Cathy Schrull
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!
2015 – Saturday and Sunday
Yesterday, I hit the wall. It was a relaxed but busy day, starting off with Dad fixing the wi-fi access for the DWT compound. The access point had stopped working before we got here last year and something had fried it enough that we couldn’t get it to take new settings. Bill brought the equipment to replace that, plus an amplifier and a lightening arrester so that, in theory, there should be internet access all over the compound, as long as the power is not accidentally turned off to it. It is really powerful and reaches down to the new guest hostel.
After (a very late) lunch we went down to the Kasulu Bible college to store all the rest of the equipment we brought with us…the five monitors and thin-clients, four boxes of toner, two lap-tops, and the color printer and projector…(and the partridge in a pear tree). While we were there Bill got one of the wireless access points working again. It had gone off-line when the new method of accessing the internet was installed after we left. He will work on getting the rest of the access points around the campus working again tomorrow.
We had a lovely dinner with Canon Wilson Mafunbi and his wife and by the time I got back, shortly after 9:00 pm, I could not keep my eyes open. I crawled under the mosquito net and was asleep in minutes.
Today has been a fairly quiet day. We went to the 9:00 am service at the cathedral. The service, as always, ran long. Today was baptisms, and when there is a baptism service a LOT of folks and babies get baptized. The font is in the back of the church and we were sitting in the front so I couldn’t see exactly how many, but it was a LOT.
Tanzanians truly believe in first fruits when it comes to offerings. If they don’t have money they bring whatever they have and it is auctioned off at the end of the service. The gifts today included peanuts, a huge stem of bananas, etc. Someone in the choir bought a bag of cassava as a gift for Bill. Cassava is a starchy root vegetable that is ground up and used to make ugali. Something (like wringing a chicken’s neck) that is beyond our talents! But we will figure out a wau to make good use of it.
Someone had brought a bunch of kangas as an offering and Dad was going to bid on one for me when Efram bought it for me!
Early this morning, Daudi Ndahana’s dad died and he and Olivia had to travel to Kibondo. Daudi will be there all week as his Dad had “many wives” and many children and there will be much to discuss. Olivia will be back on Wednesday. Needless to say, we did not have Dad’s chicken for dinner tonight, but ate by ourselves at the German house.
However, Bill did pickup Daudi’s car before they left (they will be taking one of the diocesan Land Cruisers to Kibondo) and it has already given us a real sense of freedom. We are discouraged from walking between the DWT compound and downtown Kasulu and now we can drive on OUR schedule.
And now we are going to enjoy a movie night!
Quick Saturday Update
Even if you have already read them, check out Thursday and Friday’s blogs again. There are now pictures!
More later on today’s doings.