floorboards. We looked at importing it from China, Kenya…and then found some locally grown that came in thicker sheets, was considerably cheaper (due to not carrying import tax) and boasted good stocks (enough to cover our entire project ensuring we wouldn’t be held up midway, waiting for the Chinese ply to be shipped over). At decision time, my concern was the eco-friendly issue – we could guarantee the Chinese and Kenyan ply was ‘green’ (forested under international Forest Stewardship Council – www.fsc.org), but the Tanzanian held no such guarantee. Eventually, I came up with the idea of planting enough trees on our land to offset our use of the Tanzanian ply. We all agreed and felt good. Knowing wet season was soon to be upon us, Daz also took the step of questioning the supplier about the resilience of this ply in the rain. In reply, Daz was given a verbal guarantee that it would hold up in any rain, no problem at all. Imagine his distress, when after laying 50 of these sheets as the Kesho floor, the heavens opened, dumped precisely two minutes of delicious, dramatic rain and then just as quickly sucked in the rain clouds and let the sun beat down, leaving Daz to stand alone, bewildered by the buckling, warping, soggy, cracking Kesho Floor. He was devastated. And angry – how could the seller lie to him about the quality of the ply like that? A guarantee, apparently, is not always a guarantee. It’s potentially a pretty devastating blow – our whole building is made from plywood…Way forward? Well, fortunately, Daz only purchased 100 sheets, so we’ve decided we’ll leave them down as a temporary ‘working floor’ for now, while we erect the walls. We’ll end up using them for a livestock shelter (unless we get our money back on them – we’ll try that first!), but in the meantime they can carry on in the rain as much as like since we’ll be replacing them with hardwood timber for the Kesho floor. We’ll need to import the Kenyan ply for the Kesho roof system to ensure it’s structurally sound, and then we’ll research into some alternative ply for the walls. Personally, I feel content with these solutions because it’s a difficult undertaking to build a structure in a developing country in the first place (we’ve done well to get as far as we have without any setbacks!) and secondly because the Kesho early-learning centre and communal dining room should always have boasted hardwood floors anyway, if you ask me! Daz sees it like this;
“I freaked out when I first saw what two minutes of rain did to that plywood – after all the time I’d spent researching it and trying to ensure we got a weather-proof product…now I just remind myself that we’re in Africa so all of those things you can rely on at home – people’s word, refunds, warranties – don’t exist here and I just have to continue doing my best. Of course, I’m pretty stoked that I went with my intuition and just bought 100 pieces to see how they went - imagine if I’d ordered the whole lot! Everything will all work out okay…”

Bongo Flava Event Three: Shapeshifter – the people’s chui.
Our gorgeous employee Agnes, who cooks dinner for us each night, accompanied me into town last Monday to do our weekly market shop. The ute, packed with fresh vegies and a few exciting luxuries (biltong, yoghurt, cheese and peanuts), was travelling through the slums serenely when Agnes surprised me with a question. “Rebecka, I want to talk to you about these jobs you are giving widows and single women – the jobs as “house-mothers” of Kesho Leo…”
“Yes, Agnes, I’d love to hear your thoughts on our idea. What do you want to say?”
“I just want to tell you that is very important that you get good mothers – who can love the children like they are their own, honest mothers who will not cheat you, and will not be jealous…”
“I agree Agnes, it’s very important. How do you think the women might be jealous?”
“People in this village can be jealous. They don’t want to see others get ahead, get a good job, or a good house or get some more money…”
“Ah yes, I see what you’re saying… Well Agnes, do you know I’ve been thinking about this a lot. When I saw that 76 single mothers came to our Kesho Community Day and we only have jobs for 8, I started thinking. Do you know what my idea is? I think we might run a fortnightly “single mothers group” for all the women who don’t get jobs with us, maybe we can teach them some good business lessons, we can maybe loan them a small amount of money to start a business and then they pay us back… what do you think?”
“Ah I think this is very, very good. And I think they will be very, very happy… and not jealous.”
“Good, if you like it, then I like it”
“Because you know jealousy is a big problem…”
“Ye-ees”.
“Even the chui [leopard] in our village – you know how we have a chui in the village?”
“Ye-ees”.
“Well, it is not a real chui. It’s a people chui. I don’t know what it’s called in English, but in Swahili we have a word for it…maybe like a witchdoctor. It means that someone bad, who is jealous, can turn themselves into a chui to hurt you. And you don’t know it is them because they are a chui…”
“Oh…really? I see. Yes, actually, we have this word in English – it’s called a shape-shifter [like in Charmed, everyone]”.
“Ah, a shape-shifter?”
“Yes, they change – or ‘shift’ - their shape...But Agnes, in Australia, we don’t believe in this shape-shifter”.
“No, in Tanzanian we don’t believe in this one either – we believe in Jesus Christ”.
[I think Aggie took my “believe” to mean “worship” as there is truly no doubt in my mind that Aggie really, wholeheartedly believes our village chui is a shape-shifting people-chui].

Bonga Flava Event Four: Corky, fws environmental engineer shapeshifts into an African-hut builder.
He’s an outdoorsy country boy (Dorrigo, Northern NSW), but of late, he’s become accustomed to tinkering on his laptop under the roof of the volunteer house. Researching, he calls it. Well, we humoured his touch-typing for a while, but this week it all came to an abrupt end when we settled on the materials we’d use to build our African-hut style volunteer village. Corky bravely left his laptop inside, took his roughly drafted plans out to our 1-acre backyard and picked up a stringline and measure. No sooner had he marked out the boundaries for each hut than a pick found it’s way into his hands. It might not be the first time he’s wielded a pick, but it’s definitely the first time he’s built an African hut. Here’s what he has to say on the matter.

“I always knew that it would take me a month or so to get my feet on the ground with Kesho Leo in Tanzania. What, with a two-week permaculture course in Western Tanzania to learn a few of the finer details of sustainable living and agriculture. Then with catching up on all the progress that the rest of the fws team had already made, followed by the interesting networking process to start tracking down local contacts who’ll be able to help me along with our work over here.

But sure enough, now that that has all happened, the tasks have piled up quickly. There is just so many things to do, that it is sometimes difficult to know where to start. Is it most important to find my local Farm Manager who I’ll counterpart with, and who will eventually be responsible for managing our small farms, fish ponds, biodigester, livestock, compost toilets and rainwater systems (and I might add that the idea of lateral thinking, experimenting with new ideas and sustainability are concepts often not covered by the Tanzania education system)? Or, is it most important to start getting some fruit trees planted to beat the rains? Or maybe we should get the volunteer accommodation up and running, as when the four of us currently living, working and socialising in each other's pockets suddenly becomes 11 people in January, it would be nice to have somewhere for us all to live with some decent toilet facilities and reliable water…

But all of it is great fun, if a little overwhelming at times. The sourcing of building products that meet our sustainable needs (not easy in a country where people are happy to tell you what you want to hear), products that meet our expectations of quality (probably harder than sustainability to find), and fundhis (tradies) that meet our standards of trust (we seem to be doing pretty well by sourcing them for our small, close-knit community) and ability (which we can work on). With plenty of advice from Daz who has been through all this for a couple of months and some great help from a couple of our local staff, things have been charging forward over the last week.

Once we tracked down a supplier of mud bricks that seem to be of higher quality, and that meet our “sustainable” needs by making them from river sediments that will be replenished each wet season, the bargaining begins. After 30 minutes of chatting and bargaining, I was able to convince him that we didn’t need to pay an extra $0.02 per brick for him to have them carried up out of the small gorge where they were working, and that $0.08 per brick was actually a good price for him, considering we’ll need about 10,000. But walking away from some good bargaining like this leaves some mixed feelings of victoriousness and scabbiness. Yeah, it’s nice to come out on top, but surely $0.02 per brick extra isn’t too much, but then $200 is a donation that someone has made to fws, so it becomes valuable pretty quickly!

So yes, it’s great to get out in the paddock, starting construction of the compost toilets, working with the local fundhis to learn how to make a mud brick house with a mixture of Western and local techniques. Yeah, it’s been a bit long for me on the computer, and the blisters appeared pretty quick, but I’ll work on them.”

To which Beck replies, “Well maybe you should...toughen up, skirt”.

Take care

Beck

Kesho Info Day, Shamba Co-op, Permaculture Plans, Grant Writing

2007-11-05T19:15:00.001+11:00

No-one cares, but the itch is back. I keep boring Shona and Corky with random deductions such as “Hmmm, [scratch-scratch] maybe it’s from blackcurrant sodas I’ve been drinking [scratch-scratch]. I used to be allergic to Ribena when I was five…” I’ve finally broken Shona – and now she’s joining in. “Hey Beck, my sister is totally allergic to mango – not eating it, just touching it – and she gets itchy on the palms of her hands and her feet – exactly what you are getting…this must be it”. That was a good one. We liked that one for 4 hours, until I got crazy-itchy simply by walking outside. (Yes, our concrete outside is littered with early-dropping baby mangoes, but I didn’t walk on them or touch them). Our latest: the pollen from the mango trees. Corky offered his “dermo” cream, but really, the cream Kelsey gave me before I left is the best calming salve. Works like medicated cream, but isn’t. Anyway, Corky has decided that, given my last month (2 weeks lost to bad back, 1 week sacrificed to intestinal infection and now 5-days of itchy-scratchy mania), I’m clearly allergic to Africa. Fine shame, that. Physically allergic, mentally addicted, bit strange. Nuff ‘bout me. I promised FWS info, and deliver I shall – in order of occurrence, not in order of excitement, because they’re all pretty bloody exciting.

Local Carpenter Found. Yes, Val, our Tanzanian neighbour passed his day trial as a carpenter so has joined the FWS boys on the job. Day trial? We had him to whack up a few shelves for the FWS office (neat, stable, butt-jointed – exceptionally good) and fashion a door for the skewiff frame of our laundry cupboard. Now anyone who can craft a tidy, trim door into a bowed frame so the whole cupboard suddenly looks straight as a die, gets the nod, as far as I’m concerned. Shona, Corks and Daz agreed, so Val started on the Kesho Leo building site the next day. Which, of course, is still going smoothly and swiftly. We’re looking at laying the first of our floorboards this week – pretty thrilling stuff!

Permaculture Plans Afoot. Our clever Corky has returned from his permaculture course in Western Tanzania with a cornucopia of specialist ideas. Always happy for a quick show-off, he wasted no time in scribbling up the ideas on our Kesho Leo site plan and walked us through the basics and the not-so-basics (yes, he was very patient with our incessant questioning). He also managed to convince us that not only does he know what he’s talking about, but he’s possibly the greatest permaculture planner in existence. Look out for his ripper plans (with explanations) on the website in the next few weeks.

Farming co-op. Another one of Corky’s great ideas involved FWS “Leasing out” to our builders, a two-acre plot of land we own, but have not been using. The land sits next to the FWS office and has for the past three months moonlighted as a turning circle for the ute and then as a dirt soccer field for the kids across the road. It’s a shameful waste not to crop this much land, so Corks came up with the idea of handing it over to our labourers to crop. They are to form a “Shamba Co-op” (“shamba” is Kiswahili for ‘farming plot’) whereby they pool their cash (that which we’ve paid them for the day jobs as labourers) and farm this land. The deal is they pay us 10 per cent of their takings. Mudi Salim, Kesho Leo assistant manager, has agreed to head up the project – and 10 out of our 20 labourers have agreed to take part. They are planning to plant onion, garlic, eggplant and capsicum now, a harvest which should be ready in about three month’s time. On the weekend, Ruben, who had been allocated the job of arranging the tractor to plough the field, got things under way. This week, Richard, who has been allocated the job of buying the seed, will do his work. We have asked Mudi to keep FWS as ‘uninvolved’ as possible so that these guys learn to work as a team without “Western” support. We’ll keep you posted on their progress.

