trips.schrull.us

 
When we returned to the compound last evening and saw our new room, we found that a marvelous transformation had occured.  Our once empty room had not only the promised new bed with misquito netting, but also has new curtains, a linoleum floor, two tables, an electric kettle and buckets of water.  All the comforts of home! Most importantly, it has four times the space of our room in the guest lodge.

The bed and working area in our new room.

A few explanations of Kasulu-style living for any who have not read prevous year’s blogs:  The floors in Tanzanian houses are packed dirt for very basic housing and cement if you have an actual floor.  The cement is often just painted.  We are starting to see ceramic tile floors in some houses, and they are very nice and easy to keep clean.  Folks with cement floors will often lay linoleum on the floor.  This is not the thick linoleum that is glued down on American floors;  it is quite thin and just laid on the floor like an unsecured wall to wall carpet.  After some time, a few years a most, it starts to wear and get tears in it, but it is easy to pick up and replace.  We are used to painted cement floors.  The linoleum is a nice upgrade.

Water does not flow in the compound all the time, so it is usual for each bathing area to have serveral buckets of water, some of them quite large, for bathing and flushing the toilet when the water is not running.  Actually, we use water from one of the smaller buckets, augemented by water heated in the electric kettle for any serious bathing we do in our bathroom, as our room is not supplied with hot water.  Only one house in the compound, the German house, which has an interesting solar hot water system, has “automatic” hot water.  All the other houses have cold water in all the bath rooms; hot water is supplied to the “back kitchen” from a “Tanzanian boiler”– a piped in oil drum which is heated by a fire.

Our pantry and sitting area. Pretty new curtains, a linoleum floor and four times the space!

The electric kettle is a real gift and only possible in the last few years when central electricity came to Kasulu.  It allows us to heat water for bathing or (bottled) water for tea/coffee whenever we want it instead of having to depend on someone to heat it up over a charcoal fire for us.

We slept quite well in our new palatial bed.

This morning was spent at the DWT office.  Bill replaced the bad switch with one he had left at the Bible College for diagnostic purposes last year.  This permitted the wired connections to the DWT network to work again.  It also allowed him to discover That the access point that supportss the antena that is supposed to provide internet to the entire compound has some issues.  It doesn’t seem to want to hold configuration and give out addresses to computers that want to use it.  He hasn’t figured out how to fix it yet, but these are the kinds of puzzles that he enjoys working on.  We don’t think that it has been totaly “fried”, because he can get it to reset to factory specs, but it won’t hold the necessary configurations.

The “new” switch. Walls are solid brick so internet wiring is routed through pre-existing ventilation grids.

We were late to lunch because the Bishop was returning from the Kigoma airport with the Dean of the Glocester (England) Cathedral, and we encouraged to join the rest of the DWT compound staff in welcoming them with the traditional Tanzanian welcome that greeted us when we arrived two days ago.

This afternoon we returned to KBC where Bill completed installing the remaining two new workstations and started downloading new drivers and updates to support the new printer.  Meanwhile I enlisted Daudi to help me do a little shopping:  Africafe and Nido (Coffee and full fat powdered milk), napkins and cookies for snacks; a small basket for trash like tea bags and toilet paper rolls and a small basin to hold water for washing as we could not find a stopper for the sink.

Back to the compound for a skype call to our daughter, Abbie, showers at Alister and Helen’s house, and then a lovely dinner with Andrea Jung, a German missionary who works with the diocese and lives in our favorite of all the houses in the compound.  And so, to bed.