Back to Dar...halfway through the second trimester

Last Wednesday Charlie and I took the bus back to the big city of Dar Es Salaam. It is strange to think that this is already my third trip to the city, and I am finished with the first half of my time here in this country.

We came to the city last Wednesday because Charlie's dad and uncle were coming for a visit! They flew in on Friday evening late at night. We also met our bennie friends that are staying in Imiliwaha on Thursday afternoon, and our Johnnie friend Dave Sexton who just finished training with Peace Corps and traveled to his site on Friday, where he will be living and teaching for the next two years.

We were able to have an Americanized day on Thursday in celebration of Thanksgiving...more to come on that in a future post (Sharing Culture Part 2...) but all in all, the last few days it has been exciting to see some familiar faces and be able to show them around the city a little bit. Yesterday, Saturday, we took a trip to the beach here in Dar. Br. Barnabus drove us in one of the monastery cars. We took the ferry across to the peninsula and then drove to Sunrise Beach resort where we had a delicious lunch and then swam in the warm Indian Ocean. (There will be pictures in a future post of the McCarrons in the sea!)

This morning Charlie and his dad and uncle took the bus back to Hanga, but I decided to remain in the city for a little while longer. Though it is hot, so hot that i am literally dripping with sweat just walking around, or even just sitting on the steps of the Cathedral waiting for Mass to begin this morning, my air conditioned room and cool shower is quite a luxury every night. It has been fun eating a variety of food (lebonese, indian, pizza, hamburgers) and seeing more of the market. And I cant leave the city until I have some help from one of the brothers to fix my laptop. It doesn't seem to want to charge lately.

Sorry for the absence of pictures in this post. Due to my laptop's power issues, and the reformatting of the laptop I have been using in Hanga (which had ALL of my pictures on it from the last two months) I dont have any available to post right now. But there are plenty more from sorting through the donations of books and other things last week...from the beach...from Thanksgiving dinner in Dar...so stay tuned!

When I arrive back in Hanga sometime this week I hope to begin work painting and doing other improvement projects around my Primary School. It should be a welcome break from teaching, and a chance for a little more hands-on improvement of the school grounds! Pictures to come from that too :)

Thanks for reading. Happy Advent!

A Library arrives in Hanga

Last Friday the container of books and other donations finally arrived in Hanga after months of journey from Wisconsin, USA! I just happened to pass by the entrance to the Abbey when I saw this semi that had just arrived from a long two day travel from Dar Es Salaam.


After the container was cracked open, the novices were called to help unload all of the donations. I called Charlie and he and Lennart came to help, too. In the container there were blankets, clothes, a bike, a computer, a printer, and most importantly, BOOKS. There were just over 600 boxes of books. Our nearest estimate for the actual number of books is right around 18,000 to 20,000! What a great project. These will be distributed to all of the schools in Hanga.


We used the outdoor walkways of the new monastic residence for temporary storage of the books.Some worked to stack the boxes while others continued bringing them out of the actual container. For a while, the container didn't seem to have a back to it. There were so many boxes!



Finally, we reached the back of the container, and all was unloaded.


Here Br. Cassian checks the master list to make sure nothing big is missing...he will be in charge of all of these donations in Hanga and their distribution to their final destinations.


On Monday afternoon we began sorting through the books to get them ready to distribute to the many different schools in the area. We had piles for: Primary library books, Primary text books, Secondary library books, Secondary text books, seminary/religious books, and teachers resources.

To sort the books we opened every box, took out the school supplies and/or clothes that were packed around the books (supplies such as notebooks, loose leaf paper, pens, pencils, and art supplies) and then put the box of books in the most appropriate pile.

Here Charlie is gathering the many volumes of encyclopedias to attempt to piece together full sets.


Thank you St. Scholastica Academy in Chicago! your donations, along with those of so many other schools in your area, are very much appreciated here in Tanzania. They will be put to good use.

And thank you Colleen, Tory, and Julia! I am not sure what school you are from, but it is true, you guys truly R Ahmazing :) Thank you for your help with these donations, and thank you for your note on this box.


We continued with the work Tuesday morning and afternoon with the help of a wheel barrel to transport the heavy boxes from under the outside awning to a large room inside the new monastic residence where we were sorting.



And we are not done yet! We will continue with the initial sorting tomorrow, and then the real work begins. Luckily, the school year is just ending here in Tanzania, so us teachers will have plenty of time in the month of December to oversee the building of shelving for the different schools, and beginning to organize the books in each school's library. Look for more progress there in the upcoming months of posts.

thanks for reading. be sure to check back soon to see pictures from the completion of the sorting stage.