Kesho Leo info day pulls a crowd of mammas. Shona has spent the last two weeks, working with Lucas, to design an information day for the local community, the aim of which was twofold. Firstly, we wanted to introduce FWS & the Kesho Leo project more formally to the community (rather than us just being known via word of mouth) and secondly we wanted to meet some of the community’s “widows” and “single mothers” who have been filling out application forms for the house-mother roles at Kesho Leo. Shona whacked up a tarp (she made from recycling cement bags and sewing them together with the help of local seamstress, Elizabet), some great drawing and information pages on a board she borrowed from Brother Frank, had all attendees (76 mammas and half the village on top!) sit on bench chairs (again, courtesy of Frank) and we got talking, using the help of Tanzanian FWS members, Mudi, Lucas, Agnes, Nolasco and Gertruda to translate. Interestingly, during the speeches, the health clinic and health education aspects of Kesho Leo drew a huge round of applause (obviously, we’ve tapped into an unmet need there!) as did the “sustainable” environmental concepts and the support for widows. We interviewed (very briefly) 76 “widows”, all of whom were aged between 22 and 65, some of whom were single, had no children, and had never been married! Shona will now spend the next few months visiting these women, with Lucas, to talk with them so as to fine-tune our list of potential employees. (Don’t worry, we have plans brewing for the widows and single mums that don’t make our final list).
Grant writing. I just want you to know, that in between scratches, I’ve been writing grant applications in order to help us pull in the last of the dosh we need to get this building up and happening. It feels nice to be asking for money alongside so many of you doing the same for us back home. Thanks again for that!

Now about some of the more random pix above (and yes, clearly I'm still to learn a lot about position pix for this blog - apologies!), pic of Anne (the chook) nesting in Shona's bedroom. Gave Shona quite the fright one evening - as Anne was uninvited. Pic of Reika, a lovely West Australian girl that Corky met on his permaculture course - she stayed with us a few days, one of which she spent painting old engine oil onto our timber joists so as to prevent dry rot and termites.

Speak soon, Beck

Up close & personal (posted late - written mid-Oct)

2007-11-05T18:12:00.000+11:00

It’s a personal blog, so let’s get personal. After all, anyone who thinks there are no emotions involved in building a children’s village in a developing country needs to sit in the room of mirrors. I’m talking about myself, of course. No, strangely I didn’t realise that the building bit would actually be the easy, smooth-flowing part. Who knew so much energy would go into keeping my head straight? And let me be the first to say, that I’m barely confident I’ve even managed to pull of some semblance of sanity.

I felt a little bit saner a couple of weeks ago, when Dad emailed to say that Mum had come of surgery for her second bout of cancer, fairly well. Yes, there are still months and months of chemo and radiation therapy ahead so we’re not out of the woods yet (and won’t be until mid 2009!), but step one is complete. Of course, Mum was supposedly cancer-free (after having already battled and overcome it in 2004) when I left Australian shores to undertake this little adventure. Every time I come to Africa, something heart-wrenching happens. Last time, our much-loved family dog, the inimitable Chevy James Delforce died, the time after that my extremely inspirational grandfather (Mum’s dad) passed away and this time… well you can imagine where my heart and head were going when I read mum’s email last month outlining the less-than-terrific news that she now had a different, new type of cancer, that was…fairly invasive. Anyway, that was then. Now the prognosis is gruelling but better. The doctors are confident they removed all of the cancer during surgery and when Mum asked them to speak plainly about whether she was “too far gone” to bother with the side-effects of chemo, they answered, “You’re very young, in your 50s, and you’d be absolutely mad not to go ahead with chemo. It is our intent to cure you.” So there we are. Mum says I'm not to come home (yet), but to stay in Tanzania, doing this important work and also to stay with Daz to help him continue his side of the bargain. An easier job than it sounds!

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS
Which brings us to the second emotional lets-get-personal element of this cozy little blog my keyboard seems to be spitting out. Now you may or may not know, but Daz is the love of my life, my soul mate, the one I was waiting for – all that and more. I first encountered him when I was seven years old, in second class, at St Joseph’s Primary School, Moorebank, NSW. In my young world, he scrubbed up as somewhat good-looking, superbly tall, and suitably cheeky – all good. Actually, I also thought he harboured an annoying tendency towards raving on far too much about trucks but I must have forgiven him this outrageous immaturity because at some point, he asked for a kiss (just a peck, mind – we were 7) and I happily volunteered. Volunteering for gold, way back then! Unfortunately however, my offering didn’t receive quite the humble gratitude I’d expected. Daz, promptly wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and replied, “Ever heard of Colgate?”. Needless to say, Dazzie Pants, who had started off looking like such a catch, didn’t end up being my greatest friend. We went our separate ways for many years – him to Norway, where he met and married a Norwegian girl and had his sons, Robbie, 18 and Daniel, 14, who was here with us in Africa just a month ago. I ran into Daz again a few months after I had returned from my first life-changing trip to volunteer in Africa in 2003, and a few months after he had separated from his wife. He was living at Alexandria and I was living at Surry Hills (suburbs adjoining each other). He asked me to dinner and managed to get through the entire meal without insulting me. Wow, had this boy matured! Over Fu Man Chu Chinese at Bondi, Daz talked about his sons and I talked about Africa. He asked awesome questions and seemed genuinely interested in my experience. We agreed he’d call me the following day. Now, here, he excelled himself. He did something I’d rarely experienced – he kept his word and called. We saw each other again the next night and by the end of the week, we had discussed how long his sons would need to adjust to the emotional turmoil of him having a girlfriend and how long it would be before him and I (and hopefully his sons) would be able to fly to Tanzania to build some type of children’s facility for orphans. We thought the year would be 2009. So, really, if this cement shortage lasts two years, the Kesho Leo Children’s Village could still be on track! Needless to say, we began an awesome life together, with fws starting off as a weird thing that I spent time on by myself. Before long, the fws girls were on board, and then Daz, by osmosis – just like how Ben was osmosis-sed in by Kels – became as involved as any of us. The fws girls and I always look back and laugh about the switch in our lives – you can get a gauge for when the fws bug really bit us if we look at when each of us started checking our fws emails EVERY day. Once you’re checking emails every day, you are bit, and you’ve got the fws fever and so far, there’s been no inoculation. I feel especially proud of our fws boys because they don’t get loads of glory like we girls. Since we’re board members, we show off outrageously and talk ourselves up at every function, speech, presentation, event. But really, our boys don’t get that chance because they’re not often given the podium, since they are not officially "board members". They’re executive members – Ben Schwabe (IT legend who is responsible for our awesome websites – new and old!), Robert Cork (environmental engineer is ensuring all our eco-friendly stuff goes off), Joe Ward (our financial strategist who gives us all sorts of KICK-some-goals advice), and of course Daz (building foreman/engineer/singer-songwriter). We are, of course, very close, to asking our wonderful eco-tect Rob-Not-Dentist Watson if he’s up for taking an executive management role – but we figure we’d better allow him the chance to finish an entire project with us before he commits to another! So for the meantime, let me confirm that Daz, Ben and Corky are checking the emails daily and are an incredible team to work with – a particularly impressive team given that two of them (Ben & Daz) also get the role of supporting their fwsing girls during the highs and lows of fws-life.

Now first, let’s specify that there aren’t too many lows – but yep, they exist. For instance, Daz & I found it fairly easy to make the transition from happy-go-lucky couple with separate day jobs and long-term “plans to do some good work in Africa in 2009ish” to single-income couple with separate day jobs (mine was to volunteer my services to fws full-time). The transition we’ve found hard is the bit where we learn to work together, on foreign soil, in a developing country, while hosting volunteers, while building a children’s village. Why?
1. Well, there’s culture shock number one. It can feel very weird to have an African experience EVERY single day. Most African experiences range from exhilarating to frustrating within the hour, so walking (or stumbling!) through that day in, day out, is always going to be exhausting.
2. We’re both used to being the manager in our day jobs. So it’s been a bit of a case of too many managers in the broth will kill the cake. (That was my Jo Bjelke Peterson impersonation).
3. Putting myself in charge of accounts and Daz in charge of spending was just a stupid, stupid idea from day one. Like a serious Der Freddy decision! As if we weren’t gonna fight about that. “But DARLIIIIING, why does this receipt indicate that the cement is suddenly more expensive this week?”
“WELL BECAUSE DAAARLING, LIKE I EXPLAINED, THE GOVERNMENT SOLD IT TO SOUTH AFRICA TO BUILD THE NEXT WORLD CUP VENUE.”
“Yes, DARLIIIING, but you ordered it before that happened, so I’ll ask again: why are we paying more?”
“BECAUSE DAAARLING of the reasons I just outlined…”
“Well, DARLIIING it’s not ME that cares – it’s the FWS supporters and donors we’re responsible to.”
“Yes, I’m well aware of that DAAAARLING, that’s why I bargain hard every single day - but it doesn’t change the fact that cement went up!”
“Goodnight”
“Hmph”

So, Daz and I have come some way towards sorting ourselves out – it’s only taken three months. We’ve worked out that we must:

1. Take a day off, away from everything and everyone – and do something that is relaxing and if possible, Western. Like…having a yum lunch (with no rice in it, say!) or going for a good-old fashioned dunk in one of the hotels’ aqua-glittering swimming pools. This makes us feel like we are a couple, not just workmates, that we deserve some time out from constant fws decision-making, and it also gives us a break from the culture shock. At home, we’d enjoy the odd lunch and plenty of swimming – so why not do some of that here? We’re also thinking we might take a WHOLE weekend off every fourth weekend to ensure we keep feeling on top of everything.
2. Since Shona’s arrival, the two-managers thing has started to sort itself out – now’s there’s three! Hah, jokes. No, what has happened is that Daz focuses more on building – using his team of Tanzanians and volunteers and Shona and I have been focussing on our NGO bureaucracy bits and pieces. It means that in a way, Daz worries about the building stuff and I worry about the non-building stuff, so now we can still be managers in our own areas.
3. Accounts – well Mark Biz has helped us out enormously with this (by setting up great excel spreadsheets during his visit last month) but Daz and Shona have both helped me out as well by starting to scribble the exact info I need onto each receipt before handing it to me to log in.

FWS AUST & KESHO CREW – THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE

The other unanticipated emotional strain is around being separated from the fws girls. It’s generally accepted that long-distance romances need some serious effort to work out. Why would I think my working relationships with the fws girls would be any different? No, we’re not writing each other Dear John letters – far from it. But we’ve not been able to communicate as effectively as we have in the past. I blame that on a few things – Daz and I arriving here and aiming to get on with the job (at the same time as we were learning to work together) didn’t allow much time for me emailing regular updates to the girls. Of course, we didn’t have an internet connection for a while either so that didn’t help. And then when we did have it, I was spending most of my time trying to settle in our newly arrived volunteers, continuing to learn to work better with Daz, dealing with Mum’s less-than-thrilling news and preparing to welcome Shona who was on the plane already-already! Anyway, the girls and I have come to the conclusion that I’ll write them a weekly update of fws happenings so they don’t have to wait until a blog gets posted, or for spasmodic emails about spasmodic topics! Who knows, I might even delight them with a rundown of my and Shona’s emotional headspace once in a while – I’ve tried to save them the boredom so far, but our resident almost-psychologist Kels reckons she’s happy for us to debrief. I suspect she just wants some good case studies! Of course, everything will be terrific when the fws girls can have one of our face-to-face, never-ending fws meetings again, which we will of course, follow up with a chai and chat about our lives outside of fws (minimal, but still worth a mention!)

