trips.schrull.us

A relaxing day here in Kasulu, and as Bill says, just another beautiful day in Paradise with sunshine and ideal temperatures.  Of course the constant sunshine DOES mean that there is a lot of dust….

Spent the morning in the DWT compound and hitched a ride down to the Bible College after lunch with Andrea, the German missionary.  She has the newest and most beautifully maintained car Land Crusier in all of Kadulu, I think.  Leonard, who also meticulously maintains the gardens around German house, does not just wash, but details the car almost everyday.  We think that he considers the car to be his; he just allows Andrea to drive it.  (I doubt, btw, the Leonard is able to drive at all, but does he ever love maintaining that car!).

Bill spent some time starting to train a Bible College teacher and student who Daudi hopes will be responsible for the Internet room once Elisha returns to Burundi, while I took a walk into town to visit Olivia’s cloth shop.  

I knew that Olivia’s shop is on the other side of the main route from KBC, and where it is within a block or two, so my walk took me west on the road that the Bible College is on, left on the road where car repairs are done for half a block then right up the road where kitchen utensils are made and sold.  Cross the main route and then I continued west up a block of bicycle shops.  Right onto a block of hardware shops until I reached the square where all the taxis park.  Here I turned back east to cross the square where there are many cloth sellers, one of which is Olivia’s shop.  I acutally had to walk there twice (a more direct route the second time) as after I had made my selections I discovered that I didn’t have quite enough money in my wallet and I had to return to KBC and raid Bill’s wallet.

 

 So just what DO we bring with us to Kasulu?  Well, Bill is always expected to bring his guitar and we also bring various items of technology that are hard to find in Tanzania and fit easily into our luggage.  Laptops, iPads, kindles and older cell phones for which we purchase sim chips when we arrive are all part of Schrull standard equipment.  In addition to clothes, travel drugs and the usual travel drugs, we find that a few other amenities make our stay more comfortable.  It might be interesting to note that most of these are also items that we bring with us when we go camping:

• Beach Towels – Douglas Adams was correct in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” to always bring your towel.  While there is no need here to use them to hide from strange alien beasts, I have used them as extra blankets as well as the normal intended use of drying off.  Sometimes towels are provided….sometimes they get forgotten.
• Wash Cloths and Net Bath Sponges – Neither of these are ever provided.  This is the first year I brought a net bath sponge and I found it particularly useful as the orange Kasulu dirt rinses out of it much more easily than it from a wash cloth.
   
• LED FLASHLIGHTS!!! Yes there is now electric power in Kasulu, and it’s pretty reliable.  Note the “pretty” in that last sentence.  But unless you have eyes like a cat, flashlights are needed for getting into bed.  There are no such things as bedside lamps, not that they would be easy to reach through the mosquito netting, and the overhead light switches are on the wall in places unreachable from the bed.
  
• Pillow cases and single flat bed sheets – it’s always nice to know exactly what you are putting your head on.  I find that the bed sheets, folded in half, work well as an “extra blanket”.  The bedding that is provided can be either too light or to heavy.  No artificial climate control in these rooms, so you want the correct weight of covers.  I also bring a small compressible pillow as I find that the pillows that are provided are usually pretty darn hard.
• Small Mirror –  There are minimal, if any, mirrors in the bathrooms in the guest houses at DWT.  I’m not vain, but I do like to check my hair after is is combed and put on a little makeup for Sunday services.
• My crocheting – which translates into string and a pair of scissors.  This has been surprisingly useful.  I actually brought it so that I would have something to keep my hands occupied with.  In addition to that, I have used crochet string to hang a small LED lantern from the top of our mosquito net to provide light for getting into bed, to hang the mirror I brought from a nail over the bathroom sink, and to crochet lanyards for our room keys so that I don’t have to carry my purse all over the compound just to keep track of the key (my skirts don’t have any pockets.)
• The normal sun screen and bug repellent, although I find that we seldom use either, as well as a small first aid kit and some camping t.p. just in case.

Throw in a few pairs of sandals and a warmer sweater for the cool nights, and you are good to go! 

I hope that you all are enjoying a good Memorial Day Weekend.  It is hard to remember that today is a holiday in the U.S. when it is very much a work day here in Kasulu:  all kinds of meetings are occuring here in DWT compound while the students at KBC are sitting their end of term exams over the next three to five days.