Rain, Hail, Sleet, or Snow...

Thank God for the United States Postal Service :) Service we should not take for granted...

I guess this motto does not exist across the globe, especially if the parcel is being sent anywhere internationally.

This morning started out pretty normal for a Friday. By lunch time I was hungry and already a little tired from teaching and ready for a nap. However, when I walked into our dining room I was overcome with joy. The package from home that I had been waiting for for over a month now finally arrived (sent from Winona, MN on September 25)! Of course the contents were important (gum, crystal lite, and the essential news magazines to keep up with all the happenings in the US: Newsweek, the Abbey Banner, and People) but I was more relieved that all of these things were not lost somewhere never to be found again. I think only a few packets of drink mix slipped out through the worn lower right corner...

Thank you Mom for the package. Thank you Ceili for the beautiful pot holder that will now be a part of every meal here in the Hanga guest dining room. If there is one lesson that I have learned from this, it is: never lose faith in your absent mail...it is on its way, and will arrive...sometime :)

Here we see one possible explanation for the delay. The package was "missent to TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO; WEST INDIES" what?! I am not sure how this routing took place...perhaps "East Africa" looks like "West Indies" to some computer scanners...

All for now. Look back again Monday afternoon for an in depth pictoral analysis of the unpacking and distribution of the container from Wisconsin!

Rocks from Space & Rides in Pickup Beds: MBEYA

This past weekend we decided to get out and see another city. Early Friday morning we (me, Charlie, Anne, Lennart, and Br. Emmanuel) left Hanga and caught the Super Feo bus to Mbeya on the main road at the turnoff at Milayoyo. The seating was a little cramped with five seats across instead of the normal four for a coach bus, but we made it. We picked up Sara and Cara along the way in Njombe. It was nice they were able to catch the same bus! They only had to stand for about 45 minutes of their 3 hour ride i think.

We arrived in Mbeya at around 2pm, had some lunch, and they spent the rest of our afternoon walking around town. We did a lot of walking all weekend. It was great to see another city center...most of the roads here were even paved! The size of the city itself is a little deceiving, though. We walked around all of the streets of downtown multiple times in the afternoon on Friday, and again on Saturday...even though the city has a population of nearly 300,000. It is a pretty sprawled place.We stayed at the guest house / conference center that Hanga has in Mbeya. The rooms were great, the food was great, and we were even allowed to use the conference room to watch TV and the new DVDs that we bought. (Toy Story on Friday night, Blood Diamond on Saturday night, and Michael Clayton on Sunday) Our hosts were so good to us all weekend: driving us around in the pickup to find a pizza place on Friday night, to the Cathedral for Mass on Sunday morning, and even all the way out to the outskirts of town where we got to see this giant rock that fell from space...literally. supposedly it is the eighth largest meteorite discovered on our planet. We had to take at least a few pictures with it :)

You can see Anne was very excited to finally arrive at the meteorite site after riding in the back of the pickup for the 94 minutes that it took us to get there (at least 20 of those minutes on very bumpy gravel roads)

On Sunday Anne and Lennart came back to Hanga with Br. Emmanuel, but the rest of us stayed in Mbeya for another day. We wanted to get to the top (or at least near the top) of one of the mountains surrounding the town, but were told it would not be safe to try to climb ourselves. So we did some more walking around the town during the day, had some great Indian food for lunch at the Mbeya Hotel, and then were driven up one of the mountains later in the day...most of us riding in the back of the pickup. You can see a little bit of the sprawl of the city below.

Before we headed back to the Guest House on Sunday afternoon we stopped by a place near by to use the internet. I didn't need to check my mail, so instead I found these kids outside shooting some pool. They were very excited that I came over and was talking with them and one of them even offered to play me in a game. Of course I couldn't deny this offer...I am older and have played a good amount of pool before so I should at least have a chance, right? Well, long story short, these kids were hustling me. They killed me and then I had to cough up the Tsh 500 (about 50 cents) for the game token. It was fun to play with them. Though I think they were trying to teach me to say some words i shouldn't be saying in Swahili. Kids will be kids.

Travel back on Monday went smooth, I taught one day of class on Tuesday, but today and tomorrow there is no school because Standard IV is taking the national tests. That means only six more days of teaching this school year! The whole school will have terminal examinations (yes that is right, FINAL EXAMS for first through sixth graders!) the 24th and 25th of this month, and then they are done.

I have heard there is a full container with many many books coming by the end of this week, though ;) That will keep me busy for the month of December when I wont be teaching. Look for pictures from the books arriving in Hanga on the next update sometime this weekend.

Thanks for reading!

Letters to Winona...