AND FINALLY - WE KNEW THERE’D BE EMOTION AROUND TZ BUREACRACY
Well, I also have to mention this one, despite the fact the emotional pull around the two-forward-two-back sort of system here, is one we were all completely aware of and completely expecting. Because we anticipated it, we’ve so far not been too upset by the delays, backtracking and non-advice. But clearly, there’d be less emotional pull if things just went through the wheels of the powers that be the way they do at home. You tick boxes, they tick boxes. Here, we tick boxes, and they untick them. And then we tick some more and they tick one… and then untick two. On it goes, but as I say, we were prepared for it, so this emotional pull at least, hasn’t affected us too much.

Okay, enough of the girl talk. Yes-yes, next blog I’ll update you on building – but I couldn’t this time because we’ve had no cement and plenty of rain so that put a stop to proceedings. Ho hum. No real stress - instead, we employed the guys to build a gorgeous perimeter fence around our volunteer house, to plant a huge vegie garden (which also resulted in us discovering an avocado and pear tree), to clear the grounds, plant bouganvillea, transplant the 135 grevillea seedlings that had popped up on our land, to tier a mountain-viewing area for us to sit after work. Starting to feel like home…

Back soon, beck

a typical day in tanzania and some updates

2007-10-19T01:58:00.001+10:00

14 October 2007

Updarts & Newsflashes from the last fortnight:

• Leopard chomped at our neighbour’s dog. Well, so the locals are telling us. We’ve taken our Lonely Planet guide out and had them point to which animal (dog had deep lacerations all over its hind leg so we knew something had happened – just didn’t know what!). Our neighbours flipped through our book, came to a stop and pointed. Leopard. “What? Here? In the village?” queried Shona aghast.
"Yes”
”Where?”
”Over there…”
“Where, near the river?”
“Yes”
“Just there? So close?”
“Yes”.
• We purchased a you-beaut shipping container last week. All our tools and power tools are locked up in it each night. Security plus. Must have been all the energy the blog readers put out in order to ensure our success!
• Julius, one of our workers is using the money we pay him to put himself through school, another, Elias, has asked that we keep $5 from him each week, so that when his time to leave has come, he can pay for his younger sister’s education (they have no parents). A third, Abel (who likes to call himself Roger Moore for reasons as yet unexplained for the resemblance is not overwhelming) is paying to fix some areas of his shamba (farming plot). We have decided to give all of the men some help with saving (we’re going to offer to hold some of their money for them each week since none have bank accounts) and we’re also thinking we’ll offer a few acres of our farm house for a very-low rate (a bag of the resulting produce) in order to encourage the guys to get a communal farming co-op going (Corky and Mudi’s excellent idea). Our plan is to encourage these men to spend money on sensible, income-generating items, while they have it rather than beer and cigarettes. We’ve had the first talk – just an introduction outlining our plan [see photo] – but are really looking forward to implementing this part of the project.
• Two new volunteers Brendon and Eamonn have arrived and have been absolutely going off! We’ve all been really looking forward to their arrival because they’ve been so incredibly enthusiastic from the onset. We asked Eamonn via email, before he came, whether he’d want to do a safari while here and he answered, “No, I plan to just work for FWS while I’m in Africa.” A day after arriving, up on the job, nineteen-year-old Brendon said “I’m going to really work hard because I feel like I’m taking somebody’s job by being here, so I’m going to put in heaps of effort”. The boys also impressed us with their sensitivity to the cultural temperature of Tanzania. Straight up, they asked Shona all sorts of questions about appropriate behaviour in Tanzania (You see, like any country, there are non-spoken rules of etiquette here, that FWS is keen to respect and follow at all times - ie Tanzanians are fairly conservative compared to us – Tanzanian males would never walk around in public with their shirt off, so it’s inappropriate for us to do the same here. Another one that differs from home revolves around socialising – Tanzanians socialise, for the most part, without alcohol. Yes, they drink beer, but they often can’t afford it, so they don’t drink regularly or excessively. This is seen as dodge behaviour at best, as unacceptable behaviour at worst. Tanzanians would certainly never go out on weekly or twice-weekly binges as many Westerners do back home. Therefore, the way FWS sees it, Westerners wanting to interact with their Tanzanian neighbours, might need to settle for a few sodas (soft drinks), rather than a big, weekly booze-up. Eamonn and Brendon were quick to absorb our advice and have continued to ask us how best to respect the culture of our neighbours. We really appreciate their open-minded enthusiasm and willingness to learn about this country and these people we love so much.

That said, we also really appreciate their physical efforts – Eamonn has led a small Tanzanian team in the setting out and pouring of the cement slab for our shipping container to sit on – fantastic job [see photo]. Brendon has been Daz’s right-hand man, on the ongoing carpentry work (we waved goodbye to volunteer carpenters Jai & Blair last week). Daz says, “Brendon is great with his hands. Anything I give him to do, he picks up really quickly – I like him, because he’s humble and often downplays his skills, but then it turns out he’s really capable.” Together with the Tanzanian team, Daz & Brendon are working on the joists that will support the floor of the early-learning and community centre. And this week, Shona and I are particularly thrilled with Eamonn because he’s tackling the long-awaited job of getting this fence up around the Kesho volunteer house – yippee! So, yes, we’ll be sad to see Eamonn and Brendon go next week – and we’ve already begun trying to trick them into staying (yes, we're sure their girlfriends will be so happy to read that!)
• Big ruckus one morning. I pretended so sleep through it (so lazy!), but Shona, Daniel and Daz leaped out of bed to find that our guard, Luseiko, had come across a mongoose (the fancifully named Slender Mongoose) in our chicken coop at 1am. To save it from eating our chickens, Maasai Luseiko, tied its tail to the chicken wire. As you do. [see photo]. By 7.30am, locals had come from all over the village to discuss the event. By 8am, it was decided that nobody would eat it, but instead that the house owners should take the mongoose to Arusha National Park and release it in the wilds. Shona, Beck and just-arrived volunteers Brendon and Eamonn were up for the adventure. And an adventure it was. An hour’s trip on the bumpiest road in town, all the way to the gates of the game-park, only to be greeted half-heartedly by an attendant who didn’t know or much care what the mongoose was or why we had brought it. We placed the box housing the mongoose on the floor and opened it for the attendant to have a peek. He barely raised his eyebrows at it, but seemed more intrigued by us. “Where should we release it?” beamed Shona as she stood next to the box in the car park.
”Here,” answered the guard pointing to his feet.
“In the car park? No, it’ll get run over,” explained Shona.
“Let’s just take it on a little walk down that path and let it go there…”
Which is what we did. FWS: For Welfare of animals great and Small.

Interestingly, when talking ourselves up to our American mate, Fred, a long-time Arushan local, we were told that the “slender mongoose” is in fact, not particularly exotic, generally seen as a pest to Tanzanian wildlife as it eats birds, a animal more akin, in status, to the ... feral cat, say. Shona: “We found it in our chicken coop.”
Fred: “Yeeep, that’s where you’ll find em!" [laughing - at us and not hiding it!]
Shona: “We released it in Arusha National Park.”
Fred: “You did whaaaat? You released Tanzania’s biggest bird-eater into Tanzania’s biggest bird-life game park?”
Us: “Mmm, apparently”.

A typical Tanzanian day - by request. It’s not exactly a weekly blog yet is it? Right, well try this on for a typical day and you’ll soon see why the blog comes whenever it comes:

This morning - 14 October 2007:

Brizzy volunteer Eamonn arrives at our home at 9am with 12 workers from the block who now have no work up there (due to the artificial cement shortage – yes, companies are hiding their cement in order to create a price spike for builders. Ta for that, Tanzania!). So, Eamonn, with the help of Kesho Leo assistant manager, Mudi, arranges the guys to hand-plough our half-acre veggie patch (half a morning’s digging) and to dig 35 holes around our farmhouse for soon-to-be-purchased fence posts.
same time, Beck organises our neighbour Muswai to do our clothes washing in the back yard while our tap water is on (Elizabeth has had her baby – Jacqueline – so is at home resting).
same time, Shona & Beck welcome Lucas, fws’s first Tanzanian volunteer, into our home to sit with Shona and translate our fws info flyers into Kiswahili.
same time, Beck does a few exercises for her back problem which flared up during a spectacular endeavour to save some seemingly exotic Tanzanian wildlife (more later).
same time, Beck welcomes Agnes our cook into our kitchen to surprise her with the fact that we had absolutely no food for her to cook with – none. “So, Agnes, how about we give you some money now we are confident we can trust you, and you can go shopping, buy enough food for lunch for the boys, cook that food in your home (as we won’t be home to let you cook in our kitchen) and then bring it back to the boys who will be wanting a hearty lunch at precisely 12.30pm. “Hey Agnes, here are some hotpots for you to carry the food back in. Goodbye, have fun!”
same time, Mudi advises that the boys will only have enough ploughing work to see them through to midday, so given it’s 11am, we girls better get going into town to buy the timber for the fence posts so the boys can paint the posts and whack them into the holes this afternoon.
soon after, Beck decides that it’s unlikely her and Shona will return in time with the fence posts, so instead, lets have the boys actually plant veggie seeds (spinach, tomato, carrot, onion, eggplant, watermelon for starters) after they finish ploughing. Find seeds, leave with Mudi to hold them as he will not have a key to the house once we go, so there will be no way for him to get inside. Good, sorted.
Shona, Lucas and Rebecka discuss the idea of only putting the word out about the mama positions for Kesho Leo and holding off on the Tanzanian teacher, nurse and farm-manager roles. We’ve a sneaking suspicion (der) that we’ll be inundated with applicants and decide it’d be better to stagger the call-out for employees over the next few months instead of beckoning all at once. Excellent. Shona and Lucas tweak the flyers to reflect the new changes.
Corky SMSes Rebecka again to ask if she’s had time to see if there is a volunteer rate for the game-park fees he must pay to return through the Serengeti from his permaculture course. Rebecka texts back “TBC”, adding “Visit Tanzanian Tourist Board to ask about Corky’s vol rate” to her list of town-jobs.
Rebecka and Shona alternatively chase Anne and Kelsey out of the house several times. Edwina is not interested in coming inside, Anne however, is quite bold and rather annoying. Very pretty though.
Daz arrives home early, surprised the girls have not left for town yet and decides that since they are so late, he will catch a lift into town with them, throw the bike in the back of the ute, get off halfway, buy his own nails, and return with them on the bike.
Rebecka and Shona write shopping lists, combining the job lists and finally declare, keys sorted, jobs sorted, that they are ready to leave. It is 1pm (no sign of Agnes but fortunately the vols aren’t at the house waiting for lunch yet).
Hold on. Let’s stuff around with finding the actual money. Seems we’ve all but run out – waiting on a lump sum to come from Sydney, but meantime, once again, we’re dipping into our own bank accounts. Which would be fine, if Rebecka’s ATM card hadn’t expired the week before. Seems we’ll need to use Daz’s which is a little bit of sore point, given he’s still waiting to be repaid (by FWS so he knows we’re good for it!) for the first $8,000 he spent when he got here. Anyway, Rebecka works out she can transfer, via the internet, money from her account to Daz’s so that we’re not actually using Daz’s money, despite us using his card to withdraw the cash. She does so. All is calm and almost organised. Beck asks for Daz’s ATM card as everyone finally jumps in the ute (Lucas included as he needs a lift to town).

