trips.schrull.us

You may have noticed that we are spending most of our time at the Bible College.  Kasulu Bible College is very near to our hearts.  It provides training for local priests, but it is even more than that.

There has been a tremendous growth in the Anglican Church in Western Tanzania, and with the increased number of churches there has been an urgent need for more priests.  The Bible College was established to provide this training.  The minimum training for a priest is a two year certificate program.  This program is taught in Swahili and English is not a requirement.  There is also a three year diploma program which not only provides a deeper theological education but requires a minimum level of English.  When I was here five years ago, I taught some of the diploma students English for 8 days.  I don’t know how much of it “stuck”.

Right now it is the growing season and all of the theological students have returned home for two months to help with the crops, but the Bible College is still a very busy place.  Students whose secondary schools are now closed are here attending tutorials to get a head start on the next year and to do better on their all-important exams.  The Bible College provides computer training; basic computer use and how to work with MS Word and Excel.  These classes are very popular and a key to doing better financially.  Of course, when the Bible College is in session, the students use the computers for research and there is also wireless internet available for priests and others who have been issued laptops for their work.  Finally, the computers at the college provide one of the best internet cafés in the area.  Any one in the area can come and use the computer to do email, do research on the internet, etc.  They pay a small fee, depending on how much time they spend logged on. (The fees are used to pay for the power used to run the computers and satellite system.)  If the bench sitting on the side of the room is any indication, there is usually a number of folks waiting to use the computers when the café is open.  The café has been closed this week to allow us to work on the system, but every so often someone will see the doors open and hope that maybe….

When we first installed the café, the only source of power was an old diesel generator that did not have a good voltage regulator.  The generator was also prone to running out of fuel at unpredictable times.  None of this was healthy for the server and even a battery backup was not a help as the battery quickly died do to the bad voltages.  A few years ago, batteries and solar power was installed which has helped a lot.  A less than a month ago, central electric power was installed.  What a difference.

The central electric power is MUCH cheaper than running a generator, but paying the bill is a little different than in the U.S.  There is no such thing as credit in Kasulu.  Everything must be paid for in advance.  So instead of a meter that shows how much electricity you have used,  each installation has a meter which shows how much electricity you have paid for.  You go to the power office, pay a 10,000 t-shilling administrative fee (about $7.00 USD and then pay for as much electricity as you want to buy.  The meter box is reloaded and you can see how many units you have left at any time.

We are happy to report that TTCL was able connect the Bible College to the internet today.  The wire was run in the early afternoon, but it was taking some time for the circuit to go live and for a while we were worried that they might not be able to complete the work today.  It turns about that today is the last day before we leave that the installation could be completed as tomorrow is the Tanzanian Independence Day – a national holiday.  We made two more trips to the TTLC office, the first to pay for the first month’s service and the second to verify how to set up the modem/router and load the service credits to the account.  Buying the first month’s service meant buying two TTLC service cards, to make up the total amount needed for the service.  You scratch the cards (like you scratch a card for a long distance minutes card in the U.S. and enter the card numbers and pins into a special account on the internet.  That “charges” the account for the month.  Right now, the TTLC internet speed is not quite as fast as we had hoped it would be, but it is no worse than the satellite internet speed and is much more inexpensive.  Bill is planning to do some “tweaks” and experiments tomorrow to see if he can get a little more speed out of the connection.

We had choir practice the the Kasulu Cathedral Choir this evening.  They had already learned the chorus of the song will be singing together on Sunday, so the practice went quite quickly.  Another delicious dinner at the house of another old friend, affectionately known to us as “Rev. Fred”, and now it’s time for bed.

We spent today at the Bible College, doing more work in the computer lab.  There were enough remnants of old pieces of malware and viruses on the server (it could not even be brought up in “safe mode”) that Bill decided it was best to blow the old operating system away and do a fresh re-install. In the course of the day, he got the new operating system up,and  installed a different anti-virus/anti-malware application that we hope will do better for the Bible college.  Tomorrow we will try to make sure that all of the thin client users sessions are set up and cleaned up (to save power and to make administration of the computer room easier, also to have fewer moving parts in a very dusty environment, we run all of the 10 stations off of the server via thin client  appliances rather than individual p.c.s).  We also hope to get the faster intranet installed.

We had lunch at our friend Emanuel and his wife Justine’s house, which is right next to the Bible College.

After lunch Olivia and I went to market again, where I bought a kanga – a printed length of cloth that is used for anything and everything.  You actually buy two at a time, which you cut apart.  The kanga are used as over-skirts, shawls and baby carriers by the women.  Men also wear them.  We went to the tailor shop to pick up my blouse and skirt, which I tried on – over my t-shirt and skirt as the shop is open-fronted and there is no changing room.  I will post a picture later.

There is a tin-roofed awning across the front of the shop and one of the women was cooking lunch over a charcoal fire brazier.  In a pot sitting directly on the charcoal coals she was boiling water and finely ground corn to make ugali, a staple food in East Africa.  When the water boiled she added more corn flour until it became as thick as mashed potatoes.  She worked the ugali with a large spoon against the edge of the cooking pot to smooth out any lumps.  She poured a little water into a rounded bowl to prevent the ugali from sticking to it, put about half if the ugali from the cooking pot into the bowl and then tossed the bowl a few times until the ugali formed a rounded lump resembling bread dough set out to rise.  She put the remaining ugali onto a try that she had first put some water on and then put a small bowl of stew onto the charcoal to heat up.  Lunch will be a large serving of ugali with a little meat stew for flavoring.  (Most households cook the same way, but will have several charcoal braziers so that more than one thing can be cooked at a time.)  The tailor shop has no electricity and they use an iron also filled with charcoal to press their work.

