2015 – Chimpanzees!
We are going to leave you with a teaser tonight. Cathy and I are in Gombe National Park and have limited bandwidth and since we were up at 3 am this morning, we are too tired to write tonight. But needless to say we had an exceptional day which included flying to Kigoma, then traveling by boat to Gombe and within 30 minutes or so of our first walk through the forest, we came upon a family of chimpanzees. It was an awesome experience, which we’ll write more about tomorrow when we get to Kigoma.
2015 – Tuesday in Dar
Dar Es Salaam – There is a business principle that was very popular when I was in college called Parkinson’s Law. It states that work expands to fill the time allotted for it. That was today.
As of last night, the plan for today was to get a vodacom sim chip for the tablet that Bill is testing out for communication for the deaneries (a project for next year), stop by Air Tanzania and confirm our reservation for tomorrow morning and try to get a rate for our excess luggage. The rest of the day was going to be spent “lazing” by the pool at the New Africa and practicing music that we will sing when we go to Kagunga tomorrow. (Kagunga is a village only reachable by boat.)
No plan survives contact with reality, or in this case, contact with a Bishop. Turns out that Bishop Makaya is in Dar, meeting with some government ministers on some matters and flying out tomorrow evening to England to attend the “enthronement” of the first woman bishop in England. He called us around 7:30 am and wanted to get together with us this morning.
Bill ran out to get the Vodocam sim chip and was told that it would take about an hour to register, so he came back to the hotel shortly before the Bishop arrived. As we were talking and the Bishop heard about our plan to confirm our flight, he suggested that he accompany Bill and see if he could get us a lower rate for our excess luggage.
Next thing we know Bill and the Bishop are at Air Tanzania and in a while Bill returned saying that we need to repack everything because Air Tanzania would ship all our excess luggage at the cargo rate ($.60 USD as opposed to 3.00 USD per pound), if we got the luggage over to the freight terminal today. Bill arranged for the hotel van to take him over to the airport with five new monitors, four boxes of toner, Three large LL Bean Duffles, a coil of cat 6 cable, a color laser printer (and a partridge in a pear tree). The rate of $.60 USD ended up expanding quite a bit as this fee, and that recording fee and the Swissport handling fee got added in; and there was the aggravation of running back and forth from office to office, BUT all of our equipment should arrive in Kigoma with us at a lesser amount. In the morning we will head to the airport with only one LL Bean Duffle and Bill’s guitar case and we believe that they will both be under the 20 Kilo max, although its hard to tell as our luggage scale has gone a little bonkers.
Through all of this Bill made two more trips back to the Vodacom store the get the sim chip working and I spent some time reflecting on and writing out some of my testimony. Needless to say, no lazing by the pool, although we did take a short walk next door to hear the choir practice on the church’s outdoor porch before dinner.
We enjoyed a final dinner of shrimp red curry at the upstairs restaurant, did some final organizing and spent a few minutes looking at songs we might sing tomorrow, and now to bed. Three A.M. is going to come awfully early!
2015 – Dar Es Salaam
Monday, September 14.
We have been having some issues with reaching our server back home, so ’yesterday’s post” – such as it was (Dubai) has been posted quite a bit later than it was written. Many thanks to our nephew and house-sitter, Chris, for not only taking care of our fur-babies while we are away, but also being available to do things like reset the cable modem that connects our server to the greater world.
So due to some runway holds in Dubai, we arrived a bit late in Dar Es Salaam yesterday (Sunday) afternoon. Also arriving even later, as in two hours later, than originally scheduled was another flight. As both flights scrambled for luggage and then tried to get through the customs inspection, something that is always a struggle in the small international section of the airport in Dar Es Salaam, Bill glanced over and noticed someone who looked familar. It was our friend and original in-country equipment supplier, Alnoor. He and his wife were returning from Taronto. We had lost track of him last year, after he had closed his original business, but ran into him with his entire family in the departure lounge of the airport when we were leaving Tanzania. So much of a God-incidence to run into him going and coming, so to speak.
One of the reasons we like to stay at the New Africa Hotel is to wake up the music of the worship at the Lutheran church next door. That didn’t happen this morning, After a period when we were both wakeful at 3:00 am, both of us slept straight through until 8:30.
After breakfast we got airtel sim chips for our phones with the help of Karen at the hotel. Then we walked over to the Ideal Computer store to pay for the keyboards, printer and cat 6 network cable we are also bringing over to Kigoma/Kasulu. Looks like there will be not one, but two our three additional (shrunk wrapped) packages that we be shipping our in addition to our five(!) bags. Two of thoese current five bags are filled with nothing but technology and the third bag is Bill’s guitar without which he is not allowed in the diocese.
The streets were really noisy today. It appears from the number of holes on street corners with cable of some short poking up that a major re-wire job is underway. And perhaps due to that the power was out in the section of town we were walking in because outside of every shop we passed, a gasoline generator was running. Dar is not a quiet city but it was really noisy today! And it does seem that the power is known to be un-reliable enough that every business is prepared with it’s own generator.
We enjoyed a nice visit tonight with Bishop Gerard Mpango, who was Bishop of Western Tanganyika when we first started working with the diocese, and two of his childrenm Bwiza, Jessie. His eldest daughter, Rose, is currently attending her second year at Virginia Theological Seminary. She will be ordained a priest after she graduates, but for now, the ordination comes with the understanding that she will not work as a priest in Tanzania.
We are still catching up on our sleep and tomorrow is another day here in Dar….Good night all.