This arvo:

Driving into town, we give three Tanzanians mammas a lift, stopping the ute each time, and helping them to climb into the tray with their various baskets of veggies and buckets of water. We always take anyone wanting a lift, despite it slowing us down considerably.
Mid-trip, Shona and Rebecka yell out the window to Daz, who sits in the ute tray, while they sit in the front, Rebecka using a pillow to prop her aching back. They confirm that they will go ahead and purchase 600m of barbed wire, 250 u-nails (“not sure how many in a packet, so you’ll have to work it out,” go Daz’s guidelines), 35 timber posts for not more than $2 each, but not the 4-inch nails which Daz is now about to purchase.
They don’t make a point of it, but they will also purchase food for the entire week (which sounds easy but actually involves a long haggle at the veggie market, a trip to the local supermarket for bread, butter and low-fat milk, a trip to the other supermarket for olive oil and other bottled specialties, a trip to the deli for the meat… yadda yadda, goodbye three hours!).
Arriving in town, the girls drop Lucas off, explaining that they won’t be able to come to his house for ‘greetings’ (to visit his family) today as tey are very busy. He looks at them with complete incomprehension – he has after all, just offered an invitation – there is no room for anything but an acceptance. Despite the unlikely response, he decides to forgive the girls their strange Western ways and they arrange to meet again in two day’s time.
Girls make a bee-line for Beck’s physio, as they’re an hour late for the appointment. Physio seems to think she’s progressing nicely. He massages her back into mobility, outlines a few more twice-daily exercises and asks to see her in a week. Finally, she’s on the improve.
Girls head then to Via Via café which houses the Tanzanian Conservation Foundation, hoping to get some info about Corky’s volunteer discount. No such luck. Given it’s 2pm, they decide to order lunch and discuss the latest dilemma – Daz has called to advise the incredible volunteering duo – Eamonn and Brendon have announced that they will be leaving next week, after two very impressive weeks of volunteer work with FWS. “I thought they were here for a full month!” Rebecka cries. “Oh no, we need them!” Shona returns. “But hang on…Actually, maybe that’s right… Eamonn was only ever out of Australia for one month, so with travel either side… yes, he would only be able to work for two and a half weeks”. The girls, calm down, but feel annoyed by their own stupidity and sad the time has gone so fast. They talk about introducing minimum terms for volunteering but decide it’s a dumb idea – after all, that would have meant Eamonn and Brendon would not have been eligible to come at all – which in turns means Daz would have no help with the timber work that Brendon has been doing day in, day out, and that the cement slab for the shipping container would not have been poured (Eamonn oversaw it’s entire construction) and that the fence posts that will soon surround the FWS volunteer house would never have been erected. Okay, enough chats girls, on with the job. Paying the bill, only to find some of the team from Support For International Change (they work on HIV-AIDS care and have given FWS heaps of time and information right from the early days). Shona heads over and has a chat to Emily, who advises that yes, we should visit them now that we know their address and that yes, Corky will have to pay park fees, no there isn’t any volunteer rate, and that we now only need to find out what amount he should be paying. Accidental ticking off a job, we love that.
To the market. Haggle, haggle. I take 45 minutes to return with a replacement flask for the one we purchased the week before (it exploded after one use!), and a bucket for our mop, while Shona managed to buy baskets full of spinach, eggplant, okra, potatoes, onion, oranges, bananas, carrots and avocadoes. Sometimes some shoppers make better progress than others.
On the way back from the markets, Shona ducks into the patisserie to buy four loaves of bread. I return and remember to duck in to buy some butter, low-fat milk and I treat us to a couple of pre-packaged fruit juices.
Outside, packing the toolbox with the newly purchased veggies, Shona is harassed by a mamma selling sweet passionfruit (sweet, white flesh, yellow casing – different from home). When she says no, the mamma claps her hands in front of Shona’s face and yells at her, “I have a baby on my back, I need to feed it!”. Before Shona gets a chance to react, a street kid pushes in front of the mamma and starts begging for money. Hand out, palm upturned ready to take money, and then hand closes and comes up to the mouth (to imitate eating). We know that ninety nine percent of the street kids here don’t use the money Westerners give them to buy food, but instead to buy glue to sniff. I cut in and say “Sorry, not today,” but like the mama, this kid is insistent. We jump in the car, he has his hand on the door, so I can’t shut it, I ask him to remove it. He does so and then moves quickly to the rear of the ute and stands behind us as we try to reverse. We know this trick, so we slowly slowly begin reversing, and he takes his position as self-appointed traffic controller to help the Westerners find a break in traffic. Clockwork, he’s soon asking for 200 shillings for his service. Again, we apologise. “Some days… it’s harder than others to say no,” comments Shona. “Yep, some days the desperation seems real rather than a case of trying it on and seeing how you go,” I reply. She nods and we pull up at the hardware shop.
Girls get a call from Daz who advises he’s purchased 10kgs of 5-inch nails, not being able to get the 4-inch he hoped for, but they’re not working out, so he really needs us to locate 4-inch nails. Text back: “On it. At hardware shop now”.
Fifteen minutes later: barbed wire, 4-inch nails, u-nails purchased. This hardware shop is about the only place in town with set prices (reasonable ones, too!) where you get what you ask for without any tricks. Shona packs the barbed wire and nails into the toolbox in the ute, arranging it around bread loaves and veggies.
Let’s get some money out with Daz’s card before we buy timber. No card. Yes, we asked for it but forgot to ensure that it was actually handed to us. Oh well, it’s 5pm, let’s ‘research timber’ anyway…
So, to timber. Long story short: 5 dusty timber yards. 2 girls. 0 wins. All yards offering 5m poles when 3m is what we need. Cutting is possible – for a price. Quotes ranging from $10 per pole to $2.50, despite us explaining the absolute maximum we can pay is $2. Hours later, we pack it in with the plan to do it all again tomorrow.

And that, fws friends, is a typical day in Tanzania. Beck xxx

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

2007-10-05T01:43:00.000+10:00

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.

Full house

2007-09-20T03:50:00.001+10:00

And into the little two-bedroom home, they shoved seven people. First came Beck and Daz, who were followed by carpenters Jai and Blair… and now add some Shona and Daniel (Darren’s 13yo son),

and a little sprinkle the singing finance wizard Mark Bizeray and you’ve the melting pot of Kesho Leo Volunteer House.

Daz, Daniel and I are bunking in one room. Shona is kipping at one end of the loungeroom while The Bizness kips at the other. And Jai and Blair remain in their cozy backroom with a new mate – the 8cm mozzie (evidence provided).

So yeah, it’s a full-on share-house set up, but the vibe is certainly not Big Brother (or I’d go home!). I think it’s not BB because this crew are intelligent, open-minded and here to do something for ‘the greater good’. We’ve only had one ‘volunteer house meeting” and it was at my behest. We needed to rejig our eating finances given that some of our funding could possibly/is maybe falling through. Had to ask the team straight up if they minded covering a little bit more or their eating expenses than we’d agreed. Rather embarrassing, but what can you do – if the funding falters, there’s repercussions. This was one. Fortunately, the guys were more than cooperative, so thanks for that, you big legends.

We’re still on track for the Kesho Leo Children’s Village funding – and are particularly proud to announce that Lonely Planet Foundation have advised that they will grant us $10,000 AUD towards the building of Kesho. We’re particularly impressed with that because we reckon they’re tops – so the fact that they reckon we’re tops is a pretty big compliment!

Shona has been busy reorganising us. Seems we are living too flash. Too many meals with meat - a twice-a-year treat for our villagers, but an everyday expectation for carnivorous Aussie blokes who are labouring under the African sun (jury is still out on this one – compromise is looking like meat-based meals twice a week instead of every night. An interesting one – Shona argues we should aim to become part of our village and live on the rice-and-beans type meals they do, whereas Daz argues just because he comes to Africa doesn’t mean he has to pretend he’s African. I’m happy to eat local food – it’s delicious. But I’m certainly not happy to eat backpacker’s meals – cold pasta with tinned sauce. I just feel like I’ve done that, and didn’t find it particularly enjoyable. It seems crazy not to eat well when there are so many fantastically fresh, organic vegies all about, every which-way you turn). And speaking of fresh, Shona’s arranged for our milk to come from our neighbour’s cow instead of the supermarket in town. Another one, I’m happy for despite the fact that at home I’m all about low-fat soy! It’s also been put out there that we should stick with the cheap local margarine not the real butter some of the posher shops import from New Zealand or Ireland (the boys are happy to go with the marg, but for me this one is an outright “no” as I’m convinced this ‘margarine’ is actually the by-product of some el cheapo women’s toiletry. Why else does it like sorbolene cream? Eh? Eh?).

It was great to sit down and nut out with Shona what we hope to achieve individually and as team while here. She’s particularly keen to get out into the village and meet and greet with a view to locating potential Kesho staff members and … ah, orphans. She’ll also be continuing her snappy secretarial duties and pitching in wherever needed in the meantime. Me, I get to continue to update and document our work so that you readers and your friends are kept abreast of how we’re going. I’m spozed to do some other jobs too but they’re a secret right now. Together, Shona and I agreed to research the stuff we need to know in order to get this show on the road. Today, we had our first field trip of researching. We headed out to the lush, Usa River area to Cradle Of Love orphanage, which is run by an awesome American woman, Davona Church (www.cradleoflove.com). Davona agreed to sit with us despite us just rocking up unannounced. She gave us a few hours of her time and imparted all sorts of wonderful advice about how she runs her brilliant home.

Among other things, Davona’s transparency will help us nail some very tight ‘operating’ costs for Mark Biz, who has spent two weeks whipping Kesho accounts (and those that run them - us!) into line. Resultment? We have some seriously spiffy excel files to work with and are now spending our last moments with The Biz fine-tuning the projections we’d made in 2006 for operating costs.

Up at the block, Daz has begun pouring foundations and Blair & Jai have moved from banging up timber moulds for our concrete sleepers in the backyard to working on the block doing set-out and foundations this week. Both are really happy to be meeting and working with our African Kesho crew. They reckon they’re learning about three new Kiswahili words a day.

Oh yes, we’re party animals too. We had a house-warming do and invited all our neighbours last week. We ate 387kgs of pilau (which Agnes cooked – we said make it for 10 people – three days later, we are still eating it!) and gave a quick, impromptu presentation about our Kesho plans – which our neighbours all know about anyway. Shona used her brand-new ‘handy cam’ to record it all but cracked herself up the next day when she played back her filming and related commentary. “Note to self,” she giggled, “I am NEVER to talk while filming…because I am an absolute dork”.

Mark, Jai, Daniel and Blair have begun catching dula-dulas into town, and as you’d expect have racked up a few adventures (and great photos) as a result. Mark Biz, in between setting us up with some slick-as accounting systems, has managed to locate us a local electrician (to fix our darkened loo room) who also makes chapattis (local fried flatbread, not exactly healthy, but certainly yum). Blair, Jai and Daniel have begun an almost-daily afternoon soccer match with the locals on the land we cleared for cropping. Yes, not so much cropping has been done, so why not use it as a soccer field? The local kids are stoked because they’ve no other land to play on (as their parents do actually crop their acreage). They use Daniel’s leather soccer ball or their own soccer ball, a sphere made up from rolling plastic bags together.

