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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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

 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.

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.

Due to excessively slow internet speeds, I have not been at all successfully in uploading pictures.  So today, I am starting this post with a picture (I hope!)   

High-light of the day:  Our welcome at the Diocese of Western Tanganyika compound.  Honored guests here are welcomed with singing, dancing and the waving of green branches.  Think of Palm Sunday – the original one, minus the donkey.  We have participated in such welcomes in the past.  This time WE were the honored guests.  It was so good to see so many of our Kasulu friends gathered in one place, all greeting us.  

Eight hours earlier:  we had an excessively early morning, as predicted.  We made it to the airport and were completely ready to check in a full hour before the Air Tanzania staff opened up the check-in desk.  We were considerably over-weight, as expected – 63 kilograms to be precise at a cost of over 300,000 Tshillings.  Which is not quite as bad as it sounds, given that the ATM will give you 100,000 shillings for around $61.00 USD.  

Then came three breakfasts, punctuated by a three hour flight to Kigoma.  The first was tea and a couple of samosas (deep fried dough filled with a mixture of ground chicken or beef).  There was tea and rolls and butter on the flight itself, followed by yet another breakfast in Kigoma with our friend Daudi after we landed.

We left the computer equipment at the Diocesan Compound after our festive welcome and drove back into Kigoma to find our Guest House.  It’s new.  It advertises “self-contained rooms with TV.”  Our room is clean, with it’s own bathroom.  It is also small.  VERY small.

 It is a very tight fit to get us and all our luggage in it.  It also appears that they forgot to pay the electric bill as the power is out.  (Here in Kasulu you pre-pay for your electricity.  When you’ve used all that you’ve paid for it goes out.  Right then and there.)  There is also a matter of toilet paper or lack there of.  Fortunately, I bring some of my own for just such occasions.

Time to do a little cleaning up before going back to the compound for dinner and a visit with the Bishop and his Editia. 

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