We went to a food market, which unlike the market I visited on Saturday is more permanent, with stalls and some roofing.  Again, there are many vendors, each selling a selection of vegetables and fruits, but also selling other things.

We went home to the compound to rest and take baths before going out to dinner and found that the garden in the back of our guest house was being used by one of the local choirs to shoot a video.  Choirs are a BIG DEAL in Tanzania.  They write original songs and create dances that they do with each one.  They don’t wear choir robes, but instead all wear matching outfits, and a big choir that performs a lot might have several outfits. The choirs travel to outlaying villages to perform and they are major source of evangelism with their joy and their music.  Every two years there is a huge multi-day gathering when all of the youth choirs in the diocese come together to listen to speakers and perform for each other and everyone in the area who has time comes to watch.  The Kasulu Cathedral has several choirs, including a Mother’s choir (all women) and the Cathedral Choir.  The Cathedral Choir has recorded several CDs and we are bring home a DVD of their songs.  If you watch Tanzanian television on Sunday afternoon you will see video after video of Tanzanian choirs.  So cool!

We had a nice visit with Ephriam’s family, where we went for dinner.  He has five children, with a sixth on the way (large families are usual in Tanzania).  It was fun to see his twin daughters, who had just been born when I visited here five years ago.  Ephraim is the youth pastor for the diocese and travels all over this quite geographically large diocese encouraging the young people in their faith.  We left early as we are very tired.

Goodnight.

This morning we set out right after breakfast with the Bishop to visit the TTCL (Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited) office in Kasulu to talk to them about getting a broadband connection to the intranet for the Bible College. 

We have had intranet at the Bible College for the last 5 years via a satellite provider.  By it’s nature, it is not very fast and is very expensive (imagine paying $6,000.00 USD a year for your home internet connection), but that has been all that has been consistently available in the area up until this point.  However, TTCL now has a fiber optic line to the area which provides broad-band at much higher speed and at a much lower cost. The Bishop has had this service installed in his house and has found it to be very good, the cost for setting it up is quite low by American standards, so it seems to be only good stewardship to see if this will work for the Bible College.

If you want to do business in Western Tanzania and do not have an appointment, you need to go to the office first thing in the day.  It is not unusual to find that otherwise the person that you need to speak to cannot easily be found.  We found the gentleman in charge of the internet in his office, and with the Bishop’s help, discussed our requirements.  We only needed one port for our internet connection, but there was a problem:  TTCL only installed 32 ports in the Kasulu area and they were currently all allocated.  Our TTCL representative got on the phone with his supervisor and discussed our situation.  Apparently there are a few customers who have not paid their bills for 6 months.  They have actually been disconnected, but are still taking up a port.  The representative and his manager decided that they could re-allocate one of those ports to the Kasulu Bible College.

We discussed the cost for installing a new telephone line at the Bible College, buying a modem and the TTCL connection charge.  We also discussed which data plan we would purchase. In choosing a data plan you must choose between the speed of the connection and how much data you expect to download a month.  If you choose a very fast line you can find that you have used up all of you data before the month is out – and then you are stuck until the start of the next month.  It is important that the Bible College remain on line as much as possible; with a faster speed more data will be downloaded.  We decided to go with a slower speed (but still much faster than provided by satellite) and unlimited data.

We headed back to the compound to get the cash necessary for placing the installation order.  Tanzania is almost a completely cash society.  The only time you do not use cash is if you are doing funds transfers (or wiring money) from one bank account to another (NOT cheap even in the U.S.)  Bill and I had each gotten a supply of money from the ATM machines before we left Dar.  Needless to say, we do not carry much of it around with us.  We got the cash and headed back to the TTCL office where the Bishop, as the Kasulu Bible College representative filled out the necessary forms and contracts and we the installation fees.

Working with a Bishop who knows everyone in town is a good thing.  TTCL is going to try to get the wiring to the Bible College done today.  Tomorrow they will try to get the internet connected.  This is perfect!  We will have a few days still “in-country” to see how it works.

Often we Americans have to change our expectations about schedules and and goals in Tanzania, because the people here are more relaxed about these things.  We have to get used to working on African time.  But other times we can be surprised by how quickly things are done.  If I ordered internet today at home, I might be waiting as much as a week.  And that’s in a country with a much more established infrastructure than here in Kasulu!

On returning to the compound we had a really good meeting with the Bishop, about his plans and vision for the diocese and about administrative changes that he has and is instituting.  Bill and I did not really know Bishop Makaya before this trip.  He has only been at the diocese for a year, and while Bill had met him last year it was during the week that the Bishop was being “enthroned”  in the diocese (or, as we say in the U.S. “installed”) and there was no time for getting to know one another.  We now count him as a good friend.

After lunch I wondered around in the garden, while Bill rested.  The varieties of fruit that  grow in the compound alone are astounding:  Banana plants, of course; also Mango, Papaya and Avocado trees.  With the exception of the mangos, none of the fruit is ripe yet.  Still, the idea of such an abundance growing right outside the door is amazing.

This evening we were supposed to meet with the Kasulu Cathedral Choir (KCC for short) to practice with them.  But it rained.  It utterly rained.  (Did I mention that this is the rainy season?)  The choir members finally began arriving at the cathedral after 6:00 pm, after practice was scheduled to be over.  Bill and I headed back to the compound.   We are scheduled to meet with them two other times before Sunday.