Food Rockin Shelter went off so the boys have a regular gig at Stiggy’s on Friday nights. We made Mark Biz get up and sing two songs despite having been in transit for 35 hours. I’ve never actually seen someone nodding off in their chair (those big nods where your head jerks and looks like it might snap your neck in two), be called to the stage by so-called ‘mates’, only to shake off the snores and bleary eyes and render an extremely charismatic rendition of Pearl Jam’s Black. (Hey, wasn’t this crooning, swooning guy in la-lah land just minutes ago?)

An adventurous night to the end. On the way home, Jai, holding his camera in the back of the ute, was accosted by a pretendly-friendly African on the way through the slums. Faking a handshake, the guy ghosted Jai’s hand and made a grab for his spiffy Nikon digital. Stealing Stanley didn’t know what happened to him. Before he knew it, Jai had him in a headlock and was dragging him, limbs flailing, behind the ute. Not sure what the unusual noises were, Daz braked and yelled out, “What’s going on?” to which Daniel, Blair and Jai shouted, “Don’t slow down, keep driving!” Eventually, Stanley let loose his grip on Jai’s camera and in return, Jai let loose his iron-fisted grip of Stanley’s head!

Blair taught Daniel to play canaster in one night-long session, so now Daniel likes to play with anyone who will play him. Which isn’t that many people, given he’s become a self-appointed Card Nazi. Apparently there are many rules to Canaster and you shouldn’t make any mistakes while learning them. Too funny. The annoying part is that Daz doesn’t even listen to the rules, causing us all – particularly Daniel - great distress, and then drives us all mad by winning. We don’t ask Mark Maths-Brain Biz to play any more because he beats us without even letting us explain the rules to him.

And we’ve found Benui a job. Well, sort of. Shona, Daniel and I ran into a lovely Aussie pilot who has been based out of Arusha for three years and is going home, leaving his piloting job behind, in one month. If you weren’t onto it, our lovely IT maestro, Benui Shwabe, yes that’s Kels’ boy, is a pilot looking for more hours during his stay in Tanzania next year. So swapski? Topski.

Next week,
Beck

FWS's first-ever international volunteers arrive

2007-09-06T17:08:00.001+10:00

There they are - Jai and Blair, fws’s first-ever international volunteers. Look at them: trailblazers, groundbreakers, pioneers! Or two grubby but good-spirited Aussie chippies that haven’t seen their lost luggage for five days? Depends on how you see it, but for these two volunteers, a clean t-shirt and a new pair of undies wouldn’t go astray! Blair, in particular, wouldn’t mind seeing his bags ‘cause then he could pull out his hat instead of having to go with this number he created from a piece of cardboard and a girly pink t-shirt he found. Over the top? Not when your Scottish skin starts asking for sunscreen at 9am each morning.

Despite their baggage issues (non-emotional), the boys have got stuck into the carpentry work for Kesho. They’ve spent the week in the backyard at the volunteer house, sawing and planing the timber lengths that will be whacked together to make moulds to hold the concrete for the pathway surrounding Kesho Leo pathway. They’ve been into town with us a few times (an initiation for anyone – dare you to return without feeling exhausted) and have even downed a pizza and beer at Stiggys, the local Australian-owned restaurant. In fact, Daz, Blair, Jai and Mark (our auditor who is coming over to help us fine-tune our accounting systems this end), have a gig on at Stiggy’s this Friday night. Get this for a multi-talented volunteer crew: Daz will sing and play guitar, Blair will play guitar, as will Jai, while Mark will sing (not that he knows that yet – he’s only just hopping on the plane). Sound sensations! Look out Arusha – Food Rockin Shelter has rolled into town.

Who bought eight awesomely huge water tanks for a terrific price this week? We did. Who dug and dug all day (through 5 foot of our gorgeous top soil) to make holes for those tanks? We did (no we didn’t – our African Building team did – you’ve never seen people work the way these guys do, it’s incredible). Who managed to put four of the eight tanks in the ground? We did! Who managed to totally gob-smack our building team by telling them there were several more water tanks coming…and that they’d be used to give not just Kesho Kidbs, but also them – our neighbours – water? We did.

What else? Well, we completed part two of our “erect a strong boundary fence” mandate this week – in went 190 bouganvillea seedlings. Our smiling Ruben patted them into their new home with the lush topsoil we’d dug up while making holes for our watertanks, while Nikodem, our next-door neighbour at Kesho, followed and gave each a generous splash of local infereji water. We’ll wait about six months or so for these baby bougans to grow up, entwine with the barbed wire fence, grow their own thorns and become a fully-fledged pretty but threatening boundary fence.

Driveway. Spectacular. Strong. Finished!

Oh and Shona arrives tomorrow – and with her, Daniel, Darren’s youngest son (13yo). Personally, I can’t wait for either of them to arrive. Obviously I’m deadkeen to show Shona around (and to give her our resident linguistics legend the job of teaching me Kiswahili), but I’m also deadkeen to introduce Daniel to January. January is our askari (guard) up at Kesho Leo. He’s from a tribe, which Nolasco says, is even stronger than the Maasai. It’s hard to credit – and in fact, when we told Mudi that Nolasco had said that, Mudi cracked up! “A tribe stronger than the Maasai, wwaaahhaaa, never! Eeeh!” I later queried Nolasco again and he said he thinks this tribe are stronger than the Maasai because they had very, very small numbers, but purposefully grew them by having many children and learning to fight hard. They became excellent archers and actually began to tip their arrows with poison. When we met January, Nolasco asked January in Kiswahili if he was good with a bow and arrows, and January smiled slowly and whispered, “safi sana”. (direct translation: “very clean”). Nolasco then hastened to point out we didn’t want him to hurt anyone…he wasn’t to use his spear… but still, I think Daniel, who spent most of his weekends with us in Petersham aiming his bow and arrow at a cardboard box in the backyard, should convince January to give him a few lessons.

I’m looking forward to introducing Shona to Agnes and Elizabeth. Elizabeth (pictured washing our floor) washes our clothes for us and sometimes (well...once) the floor.

Agnes (pictured shaving the coconut flesh), who only started two days ago, has begun cooking us some fantastic African meals each night. We hoed into ndizi nyama for our first meal (banana and beef, but not banana as Aussies know it – it’s cooking banana – which is more often known as ‘plantain’). We gobbled down ugali na mboga (polenta and vegetables) last night. And tonight…I think it’s maharage na wali (beans and rice. Sounds dull – it will be delicious I promise).

Agnes is from Kenya but is staying with her sister in Engosengui (the village where Kesho is being built). She left Kenya a year ago because her father was selling brides for arranged marriages and she “didn’t want to be one”. Her English is excellent, which isn’t rare in Kenyans. She’s on “trial” as our cook, but so far things are working out extremely well. I really like her. She’s bolshy (a fairly standard Maasai trait!) – for instance, she was telling me how she needed to rearrange the food in the fridge so it worked better for her, she’s smart (showed her once how to use our gas oven – and she’s never asked again! Daz had to show me twice!), and she’s straight-forward (there’s no ‘deals’ going on here. If she wants something she asks for it, but she doesn’t ask for the type of stuff that makes us uncomfortable. And that isn’t always the way here. Agnes never make us feel uncomfortable for our Western lifestyle (one that we've downgraded but that is still extravagant by comparison - how can it not be with such income earning capacities). Some of our neighbours come to our fence, or to our door, and gawk at us. Some that come inside, eyeball our fridge and lounge and say how they’d like this or that, and can they have it. Can they have the paw-paws on our tree (the ones that aren’t even ripe yet), can they have our butter, can they have our sunglasses, can they have eight 20L buckets of our water, can they have… it’s all understandable of course, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable and at times, if it didn’t niggle me a little. How many ways can you say: No, sorry you can’t have our butter, no you definitely can’t have my sunglasses, no sorry, you can only have four 20L buckets of water not eight – we have people here who need water as well, no you can’t have the fruit growing on our trees, no I can’t give you 1000Tz ($1) to go to the local fair, no I can’t pay for you to go to English lessons, no I can’t pay for your headache tablets or typhoid bill, no I can’t pay for your hospital bill, yes, we can sharpen your knife for you but not just this minute, yes you can have our axe, but please bring it back when you’re done… I asked Mudi about this – why some Africans ask and ask and ask (and I stipulate SOME here because others have been the exact opposite and have simply given, given, given! and I also stipulate that these are just my personal ramblings and may or may not reflect the feelings of the other fws team - don't know, havent asked them), while others don’t ask anything at all of us. Mudi said “Some Africans are lazy and think it easier to ask you for things than to get it themselves. Maybe they don’t want to walk to the bomba to get water, even if they only pay 200 shillings (20c), but they just don’t want to walk, so they come to your house and ask for your water instead…it's closer”. It's interesting when you put that perpective on it - is this poverty asking? Or convenience? Anyway, the point was Agnes doesn’t ever do this and I like that she doesn’t do this. She comes here, she does her work extremely well and I pay her. It was like this from day one - she told me what price we must pay her and that after one month if we were happy with her, we could pay her more – it was up to us. Very clean cut and very ‘comfortable’ because it’s similar to how things would work at home. Funny how we like to stick to what we know isn’t it? Some traveller! Some community mobilizer!

Maybe I need to be more adventurous and think up some creative ways to say yes to the African neighbours who come asking for this, asking for that…but then you fear – where does it stop? And this is the scary thing about charity and giving - where does it stop? Well, I think that for now, until I evolve a little more spiritually that is, I’ve decided that it stops where I say it does and there’s to be no guilt around that decision. So where does it stop for me? Well, I decided a while back, that it was going to be a fairly big deal to get this children’s village up and that I would work terribly hard to ensure we got it up, involving as much of the local community as possible…but that I wouldn’t give out money/sunglasses/anything much to every African I met in passing because then I’d be out of the stuff I needed to keep going - to keep going in ensuring Kesho went up. I told myself I wasn’t going to be able to pull off a Gandhi so I should just mark out boundaries for giving that I’m comfy with and then stick to them. So for now, that’s where my giving stops. I give for Kesho, and for the neighbours around Kesho, but not to the many millions of Africans who could use a pair of sunnies or a few more 20L buckets of water. That said, I’m absolutely hopeless with the “no guilt” element of my decision, but maybe the guilt is a good thing. Maybe the guilt is what is prompting me to review my decision and to try and come up with a more Gandhi approach to openly helping those asking for it, as well as those I specifically came to help – the Kesho beneficiaries. So once again, history has it: they say you come to change Africa but Africa just changes you. Well, let’s hope Africa does a good job of sorting out this boundary-marking Westerner - and sorting her out quickly. Because she's a little confused.

Beck

Midweek Funnies

2007-08-31T15:36:00.000+10:00

Sorry couldn't wait a whole week to post these.

1. Daz negotiates all morning about having some steel brackets for our footings made with a local steel fundhi (tradesman). At 1pm the fundhi rings back with a still-extravagant price. Daz says, "No, sorry, that's far to expensive. I'll go somewhere else, thanks anyway," to which panicked fundhi replies, "Okay, okay... what then is the MAXIMUM you can pay?". Daz cracks up...and explains he's not so much after working out the maximum he can pay, but more about working out the minimum he can get the job done for!

2. Daz proving himself to be a huge help around the house after our neighbour, Elizabeth, has washed a week's worth of dusty clothing for us:
"Beck, I put all of the clothes away in their drawers."
"Excellent darling, thanks."
[pause]
"Oh, but not yours..."
"So just yours?"
"Yes"
"Sooo, 'ALL' these clothes you speak of putting away ... you just mean your own?"
"Yes"
[Lucky he can build good driveways!]

