2015 – Yeah, We’re still in Kasulu..
Kasulu – Life continues in Kusulu with mornings and afternoons spent at the Bible College and evenings spent as guests of various College and Diocesan staff members. Today’s lunch was a bit of a change up as the Bishop returned today from his short trip to the Gloucester Diocese in Great Britain and the staff had a “welcome home” lunch for him, which we attended.
Bill spent a lot of time working on one of the small workstations, which he cannot get to boot. He has tried all sorts of workarounds to fix the operating system and has one last trick up his sleeve that he will try tomorrow before perhaps giving the entire thing up as due to a bad disk drive.
The rest of the work today involved completing setting up the new ip addresses on all of the workstations and taking away their admin rights, installing one good anti-virus software program and removing the FOUR others that Bill found on various workstations and setting up the color laser printer that we brought. (Note: it is not a case or “the more the merrier” in the case of having anti-virus software packages installed on a computer. They just fight with one another and bollox things up.)
In other news, the students started building the end walls (between the corners they built yesterday) of the new staff offices and Bill and I started our Swahili lessons. I spent the afternoon transcribing and trying to make sense of my notes, while Bill did a dry-run of playing a DVD movie over the projector.
It looks as if movie night will be Friday night now. We will be traveling to Kigoma on Saturday with the Bishop for confirmations in Kigoma and Ujiji and spending the night there.
I will say that the weather here is lovely, although much drier than folks would like (end of the dry season). Although the the days get hot and the sun is not something you want to stand out in for long, the nights are cooler and absolutely perfect sleeping weather!
Again, thank you so much for your continued prayers. God is really blessing us here.
2015 – KBC Tuesday
Kasulu – Last night we ate Deacon Eldah’s house. She is a teacher at the Bible College and a very brilliant woman. She would love to be a priest in the diocese, but the diocese synod will not yet accept ordaining home-grown female priests, though they seem to be accepting of women from first world countries who are ordained.
Today at the Bible College has been spent resetting ip addresses and other clean-up on the existing thin-client stations, re-configuring a workstation we brought a few years ago that has gotten messed up and playing with the projector we brought. The projector works REALLY well and we are hoping to have a movie night for the Bible College on Saturday night (Despicable Me …Minions!) A lot of the staff is not here today as they have traveled to Kibondo to attend Daudi Ndahana’s Dad’s funeral.
One thing you notice about Tanzania is that they are ALWAYS building something somewhere. You think that there is no land available, you look over, and there is a foundation for something new. A current project at the Bible College is staff offices. They are being built by the students in the afternoon after class is done. These men have have all had other trades before coming to KBC; they include farmers, carpenters, bricklayers, etc. and they are putting their talents to use starting to build the brick walls to the office.
Today I met with the student who will be teaching us kiswahili. We will only have five or six sessions with him before it will be time to start our journey back home but we hope to begin learning enough to get around a little better and be better able to make polite conversation. The lessons will start tomorrow at 9:00 am. Pray that our brains and ears will be awake and aware!
We want to thank you all for your prayers and request that you continue to keep praying for us as we continue with our work and the opportunities that God places in front of us while we are here.
2015 – First Monday at Kasulu Bible College
Today we started the day by attending the chapel service here in the compound, had breakfast and then drove down to the Bible College, after Bill had shared some videos he had made with Canon Wilson Mafumdi. We also had one of the carpenters in the compound take a look at the front door lock on the house. It got broken yesterday when our housekeeper locked the doors after we had headed to church. Unfortunately she ended up locking in Felix, a male nurse from Germany who is working at Shunga for 18 months and who was down in Kasulu with Christine, who runs Shunga, for an R&R weekend. He tried to force the doors open and succeeded, but he also succeeded in bending the latch so that the lock does not work anymore. Fortunately, he decided NOT to try forcing open the door on the porch, which was also locked. The carpenter wasn’t able to fix the lock so they are going to have to purchase a new mechanism from somewhere. There is a very good lock on our bedroom door, so we will be able to keep everything secure in there, and the locked porch door should also be a deterrent until the front door can be fixed.
It was Christmas in December for the Bible College. We started by stringing some new ethernet cat-6 cable to the library side of the computer/library building. The five new thin clients we are installing will be for the use of the students only, so that they will not have to wait for general internet cafe users to finish their sessions. It was a general organized free-for-all of unpacking monitors, keyboards and thin-clients and connecting them to each other and to power-sources.
Of course, we still had to connect them to the server and configure them. As we did not know exactly how many ethernet cables we would need, or how long they would need to be, we opted to purchase a big coil of ethernet cat-6 cable and bring a pair of crimpers and a bunch of ends. Bill made up the first few cables, and connected and configured the first two new thin clients before lunch.
We headed back to the compound for lunch. The food was late in arriving, so Bill and Emmanuel Bwatta headed over to the immigration office to register us with the Kasulu authorities. As our visas say that we are visiting we can’t do any work while we are here. Therefore we are not installing the new equipment, just verifying that it arrived safely and in good working order!
After lunch Bill showed everyone (Reginald, Festus and another gentleman, who’s name I didn’t catch) how to make up cables. They made up the remaining cables needed to connect the thin-clients which had been pre-configured at the server level. The men then went to a classroom with a blackboard so that Bill could give them a basic understanding about TCP/IP and firewalls.
At that point it was time to head back to the compound for a bath before heading out to dinner tonight. We stopped at a little store on the way back to pick up honey, mango juice and bottled water. How I love being able to run errands like this ourselves instead of depending on someone else to do it. I know that they love to show hospitality, but I HATE asking!
Tonight we will have dinner with Deacon Eldah…and we are driving ourselves there!