2015 – TGIF – Busy Weekend Ahead
After an early morning eucharist at Marusi, we spent most of the today at the Bible College again. Bill was doing more anti-virus work and teaching Reginald and Festus more about tcp/ip and firewalls. Festus and Reginald took apart an HP printer that was, falsely, it turns out, reporting a paper jam, in order to repair it. It seems that the issue is a bad sensor and there is no repair that can be made.
I spent the morning reviewing yesterday’s Swahili lesson and talking to various students.
When we returned home for lunch there were two craftsman (fundi) working on the broken front door in an attempt replace the broken lock with a new one. There was a lot of filing and there will be welding and other retro-fitting tomorrow, as the new lock is a very different size (smaller) and shape than the old lock.
We called Sister Christine at Shunga, and she will be very happy to have us come on Tuesday to do a site-survey for getting wi-fi set up for the Shunga Clinic.
After lunch we headed back to KBC and our Swahili lessons. The students were once again laying bricks, this time for the back wall of the staff offices. A student procured a white cloth that we will hang in the classroom where we will be showing “Despicable Me” tonight. More mango juice and Nido (the essentials!) was purchased on the way home and then Bill saw the Bishop to find out what time we are leaving tomorrow for the confirmations that will be happening Saturday and Sunday down in the Kigoma area. Good thing he checked as it’s early! We are leaving at 8:30 a.m., which is fine except that we asked for Swahili homework to do over the weekend and Bill has a laptop to look at for someone. I’m not sure when we will get these tasks done.
In the meantime, the hot water which almost always runs, even when the cold water is turned off at the German house, has run out, so we will be bathing out of barrel water tonight, with a little help from the electric kettle. Nothing new. Every house here always has a least one big barrel of water for times like these. Welcome to Kasulu!
Today’s prayer request is for safe travels tomorrow (Satuday) and Sunday, and for the confirmands at the three churches we will be visiting.
2015 – Short Post Thursday
Kasulu – We have a tendency to be totally oblivious to the Tanzanian holidays, and today ended up being one of those holidays we are oblivious to. I thought that the noise from the mosque started a little earlier than usual, and it is very unusual to hear drumming. I know that drumming is part of the Ramadan celebration here, but that was over back in June. Then when we drove down to the Bible College for the 7:00 am Thursday Eucharist that Bill had been asked to preach at we noticed that the street in front of the mosque was blocked off and it was full of people sitting on the street. Turns out that today is the celebration of the Hajj and that is a national holiday here. Even the Diocesan offices were closed and there were no classes in the Bible College.
Bill successfully tried his last trick to get the messed-up-wouldn’t-boot work station fixed and it worked! But it meant that he missed today’s Swahili lesson because he didn’t want to stop what he was working on. Today’s construction at the Bible College consisted of plastering the secretarial office that is being built just inside the door of the administrative offices. No work on the staff offices today!
We came home from lunch to find that Andrea, our hostess, had returned from her travels. It is really nice to have her here.
We are off to a Cathedral parishioner’s home for dinner tonight and the driver is waiting, so I’ll end here.
Tommorrow starts at 7:30 in Marusi for the last Friday of the month eucharist.
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.