3. Getting pulled over in the ute, by a very tall, young, goodlooking, swarve Tanzanian Policeman who is all dressed up in the crispy white uniform with teeth to match. We amble through the 15-minutes of greetings required together, after which he takes a huge intake of breath and says, officially:
"Please sir, find a good parking area over there, and move your car to it, so that a policeman may interrogate you."
[He, of course, would be that policeman].
"Please sir, may I have all your partik-oo-lars"
[Daz smiles, hands over his driver's licence, car rego, car insurance, etc]
"Please sir, explain to me what procedure you have put in place to repair your vehicle's cracked windscreen"
[Another smile from Daz, who then explains the car has only been ours for a week or two - and that we have bought it to HELP US BUILD AN CHILDREN'S VILLAGE IN SINON]
At once, our eccentric officer, visibly relaxes and beams his blinding smile, answering, "Very good, keep up the good work" and waves us off.
He's proved so entertaining so far, I'm not quite ready to go, so I say to him, "Thank you, Officer, but what is your name?"
"The one who is baptizing Jesus is my name. Do you know?"
"John"
"YES!!! Ah, you know, this is very good!"
Happies all round and off we drive...

Building begins

2007-08-27T22:38:00.000+10:00

27 August 2007 and building has begun. Yehah! We got off to a rainy start last Monday, but Tuesday, looked good enough to get going. So we did. We started off with Mudi translating for Daz. Daz gave an introduction type talk to those Tanzanians that had put their names in our book and arrived ready to do whatever we asked of them. Daz explained who we were, explicitly pointing out that contrary to popular belief, we were not wealthy Australians building a business, but instead volunteers, here to build a village for Tanzanian orphans and that the building of the village was being funded by many, many generous Australians (youse). All seemed to understand.

Daz then went on to explain that we needed 16-18 men (there were maybe 20 standing there) and that we’d take the 16 names on our books before we’d take newcomers. We asked that our workers, put in a fair day’s effort from 8am to 4.30pm each day, with an hour’s lunch – which they could all go home for since all lived nearby. For this, we’d pay the going rate of $2.50 a day. The guys seemed fairly pleased with this – because normally they’d work on their own farms from sunup to sundown, with a short lunch break for no pay, so they thought the hour lunch break, the comparatively early knock-off time and the fact they were getting paid at all was choice! [FYI, the average Tanzanian wage is about $300 a year, yep, about 82c per day, but most Tanzanians I’ve met would do well to earn that much. Most people here earn well below The World Bank’s poverty line of $US2 a day, that’s for sure. What I’m not sure about it is how the hell they survive).

Wrapping up the chats, Daz explained that he expected that our tools be looked after and kept safe and that we hoped we could all learn to work together well as a group and neighbours. We explained that we could give at least six months work to everyone and after that we would be able to offer a couple of full-time jobs at the village, but we’d pick people who had worked well in helping us build. If we felt some people were not working well, while others were working very hard, we’d be forced to ask them to leave because there were lots of men in the area who wanted a job and would work well and help us. This revelation was met with vehement nods which we took to be a good thing. So… to work.

Where to begin? “Fence”, said Darling. “Ukigo” translated Mudi. So to the very bottom of the block, near the seasonal creek, everyone headed, carrying timber poles, barbed wire, mark-out pegs and string, shovels, buckets of water for the men to drink from, wheelbarrows, pangas (local machetes used for farming), picks. We had a few of our own tools, but also asked a few men to go back home and bring more of their own, which they did. These rusted, well-worn specimens made our shiny tools look a bit silly!

Almost immediately three men – Mohammed The Stonemason And Vice Village Chairman, Mohammed Our Chicken Coop Maker and Ruben Of The Smiling Face began marking out the fence line, painting the end of the timber posts in “mafuta chafu” (dirty – ie used - engine oil) for protection against termites, and digging post holes. It was production-line city without so much as a word of direction from Daz. Guess these farmers have put a fence or two in their time, then! Two days later and the Kesho Leo boundary fence, a job Daz had allowed two weeks for, was complete.
Right, better give the guys something else to do then. Let’s build our driveway. And better yet, instead of paying $50 a load for rock base, let’s quarry it from our very own seasonal creek. A natural decision for a boy that comes from a family of top-quality sandstone quarries. “It’s the perfect density,” repeated Daz interminably. “I can’t believe our luck. It’s not too hard to pluck out (the guys jam a steel wedge into the rock which breaks out a sizeable piece) and not to soft to work as road base (ie – it wont crumble after we cover it with volcanic rock and start driving lorries over it).”

And dah-dah... the Kesho Leo driveway is born:

Our first week went really smoothly. Of course, a few hairy moments (or it wouldn't be Africa!):

nearby Lutheran Church approaches us to say we can’t use their road to access our site anymore. (Technically, it’s not actually their road, but a public access road…and it’s not actually even that! Really, it’s a just track in the grass where no scrub grows). The concern is that our trucks will cause the earth to shake and the church will crack and fall down. We managed to speak to them and convince them that if any damage is done to their church as a result of our trucks, we would fix it for them, but we are extremely confident that nothing of the sort will occur. A seemingly quick agreement was made. We only found out later that the agreement was quick because our neighbours (most of whom have sons / husbands working for us) told the church to ‘behave’, that the community needs projects like ours, and we should not be obstructed from bringing employment and help to the area.
neighbour rocks up to site claiming to want compensation for his half of the creek we have quarried. Fair enough. Shoulda probably thought about that earlier – doh! Oh well, let’s sort it now. Daz begins to negotiate…but then intuition steps in and forces him to pose a seemingly irreverent question, “Ah, sir, are you the actual owner of that land?”. Rough translation: “Not so much. I used to own it, but then I sold it, but really, it’s now like a stolen cow [the rock quarried], so it is my duty to take some money for the stolen cow.” “Mr, is that alcohol we smell on your breath? Bye bye please”. Crisis averted momentarily. We’ve asked around for the real owner of the land, we’ll see what shows… * Daz and I sitting in our volunteer house discussing security – making sure we’re covered when volunteers come - talking about this idea of not wanting guns on any of our security guards, when KAPOW! A gunshot? KAPOW!!! TWO GUNSHOTS??? One each? Lovely. Are people shooting at us, through our door as the sun shines in and warms our feet? Only one way to find out… We creep to the walls nearby and rubberneck to look around our yard…nothing, nobody. Just the bucolic farm fields, barnyard animal braying and blissful village atmosphere we enjoy every day. “Maybe it was a slingshot, darling. They love a slingshot here…” Scan the trees for the slingshot sniper. No such dude. Scan the fields for a ground-level guerrilla. No such bloke…And besides why are people trying to kill us when they think you’re Jesus? Kinda a bit risky for their afterlife! Okay, well all seems ok, let’s sneak out to the grilled foyeur area out the front where all the kuffuffle (a word I use only because Joe Moe likes it) began. Tools, cement bags, buckets, wheelbarrow… Hang on, wheelbarrow sitting low. A tyre blow-out! Kapows explained! Our world as we know it – safe and lovely – is restored. Just as well, or we’d have to high-tail it home, not like we’re keen to be a “RACRIFICE” as Scooby Doo likes to say.

In just a week, we have whacked up a full boundary fence and half a driveway. Pretty good going, I’d say!

Till next week,

Beck

RAINED OUT! KESHO BUILDING DELAYED A DAY!

2007-08-21T17:09:00.000+10:00

Today (Monday 20 August) was going to be the illustrious, esteemed, much-anticipated launch of the Kesho Leo Children’s Village building extravaganza (ie we'd actually start building Kesho). But, alas - rain. Torrents, buckets, rivers. It poured down yesterday, last night and this morning like it did in Sydney this winter (and is right now apparently, same-same!). Relentless fat, juicy droplets that soak into all in sight and echo off the roof. Mind, no noise made here could ever outdo the frogs that have started croaking in the infereji (man-made waterway) out the front. It’s a symphony, but better frogs than dogs, I say.

No work for our tools today Daz is a bit despondent – he’s been gunning towards starting the building for weeks. He’s been racing all over town, pricing and bargaining for materials, he’s been laboriously ticking off the umpteen handy-man job associated with the volunteer house-fws office so that, today, he could put them all behind him and finally, focus on building Kesho. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow – or even the day after till things wring themselves out a bit. Can’t help but wonder if we jinxed ourselves by choosing the name Kesho (tomorrow) Leo (today). Our idea was that today, we’d do the things that most put off till tomorrow. but could our clever name be working backwards on us? Surely not! Daz has headed up to the land to talk to the workers we’ve arranged. Although it is soggy and boggy, we know the men who own the 16 names we’ve taken down this week, will be there, waiting for employment. We also expect another 16 or so to rock up simply because they’ve heard the rumour that work might be meted out. It’ll be a task for Daz just to get to the land – we’ve travelled the road before in wet weather and know it’s no picnic (slip-sliding away). Hence us arranging to be here in Tanzania now, building in this non-rainy season! Global warming – gets you at every turn, doesn’t it.

But our problems are nothing
Nolasco, our village elder, who works with The World Food Program, advised this morning that our neighbours (people like Mohammedi, pictured here clearling the scrub from the bottom of our block for a small fee) will be most concerned about their maize (corn, the local staple which is used to make ‘ugali’, or as we know it, polenta, which East-Africans literally live off). The unexpected wet weather at the time has the potential to ruin the country’s maize crop unless it eases up. So let’s hope it does.

Speaking of unexpected occurrences, ever been in an earthquake? Me either, but we were in an earth tremor this morning at 6am, which was pretty alarming to a couple of non-tremored-up Aussies. I woke to the bed see-sawing and yelled this sorta garble at Daz: “Daz, there’s someone trying to saw in through the roof, it’s shaking the whole bed, the walls, the cement…” Poor, sleeping Daz, managed to make better sense of the situation. “Earth tremor!’ he answered and jumped out of bed to grab his torch (best to ensure my version wasn’t correct)! It only lasted a few seconds, but wow, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a big one! Coolio our legendary mate advised us the week before we left that Tanzania was experiencing sizeable earthquakes (CNN put one at 6.6 on The Richter), but who knew we’d ever think about that again!

We were in Sunday Life magazine on the weekend. Did you see us? If not, no fear, Ben is going to post the piece onto our site soon. We suspected the piece must have had gone to print because we had some lovely Aussies email us to say, “G’day, read aboucha, good job, we’d love to come volunteer next year maybe”. Makes me wish even more that we were able to start building today. Anyway, there’ll be a reason…we’ll just wait and see what it is.

NEWSFLASH: JESUS GETS A UTE!
Translation: Daz, who the locals are now calling ‘Jesus’ – you can see why in the attached pic (remarkable resemblance!) – has found himself (and us, if he decides to share) the world’s most fantastic ute. We love-love-love it. Brother Frank said, "What's that heap of junk doing in my driveway? Get it out!", then said, "How much? Oh, what's wrong with it? Oh, leaf springs, bald tyres, cracked windscreen, anything else? Hmm, no big deal, what else? Oh ...but itd' be petrol. No? Diesel? Oh..." and grumped off. JEALOUS AS! Well, that's our take on it anyway! In our minds, he couldn't not be jealous - we paid 14 million Tanzanian Shillings which is about USD14,000, just under what we'd allowed in the budget and got a ute in sensational nick. Later on, Brother Frank said to me, "They're bloody hard to find - pick-ups [utes] - you know?" I said, "The dealer who sold it said everytime he gets one he sells it the day he gets it". "Well, he's not lying." While this mightn't sound like - it's high praise from Frank. To get Frank's nod on the ute means we might just have done as well as we think we have! But truly, it's absolutely the cleanest, unpranged, neatest Hilux diesel ute you've ever seen. Pure white. Bench seat in front. 4wd. Manual. Long-wheel-base. Leafsprings (easier to fix than the alternate 'coil springs'). Beautiful suspension (unheard of here!). 1995 model (brilliant - anything after '97 draws higher tax). It has been in Arusha for just 3 years (before that it was from Dubai where the roads are world-class). YES, IT'S SERIOUS THE WORLD'S GREATEST UTE!!!!

