trips.schrull.us

We enjoyed a very good dinner with Bishop Makaya last night and actually slept very well in our tiny little guest house room. The bed was very comfortable and the ceiling fan kept the air moving and at a nice temperature.  The morning shower was also good.   

But the room is too small. 

A Landcruiser full of baggage and equimpment.

 DWT is building new guest rooms (not houses, but rooms intended for short term visitors like us).  We are helping out with the expense for this and we hope that they will be able to be finished by the next time we visit.  We think of it as our “Tanzanian Time Share.”  As of right now, however, the guest house consists of a foundation and some half-bricked walls, so THAT’s not an option.

The Bishop and our friend Daudi thought of the Kasulu Motel.  This is a LOVELY resort and we have enjoyed excellent dinners there as part of each of our prevous visits.  The guest houses are really cute little cottages and the price, at 25,000 Tshillings a night (less than $17.00 USD,) is more than reasonable.  But it is several miles down Route B8 from the center of Kasulu, which means that folks would have to spend a lot of time and fuel fetching us to and fro.  The drive is much shorter from the compound (our friends insist our chauffering us) and we can easily walk down to Kasulu Bible College if we want to.   Admittedly, at this time of year it is a very dusty walk, although due to some of the route being paved, not quite as dusty as it used to be.

Behind “Door Number Three” we have a room in the compound next to the chapel that Bill has stayed in in the past.  It had been rented by a women who often visited the UN compound across the street from DWT, but became empty just this week.  One catch: no furniture.  So they have gone out a bought us a bed.  Our frends Helen and Alister Sammons, who have been teaching at the Bible College (Helen) and doing surgery at local hospitals (Alister) for the last two years and who are returning home to Britain shortly after we leave, have offered to lend us a few other furnishings.  It has also occurred to me that if need be I can perhaps purchase a few other pieces of furniture that can be moved to “our” guest house when it is completed next year.

Installing the new printer at the Bible College.

Today has been divided between the Diocese Western Tanganyika (DWT) offices and the Kasulu Bible College (KBC) internet room.

It’s not unusual for there to be issues with getting internet availablity throughout the compound and almost every year Bill has to diagnose why only a few offices have accesibilty or some such thing.  During the raining season there are a lot of thunder storms and equipment can get zapped pretty easily.  Bill diagnosed what this year’s root cause is and determined that a switch needs to be replaced.  (Some day we will learn to plan to bring a d-lync router–or whatever the flavor of the year is–with us whenever we come; there is always a use for them somewhere.)

Next up has been KBC internet room.  Bill has installed a new network printer and three of five replacement thin-client stations with new monitors.  We will replace the remaining two workstations tomorrow and plan to replace the other five workstations and monitors next year.

We enjoyed a lovely lunch with Olivia, my sister of the heart, and Daudi (the KBC principal, in case I didn’t mention it) and met their youngest daughter Gracenarie.  She was born a month or two after we left last year and our very strange faces scared her.

In a little while we will return to the DWT compound to see our new home, and then dinner with Helen and Alister.