Bill spent Saturday morning down at KBC downloading som HP universal drivers and getting the new printer we bought in Dar es Salaam on-line.  The old printer was eight years old and requires a parralel port.  We no longer have any working PC’s with parralel ports at KBC….plus, eight years old?  Time to replace.

We spent Saturday afternoon practicing the songs that we knew that we would be asked to sing on Sunday.  After we practiced for a while, Bill decided that he wanted a track of percussion, bass and strings to fill out one of the songs we planned, “Holy God”.  So he created one on his iPad!  (Isn’t technology wonderful?)  We had the congregations sing the chorus with us in Swahili.  The translation of the chorus is, “Takatifu, takatifu, takatifu Mungu”.

Dinner was at Rev. Ephram Ntikabuze’s house.  Ephram was the priest that translated the first church service I ever atteneded in Tanzania, eight year’s ago.  His oldest son died last year from complications of sickle cell disease.  He and his wife have three daughters, (which include twins, who were just 4 weeks old when the Ntikabuze’s insisted on hosting us for lunch all those years ago), and two younger sons.  

 

Yesterday, Sunday, started way too early.  The first service, was at 6:30.  We made coffee in our room and had a couple of digestive biscuits from a package I had picked up, with Daudi’s help, from a shop last week and were picked up by the Bishop promptly at 6:15 am.  When we got to the church, Bill arranged to plug his iPad into the sound system for when we were asked to sing and then we processed in.

In the past I have sat with Bill up in the chancel area, but this time I was asked to sit with the choir.  Helen and Alister were there, so I sat with them.  I can’t remember everything that happened but the choir sang, there were the lessons, we sang, there was a sermon (never short in Tanzania), we gave greetings and sang another song while the collection occured.  Then three Canons, including Bill, were installed and there was communion – the first time in many years in Tanzania for me.

Traditional breakfast of chicken soup and chapati at the cathedral and then a “quick” drive (the roads were in REALLY “off-road” condition) to Eden Church.  This is a church that was started about four months ago by the Bible College in an area that is too far from the Cathedral or Marusi for people to be about to make it to church regularly.  You can read more about this church in Bill’s blog (  http://tzblog.schrull.us ).  There we sang our two songs – without the iPad tracks this time – and gave our witnesses.  This church is so new that they only have one choir and an electric keyboard – no sound system.  It is also off the grid, so they had to start the generator whenever they need the keyboard.  Being good stewards, the generator is shut off if the keyboard is not being played. 

The report back to the Bishop on Bill’s witness was so strong, that the Bishop wants him to repeat it next week.

Back to the Cathedral and Bible College for a celebration lunch for the twelve priests that were ordained while we were at Eden Church.  We were sad to learn that we missed a special song at that service that the KCC (Kasulu Cathedral Choir) had prepared in English especially for Bill.  I hope that we may have an occasion to hear it before we go home.

A thouroughly exhausting day, and we were happy to spend what was left of the afternoon relaxing and going to bed very early.  We even slept through chapel this morning.

Today was spent with a few meetings and a little bit of technical work.  We met with the Diocesan Controller, Canon Wilson Mafundi to discuss finances for the Guest House being constructed here at the compound (more about that in another post) and after lunch with the Bishop, for our annual check-in.  Bill updated the anti-virus software on the server at KBC and worked a little more on the routers and repeaters at the DWT offices.  Unfortunetly, the repeater that provided internet to the  entire compound seems to be fried.  It will not hold a configuration.  Some things even Bill can’t fix.

 

Yesterday, Friday (I’m writing this Saturday morning) was spent once again at the Kasulu Bible college.

We have discovered over the last few days that the internet speed that we have been getting from TTCL (Tanzanian Telephone Company Limited) DSL line is NOT what we have been paying for.  When we had DSL installed at KBC two and a half years ago, it was much faster than satellite-based internet (the only form of internet available eight years ago) and a sixth the cost. Last year we upgraded the speed to twice as fast, at twice the cost.  Although we are still paying for that faster speed, the current download speed is as slow or slower than it was over the satellite link.

