Oops...

On Sunday morning Divina, Bryna, Joel and I walked down to the classroom block to catch the staff transport that leaves around 9 am to go to into town to church. We got there about 10 minutes to 9, but there was no bus. We called the driver and he said they had left a half hour earlier to take one of the teacher's kids to the doctor. Gee- thanks for letting us know. But the driver said he would be back to get us in awhile. Awhile turned into 45 minutes, so we called him again. This time he said he had a flat tire (which was probably a lie so he wouldn't have to come get us). But we waited until 10:30 to see if he would show up. He didn't- so we gave up. As Joel said, "We were at church spritually."

For the rest of the morning, and part of the afternoon the Chui House (the leopard house where the girls live) watched Desperate Houswives. It's Divina's favorite show and she has all the seasons on her computer. We were soooooooo productive.....not.

Later we played some volleyball with some students and Bryna, Divina and I went on a run. When we got back to the school Bryna identified where the sewage smell we noticed earlier was coming from. One of the manholes for the sewer system was overflowing and raw sewage was bubbling up by the security station at the gate. I had Divina ask the gaurds how long it had been like this, and he said the system had been blocked up since Friday and it was blocked up on purpose. Of course it was blocked up on purpose- it was my idea. Good Heavens- my research project had raw sewage leaking in tot he road outside of Peace House property. Oops.

The maintenence guy that was going to block up the system was supposed to do it last Tuesday...but I guess on Tanzanian time that means 3 days later. I thought the experiement was complete crap (literally) because I had no way to measure how much sewage I had lost. I wanted to measure what volume of waste was entering the system per day. I didn't take a measurement and hoped that the system would be unplugged as soon as possible.

The good news is that I talked to the maintenence guy this morning and he has been taking measurements for the time that the system was blocked up- so it wasn't a total loss. Now I just have to see what kind of data he has.

Yesterday (Monday) we traveled to the village of Monduli, which is about 20 km west of Arusha. We met up with volunteers and workers of Global Service Core (a local NGO). They were in the village to build a hefier- which is a rain water catchment that can be used to irrigate crops in the dry season. Our group helped dig the 1m deep by 1.5 m wide by 4 m long trench that was going to be lined with plastic to store the rain water. I hope that this actually helps the family we built it for. We were actually in a Masaai village- the family who recieved this hefier was living in a small hut covered with leaves and had mud/dung walls. It was cool to see the Massaai warriors help dig the hole. The village elder made an appearance later in the morning and was talking to the warrior whose hut we were at in angry tones. Of course I couldn't understand anything since they were talking in Masaai, and it sounds like swahili, which I don't understand either. But the wife (or one of them anyway) of the warrior told us that the village elder/cheif was just a cranky old man and a corrupt leader and told us that we were doing a good thing helping them. The elder was just mad that no one consulted him first. Amends were made, and we stopped working and went into town for lunch around 2 pm. The hefier was about halfway done when we left and we came back to Peace House after lunch becasue we had a long ride in a Dalla from Monduli. We hope to get back out to the village and keep helping sometime later this week.