Last week I finally received letters back from Winona that some students in my brothers' classes there had written to Tanzania to have pen pals in Africa! The letters take about two weeks to send both ways, so it is pretty slow communication, but it is also a lot of fun to receive a letter from halfway across the world. I wanted to send a class picture back with our second set of letters, so at the end of last week I took the whole class outside and we took the picture you see above. I never realized what a tough job photographers have. Can you imagine organizing 49 sixth graders for a pictures like this?

Here are some of the students with letters from Winona, MN! Thank you Cotter Jr. High and St. Stans! (and you cousins of course :)

I took this shot one day last week in class where I had the students measure the surface area of the walls of our room with some string and rulers. They had a lot of fun doing it, but my did that classroom get loud!
I don't think that I have mentioned on here how much of a blessing Anne and Lennart have been with their help putting together our new "library" at St. Laurent's. The past four Monday afternoons I let the kids come into the small room where we have the books and check out one book for the week by writing their name and the name of the book in a notebook we have. That was the only record that I had of the books, until Anne and Lennart started cataloguing them all! They have written down the names of all the books we have, organized them into categories, and have just begun labeling the individual books this week. Like I said, such a blessing to have them working as our librarians!

Here are some pictures from last week when Charlie came to play some songs on his guitar with the kids. We decided to take a picture with our new map of Tanzania that the Abbey woodshop helped us fix up, too.


Finally, I thought I would give you a taste of nightlife here in Hanga :) Almost every night after supper, we head over to the trade school to do work/check email/et. c. on the computer there.

I will describe my slightly funny look here:

The headlamp has become my best friend the last month or so because the power goes out around 10PM. I use it every night on my walk back to the hostel and while I get ready for bed (brushing my teeth, taking out contacts, and pulling the mosquito net down over my bed.

The MN Legion Boys State shirt reminds me of home :)

It must have been a Monday after a Vikings win, thus the shorts. I have been able to keep pretty close tabs on them this season via the internet and my podcasts.

The bag over my shoulder holds any school papers that I will work on in the computer lab...and perhaps a candy bar to satisfy my sweet tooth (no dessert at dinner usually).

The fanny pack holds my ipod.

The socks...it was laundry day, so give me a break.

and finally the RED crocs. I wear them everywhere here. Though I am in the market for a new pair now because I have worn all of the grip off the bottoms.

All for tonight. Thanks for reading!

Again, please let me know if there are specific things you would like to see pictures of...hear about...I am happy to share what you want to read.

We are off to Mbeya this weekend for a visit to the Monastic house there. Should be a fun trip. And we might even find some pizza! Look for pictures from Mbeya next time.

For Fr. Daniel

Look for this picture in the upcoming Abbey Banner Fall Issue:

Ben and Charlie help some students find books in the new library at St. Laurent's Pre and Primary school in Hanga Tanzania

Sharing Culture Part 1 : HALLOWEEN!

Did you know that Halloween is a very American holiday? I dont know if I had ever thought of it until last weekend, but the good 'ol USA is one of the few (if not the only) country that truly celebrates Halloween with the Trick or Treating...the pumpkin carving...and the free candy! Well, in an effort to spread awareness of American culture Charlie and I decided we needed to celebrate Halloween here in Hanga.

The day began by wishing my kids at school Happy Halloween and then explaining some of our traditions. One of the main quests for the day was finding somthing to carve. There are no pumpkins around this region of Tanzania at this time of year, so we had to carve what we could find...a not quite ripe but perfectly round and green PAPAYA! I spotted it in the tree and got permission to go and get it. so i climbed the tree! ever seen a carved papaya before? now you have. I bet you didn't know that first picture was a carved papaya.

These were the costumes from the first part of the night. Charlie came to dinner dressed as Anne and she came dressed as Charlie. It was pretty scary if you ask me! Lennart and I just decided to be ourselves.

After dinner, Charlie and I decided this would be a perfect opportunity/excuse to shave our heads. It is hot...we dont like having to shampoo every day...and most Tanzanians are bald (yes even the women) so we would fit right in.


But of course, it wouldn't be much of a "costume" if the haircut was normal. So i decided to keep the mo-hawk and charlie kept a mean looking gotee. Dont we look like we mean business?

A summary of the events of the day: the africans thought we were crazy for cutting up and putting a burning candle in a pre-ripe fruit and I got laughed at by all of my students at school on Monday as well as every villager I passed on my way to school on my bike. I deserved it, though. I did look pretty funny.

I think we have successfully spread this bit of American holiday culture. I am a little worried for the volunteers here next year, though. I can just hear their students, "On Halloween all americans shave their heads, right?!"