In the mean-time, cellular based data has really improved, and the signal down at KBC is escpecially good.  Allister and Helen Sammons have a little celular based “hot-spot” device called a “Mi-Fi” which only costs  a fifth of what we are paying TTLC for a month of unlimited data.  They let us borrow it to try out at the Bibile College.  Not only did we want to check the speed at KBC, we also needed to do a “proof of concept” at how we would configure the device with the network to make internet accessible to all of the workstations and over the KBC wireless network.  The device works like a charm!

The next issue is how to procure such a device for KBC.  As you can imagine, it is not readily avaialble in a village such as Kasulu.  It is not even available Kigoma, a fairly large town.  Alister had gotten his in Kenya and it looked as if it would have to come from Dar es Salaam, a two-day (each way) via bus or $300.00 round-trip airfare away.  The local Vodocom shop (the cellular carrier that provides 3-G access in Kasulu) is not able to ship a device in so Bill and Daudi tried a work-around, and it works quite well:  a cellular modem plugged into the server.  It is not the optimum solution as thin-clients have to be turned on before starting the modem, or they knock the device off-line, but it works.

But there is God’s provision:  Bill and Daudi went to talk to the Bishop to ask if there was anyway to procure the “Mi-Fi” in Dar and get it back to Kasulu.  The “Mi-Fi” solution will also save the DWT offices a lot of money (they are also getting very bad speed from TTLC), although the office will probably need an antenna for the device because of all of the trees between the compound and the nearest cell “towers”.  As it turns out, one of the staff is currently in Dar and scheduled to fly back to Kigoma on Monday!  He has been contacted, given instructions and wired funds.  He has even been instructed to delay his flight a day if he is unable to buy the devices today (a Saturday).

In other excitement, a laptop in one of the other houses in the compound was stolen late yesterday morning.  This really upset the Bishop as his desire is for the compound always to be a safe and welcoming place.  Through God’s provision and excellent detective work on the part of various members of the diocese, a mid-night trip to Kigoma (with police escort, as traveling through the countryside of Tanzania at night for long distances is not safe–there are bandits out there), the laptop has been found and returned to it’s owner.  The laptop owner has willingly compensated all involved for expenses and their trouble (standard practice here – and cheap at the price, especially considering the value of irreplaceable data on the laptop) and the diocese will be reviewing their security practices and making some changes.

We always feel very safe here in a personal sense.  On the other hand, we also recognize that there is a lot of tempation and it is very easy someone to see something and just take it.  The assumption is that we Westerners are so rich that we will not really miss what is taken.  We recognize this and are carefull to keep things locked when we are not around or are asleep.

 On our way back from dinner at Cannon Mafumbi’s house (he is in charge of the diocese’s finances) we saw lots of people in town…what was catching their attention is that one of the little shops on the main road was on fire. There are so many little shops there. I don’t know how they put the fire out. I hope that we don’t find many shops burnt this morning. I don’t think that there is any thing like property insurance in Kasulu. Or fire departments for that matter.

When we got up to the compound we found that the power is out. It was out only on this side of town and may have been related to the fire.

So we sat in our room, using our ipads and cellular data. Fortunately I brought three small LED lamps with us: a small mini-lamp camp lantern that I bought three years ago, a head-band lamp that Bill got me from LL Bean a few years back and another lamp with many LED’s that we picked up for all of $3.00 from Harbor Frieght. (I think that one of the reasons it was so inexpensive was that you have to take a screw driver to it to change the batteries.)  Never go to Tanzania without being prepared for the power to go out!

Normally on a Friday night there would be a lot of loud music blaring. Last night, with the power out, we heard a lot of insect noise near-by which would normally be drowned out, a far amount of traffic and a lot of un-amplifed crowd noise from down-town. It’s actually kind of peaceful, if you didn’t know about the fire. 

We discovered that the power was back on about 45 minutes later.  Actually, it had come back on about 10 minutes after we had returned to our room, but we hadn’t left a light on and didn’t discover it until I happened to peer out the window and see lights elsewhere in the compound!

This morning, Bill is back at KBC finishing up installaing printer drivers.  I’ll let him blog (http://tzblog.schrull.us) about this diconnect between this model of printer and the current version of the server operating system.  God provides and Bill is clever:  he will find a work-around.  As there is nothing I can do to help him, except get in the way, I am spending the morning relaxing in the compound, reading and catching up on my blogging.  

I hope that you all at home are starting a gorgeous Memorial Day weekend!

[Note:  I’ll try to add a few pictures later to break up this long entry.]