AND WE ALSO SIGNED CONTRACTS ON THE LAND (not without a hitch or three!)
Well we knew we’d always get this “utopia” block. We’ve been negotiating for it since we first saw it in April and have even had our architect do his designs according to this block… it didn't take long to agree to a good price (after we got over the hurdle of the owner wanting a tractor instead of cash!). Then just as we needed it, my family members from Mum and Dad’s side pulled together to raise the $11,000AUD for purchasing it…so we were all set to go. It was just a matter of exchanging the contracts, which were being drawn up, once I arrived. I was never worried that things would go sour and we’d miss out, which was probably a little pompous of me, but truly, I felt this block was meant to be ours so I didn't stress about us not yet technically owning it.

Anyway, finally last week we headed out to the block with the owner and his extended family (men only, apparently women aren’t needed in these type of negotiations. Strange to find myself there, talking shop with 20 or so men, me the only girl…). We marched out the boundaries on foot, with the owner pointing out each individual sisal plant which made up the border. Of course, we already knew the borders – Daz had survyed the block and drawn them up for our lawyer to create the contract of sale from, way back in April – but nonetheless, these things follow a certain procedure… so tramp, tramp, tramping through the corn, the potatoes and the okra, we went. An hour or so later, after cutting hedges, placing rocks (where sisal trees should have been), we agreed we had adequately set the borders and were ready for the contract signing. But hang on, no, our owner’s witness is tired and would rather go home right now. Maybe we could sign tomorrow, but actually he wont be around, so the owner will need to find another witness please. Okay, thankyoubye. [walks off]. Daz and my eyeballs bulge and we glance across to Brother Frank, who is all suppressed smirks and raised eyebrows.
The word for ‘problem’ in kiswahili is ‘shida’, so this is my version of the conversation that then took place:

"Eoifjeoifej SHIDA oiejoeijfwijfeowi SHIDA oweijfoiewjwfoiejfw SHIDA woeuoiewjoiwj SHIDA aoudioejwofij shida… aouoijoijfoiejw …. HAMNA SHIDA".

You’ll be relieved to know that “Hamna Shida” means ‘no problem’. So at the end of the conversation that apparently talked of many problems, there was actually “no problem”.

We soon found out, from Brother Frank, who was downplaying the owner’s dramas, that the "problem-no-problem" revolved around the owner promising to get another witness and that in fact, he would have both his sons act as witnesses (One is the eldest son from his first wife, the other, the eldest son of his second wife). Of course, though, the problematic bit was that this could not be arranged for today.

We hastily convinced the owner to commit to a meeting at Brother Frank’s school the following day bringing with him, both of his sons. “No problem”.

That meeting was true African style. Suddenly we had an extra three African guests who introduced themselves as district/village chiefs. Frank nodded to me, that yes, this was the case.

My version of their ensuing conversation was:

"Eoifjeoifej 10 per cent oiejoeijfwijfeowi Eoifjeoifej 10 per cent eoifej 10 per cent wifjeoifej 10 per cent oiejoeijfwijfeowi… HAMNA SHIDA."

Now I mightn't be fluent in Kiswahili, but I pretty quickly got the gist of this chat and promptly begged to differ that rocking up and asking for 10 per cent of the sale price was not a problem. In my book, yes, problem.

Nolasco left my un-PC words entirely out of his translation and instead launched into the fact that FWS was here as a not-for-profit organisation, to help the local community and should be assisted to do so.

This time “HAMNA SHIDA” meant “Okay, we wont charge you 10% of the land sale to go ahead with your work”.

Finally, hamna shida really did mean no problem!

Hands shook and money was exchanged (huge thanks to the donating Delsleys!). And another huge thank you to Brother Frank and Nolasco for their tireless efforts in helping us make headway with our Kesho Leo!

If the rain turns itself off, we begin building tomorrow!

I'll let you know how we go...

Beck

10.25am and all’s well.

2007-08-13T18:24:00.000+10:00

Saturday morning (11th Augustus) at the Kesho Office & Volunteer House (now also known as the Kesho Farm) and all’s well. That’s a saying Joe, my grandfather, used to whip out hourly, according to my mum. An oldie but a goodie, so I’ve adopted it. What’s it actually mean? Probably just that things are going along at their own pace and of their own accord.

And that’s precisely what’s happening here now. We have Mudi here helping Daz tinker around. That’s my version of events. Daz and Mudi would no doubt prefer me to say that they are hard at it, grinding and welding our steel safe box into the cement walls of our bedroom. We had the basic box made up by a local steel fundi (pronounced: foon-di, and meaning: tradesman) yesterday. Now Daz and Mudi are making awful noises and smells (that fiery, welding stink), fitting the safe into its cubby hole. We thought it would be a good idea to throw our cameras, laptop and computer hard-drives in it when we head off to town each day. Not that security has been a problem (well, I think someone pinched my favourite Parker pen, but stupid me for bringing it in the first place!), but we can’t really afford to lose the info on our computers and cameras. Daz has his whole building schedule (the one he spent 4 days in Kenya creating) on his laptop, and I have created artworks of excel documents outlining our expenses and guestimated budgets (I’m sure Anne, our treasurer, would think they were quite fanciful and pointless but they’re working for me at this point!). I’ve also got copies of our land sale contracts and everyone’s contact details and a job list and, and, and.... Point is: We’d be feeling pretty lost if any of it ever went missing. As for the camera – well, yes it holds some footage that we hope to be downloading onto our site or a u-tube site for you to check out soon. And of course, there’s the doco we ambitiously plan to film and edit ourselves!

That’s actually my job today (apart from my self-appointed role of cracking the whip at Daz & Mudi). I’m downloading all the filming snippets Daz & I have been shooting. It’s not as clear-cut as that as we are a team of many cameras. We’ve filmed some stuff on our handy-cam – as Shona-Stuck-In-The-Eighties likes to call it – before cracking up and saying “what are those things called now anyway?” and we’ve filmed a bit from our spiffy Canon Ixus too. So now I’m trying to meld the two types of footage together. Oh, it’s a flash finish we’ll be getting here. I can see it a mile off. Ten-minute excerpts of Blair Witch shakey filming (I’m only new at the handy-cam) interspersed with not-so-shakey-but-oh-so-short 40 second snippets from the Ixus that probably don’t make any sense. Maybe the only audience willing and able to stomach the onslaught will be the hardcore FWS fans. Do hardcore FWS fans exist?

News? We can’t open a bank account here yet. Borizimo or wot? The obstacle revolves around FWS not yet having NGO status in Tanzania. It’s not entirely unexpected. But don’t panic, we ALMOST have it. We’ve applied (it’s been a process we started when we last came in April), but it might be a few weeks away yet. In the meantime, the ever-helpful Christian Brothers have agreed to hold our money for us and to release it as we need it. We actually haven’t spent any of your kindly donated FWS funds yet – Daz & I have been using our savings but they’re looking a bit sickly, so will soon need to access the FWS funds. We sign on the land on Monday at 3pm but already Daz has purchased some poles and barbed wire for the fence we’ll erect around the boundary. We’ll grow bouganvillea (spikey thorns – good for security) in between and over the fences as is the custom here. Prettiest security fences you’ll ever see.

Did I mention how cold it is here? I can’t believe I didn’t throw in a jumper! Locals tell us the winter should be wrapping itself up soon but each days seems to drop a few degrees. Still, it’s far warmer than the Sydney weather we left, so despite my sniffles, I no complain.

Another thing I don’t complain about – because it’s pure, unadulterated bliss – is the absolute all-enveloping quiet that descends over our village at night. Yes, there’s the odd rooster, cow, kid, dog, chicken, wind whistling through the grevilleas, water galloping in the infereje (man-made river) but unlike Petersham, there isn’t the thunderous, wall-shaking earthquake of a plane flying overhead every 10 minutes. Unlike my days at Bondi, there isn’t the raucous, non-sensical, alcohol-induced arguments of the neighbours till 4am, and well Rose Bay, was also nice and quiet – but there was always the hum of the highways in the background, the odd ambulance siren, the buzz of a distant neighbour’s TV. Here, there exists a sheet of pure silence which is occasionally peppered by village sounds…no ongoing hum, no ongoing thunder or yelling. It’s a truly delightful experience. If I didn’t live here already, I’d sooo move here.

Another thing we are gobsmacked by is the meat, the meat, the meat. Sooo fantastic. We’ve been meat & vege every night, just because we can’t bring ourselves to miss a night of the plump, juicy, red hunks that hang at the deli in town. The size of the steaks has us in stitches. Daz bought two rumps yesterday (for about $7 total). Later, when we laid out the first, smaller piece, it covered a 20cm diameter plate and then some. We looked at each other and grinned. I asked him why he bought the second piece. “I dunno!” he chuckled. We cut it into three, threw some garlic and onion on it – and wow, soooo incredibly delicious. But still, it was far too much eating for us. When we’d done, we whacked the second piece in the freezer and vowed to only pull it out when we have the Brothers over for dinner – not like we could even begin to get through it ourselves!

Don’t get me started on the biltong. How can we ever justify paying $4 for 100g of stringy, crumbly, fake-flavoured ‘beef jerky’ in Australian petrol stations again? Here, we pay the same for 800g of thick, peppery, chewy biltong, cut before your eyes – would you like fat on or off? On, always on! Disaster for your arteries but divine destiny for your gob!

The vegies here are great too. The tomatoes – well you’d weep. Just like those tomatoes your Nan used to grow when food tasted like food. The bananas are the sweetest, most exotic and tropical tasting fruit you’ve ever put in your mouth. The oranges are so different - practically acid free – taste more like a super-sweet and juicy mandarin. The green beans are too good till wait to dinner – they’ve become my daytime snack. The mangoes take a bit of getting used to – they’ve a slight “earthy” flavour which at first is a turn off. Stick with it, I say, and you’ll soon be converted and craving the taste. The 100% passionfruit juice? I can’t describe how good this stuff is – you’ll have to come taste it yourself.

So yes, the food here is pretty special. Of course, there is some Aussie ingredients which I already miss. For three years, I ate a daily lunch salad made of rocket lettuce, pink lady apples, coriander, grape tomatoes, mushrooms and Sirena tuna, in Sydney. Not one of the ingredients is available here – so sad, too bad. Mind, I could buy a 100g tin of John West red salmon from the supermarket in town - $10.50 USD that’d set us back!

Youch. Better stick to biltong!

Till next time, still-itchy...
Beck

Vehicular stalling, sunnies just like yours, bang for buck,

2007-08-13T18:05:00.000+10:00

Five days later and we’ve no car purchase despite spending 4 hours, looking at two 4wds that sounded promising.

The first was a 1999 Toyota Hilux ute with no door locks, average suspension and a weird burning smell that was possibly the clutch. Asking price: $US 14,000. Hmm, let’s get serious, please Mr Owner. Oh, okay, then we can have it for $US 9,000?

Given it’s worth about $US 7000 in this market, no deal was struck. Besides, growing up with a family of mechanics, it’s hard for me to reconcile purchasing a vehicle that emits any type of weird smell, so I’m glad to leave this one on the pit-holed dirt track for the next buyer. I’m also happy to leave our second possibility on the dirt track. It was a 1996 Landrover TDI. Perfect structure – ute, big, hardy shell, long wheel base – for what we require, but the plastic bag recently wrapped around the oil sump and the serious clah-unk of the gear stick every time Daz shifted into 2nd, 3rd or 4th had us a little edgy. When this Mr Seller explained that it would be costing us $US 26,000 not-negotiable and had a hard life servicing him in his civil engineering job that required him to travel across the Serengeti often, and don’t worry about that noise – it’s just a “differential bolt”, we took our car-finding man aside and asked him to stop wasting our time. He said no problem, but there was also a little something he forgot to tell us. We must pay him a 5% commission upon finding the right car. Daz laughed and said, “We? But not the owner?” to which we received a retiscient nod (ie yes, actually he would be collecting 5% from the owner as well but it’d be better if we didn’t know about that). Daz then asked “So this is why you are showing us very expensive cars that are not within our budget?”. Big grin, raised eyebrows, nod of the head. Oh and there is a left-hand drive car we can look at now if we want… Daz and I decided to run away instead!

We’ve started paying a local lady, Eliza, to do our washing. We pay her the going rate, which is the equivalent of 10c per small garment, 20c per larger garment. Her first wash was a windfall – as she got the large and financially rewarding job of washing all the clothes Daz & I had put on our back since our departure from Sydney. She was absolutely stoked with her $4 payment and decided then and there to buy a pair of sunglasses just like mine. She asked for a lift into town the following day and was dressed to the nines for the experience when Daz and I picked her and her young son up. I hear the purchase went smoothly but am yet to see the end product. Assuming she's happy, then that makes two of us because Daz's bunyip aromas seemed to have magically dispersed. Now I can sleep a whole night through without being woken by the stink! Woohoo!

8 August 2007

At least one purchase went smoothly this week. Daz and I have had an absolute shocker with our buying and negotiating this week. The biggest disaster was our printer/scanner. We had a budget of $200. Daz desperately needs a system whereby he can print out architect Rob Not Dentist’s drawings, make annotations, scan the annotations then email them back to RND to assist with advice & chats. So I went into town, did some searching around and came up with a good deal, despite it being over our budget. We’d buy a $140 scanner (reasonable) and a $195 (very good) lazer jet printer. The lazer jet would be perfect b/c it was for small to medium output, suitable for us right now and for a while longer. The real win though, was the fact that, being lazer jet instead of ‘ink jet’, we’d save a heap on the print cartridges which are astronomically expensive over here - $45 minimum reaching up to $128 each. Ink jet cartridges are a rip off at home anyway, if you ask me, but that’s when you’re paying $35 a cartridge. Imagine trying to get comfy with paying a minimum of $45 each! So yes, I was very satsified with this deal, especially when I managed to get them to knock $20 off the whole purchase. So we get the scanner home and it works. Nice. But wait… no such luck with the printer. Daz’s Apple Mac laptop recognises the printer, but won’t work with it. We ring the shop and they advise that it should have come with a Mac installation disk, and since it didn’t we now have to go into town to the internet café and download the Mac driver required. We do this the next day. Of course, there is no Mac driver to be found anywhere, on any site, and on further reading we find that this particular printer is NOT compatible with Macs. Ever. Hmm, so why was it pointed out to us a suitable printer when we’d explained we would be working from both Macs (now) and PC (in future when Kels & Shona come)? We take it back to the shop. They are seriously unkeen to allow us to make a simple return. Instead we must make an exchange. Problem is, they’re a bit like Bunnings Hardware – except 1/kabillionth of the size – they stock the dodgiest cheapest stuff OR the slickest expensive stuff. No middle range whatsoever. So suddenly we’re being shown a lazer jet printer, compatible with both Macs and PCs that costs $430. If we’d bought it and kept the lazer, our printer system purchases would have reached $570 – well beyond our budget. So I said no. We were then forced into selecting from a cheaper range of ‘ink jet’ – the very type we wanted to avoid – machines that were all-in-ones (photocopier, scanner, printer, fax). Kinda annoying because as I said we didn’t want to pay for their more-expensive cartridges and because we don’t need a fax and were hoping to buy separate machines so that if anything broke down, we wouldn’t have to do without the machine’s other services while the entire machine was sent back to town to be fixed. Anyway, there was a $350 machine that we were assured had been checked – and worked – despite the crack on its side where it had been dropped. Darren who was doing all the negotiating at this point, since I’d become a bit to grumpy to be reasonable, insisted that we be allowed to check that machine in the shop before we took it home. Lucky we did. It obviously hadn’t been checked for working order – as the scanner was entirely kaput! At this point, sick of the lies, I left the shop to go and price some salt and pepper shakers, can openers and cooking pans across the road. When I returned Daz had done an excellent job of convincing the shop to not charge us for the ink cartridges we’d opened to check the kaput scanner-printer machine, convincing them to sell us a small $184 All-In-One (pictured) that worked (he’d checked it) and to return the rest of the money we’d given them. Perfect outcome, but man, Daz worked hard for it!

Another negotiation that bamboozled us occurred in one of the seed selling shop in town. We went in to buy the vegie seeds required to grow our own food at the Kesho Volunteer House and the farming tools we’ll need to work the land at Kesho Leo. Straight up, as is now standard practice, we asked the owner if we’d get a discount since we were a charity, were making a bulk purchase and were paying cash. Yes, yes, no problem. Afterwards… Expenditure: $50. Proposed discount: 60c. Serious. Daz and I looked at this guy and said “Are you joking?” and he laughed and said, “No, it is a good discount”. Daz and I looked at each other and back at him, eyes boggling. Daz said, “It is a good profit. Did you hear us when we said we are here, volunteering, to build an orphanage?”
“Yes, I support many orphanages – one out at somewhere or other, do you know it?”
“No, we don’t know that one. Here I will give you $45 cash, no more”.

Haggles ensued, but in the end we got our discount there too – and found out that the guy also holds the building contract for one of Arusha’s fanciest buildings and has implemented an interesting pressure-based water system in it. We might talk to this guy, who we’ve now nicknamed Sixty Cent, about some of his systems when Corky, our environmental advisor gets here.

So far, we’ve come out on top with most of our bargaining. But every situation, as you see, offers some new challenge. We were again scratching our heads after recently locating ALL the furniture we need to quickly outfit the Kesho Volunteer House entirely in one fell swoop. We’d read a notice in town at the deli outlining a whole home’s worth of furniture up for grabs, cheap, due to the owners moving. We made the calls and eventually headed over to Njiro, a wealthier part of town where most of the UN staff and Arusha-based Indian business owners live. We met a lovely couple from Jordan who agreed to sell us their 3-seater, 2-seater and 3 single seater lounge suite, their 7x7 foot bed, their mirror & lockable dressing cabinet, their single bed, their 2 bedside tables. Their office desk and ergonomic chair. The prices were already rock bottom, but as we were tallying the amount, the man of the house offered to give us a $US160 discount. Well, you can imagine how that one made us beam! We had them write us a receipt for the deposit we left (which accounted for about ¾ of the total price) and shook on it. Sweet.

All the way home Daz was beside himself, saying, “Babe, see how the universe works? Look at what an awesome deal we just got. It was reasonable to start off with and then they must have liked what we were doing, so they gave us that discount…” I being my comparatively wary self, replied “Yes, it’s excellent indeed, fair love, but forsooth, I can never get excited about these things, until the said items lie in my abode and it’s all a done deal”. (Even with the stove and fridge, I’m only just beginning to feel warm and fuzzy about having them …a week later and they’re still working!)
Daz, gorgeous boy replied, “No, it’s all good babe, don’t worry”.
And shame upon shame, my negative thinking must have seeped out into the ether because sure enough in an hour’s time, we received a phone call from the woman of the house. “I’m sorry, my husband made an error when he gave you a discount. He gave you 10% instead of 5% so the price is wrong…”
Darren, ever-calm negotiator, queried. “Well, this is a little bit unusual. We agreed on a price, we shook hands, had a receipt written up…”
“Yes, but my husband made a mistake…he meant to give you 5%...”
“So what is the final price you want us to pay?”
“Well, we meant to give you a 5% discount…”
“Now, we didn’t ever speak about 5%-10%-20%. We spoke about numbers. So what is the final amount you want us to pay?”
“A 5% discount...”
“How much?”
“An extra $100”
“Right, so you gave us $160 discount, but now you us to pay $100 of that back to you?”
“Well 5%...”
“Can I speak to your husband please – he is the person who gave the discount and made the mistake…”
“No he doesn’t want to speak about this…”
“Can you just put him on the phone please…”
“No, he didn’t want me to call you, but I wanted to call you about the mistake of 5%”
“I need to speak to your husband because he is the one who offered the discount – and he didn’t say 5% or 10% or whatever % - and I need to find out what total figure you want us to pay so I get the money out of my bank account. Please put him on”.

Daz has a quick chat to the husband who is mortally embarrassed and says he is happy for the $100 to be a donation to FWS as it was his mistake and we are doing good work.

Daz agrees and hangs up feeling good. Negative Nelly, I just feel weird. We have a conversation where I reveal I feel like WE are ripping people off because all we do, left, right and centre, is pressure for discounts. Daz says patiently, but emphatically, “Nooo, actually we are combating being ripped off. We are protecting our money and the money Australians have donated to us. This is a bargaining country, it’s our duty to bargain, get involved and come out the best we can each time…and when we have shaken on a deal, a deal is a deal and that’s that.”

Wise boy spik da wise words.

So I begin to feel more comfortable after our conversation and the next day am totally okay with the highs and lows of bargaining world, when Mudi, our Kesho Leo assistant manager, pops up out of nowhere and pipes with this one: “Sorry guys. I am trying, but sometimes I’m still getting the rip off, even when I am African. Yesterday, I bought the rope for you and I got it for $7. And today, you ask me to buy some more and I find the same rope in another shop for $4. I’m sorry, I’m trying to ask around a lot, like you, and get the right price so we don’t get the rip off, but sometimes I am making a mistake”.

So yeah, if you were ever worried that we weren’t trying to get bang for your buck, please don’t! We are all TOTALLY amongst it, even if we are stumbling occasionally. But so far, the stumbles have only been a few dollars here and there. Not so bad, in the scheme of things.

Till next week,

Bargaining Beck, xxx

PS – Non dollar related stuff: Daz & I suffered our first bout of Deli Belly (good to get that out of the way!), Daz got saw dust in his eye (pretty badly when making our kitchen bench, pictured below, but recovered in 24 hours), and I got bit on the bumski by some kind of bully ant. We’re trying to work out if this is why I’m insanely itchy all over. It could be the bite, or it could be an allergy to the hard-core soap they use to wash clothes here, or the change in diet (from low-fat soy milk to natural cow’s milk with cream included!), from light-spray olive oil to heavy palm oil (so bad for you!) or coffee? I haven’t drunk coffee in years, but it’s sooo yum here, I can’t help but go a cup a day! Could coffee make you itch all over? Who knows. Meantime, I’ll do some experiments and see if I can ditch mystery itch within the week. Will report back soon!

Oh…der. You probably want to know when we will start building Kesho Leo. Next 15 days, we reckon. We’re setting up to sign contracts on land this week. I have contracts in my hot little hands (actually they're cold, we've got a crazy-cold African winter going on here), we have the money in the Christian Brother’s Account… and we have the land owner ringing us to say that he is sick and wants the money before he dies please! We think he is joking…but aren’t real sure.