Goodbye Francesca, HELLOOOO books

Last night we said goodbye again. it seems like i do that a lot around here... This time it was for Francesca. she rode to Hanga in the same car as me and my dad when he came to visit! She has been working with the farm and just hanging out with us around Hanga ever since! She lived right across the hall from me, so now i am lonely at the end of the hall. the first picture here is from the end of last night. We also took a more serious pose, but this second one turned out better i think...though i am unsure of the umbrella...

This past weekend on Friday and Saturday night the Italians, Germans, and Austrians were absent from Hanga. they were on a trip to Iringa and Ruaha national park. So that left me and Charlie in Hanga :)

Friday night we ate dinner with the girls at St. Laurent's again. This time, there was a special treat. after dinner, we tested the new TV in their cafeteria. the movie was Sleeping Beauty. I have never heard a room full of grade school girls get so quiet as when the movie first started and their attentions were all fixed on the TV. it was a fun night. oh...and charlie even got to try out the new Little Tykes play set!

Most of our Saturday and Sunday was spent working in the library at St. Benedict. This is one of the shelves that the wood shop of the monastery made for the school library. there are ten of these new sturdy shelves and now they are almost all full of books!

These books were donated through a project from Minnesota called "Books for Africa." these boxes of donated books had been sitting in a storage room at St. Benedict since sometime in 2007 I think. There were other shelves built, but they collapsed under the weight of the textbooks.

Now after a full week of just taking the books out of boxes and sorting them again, the room looks like a library! It was one of the most fun jobs I have had around Hanga. it was a bit like Christmas every time we got to open a box up and sort through the books. Sometimes it was just more textbooks...

but sometimes it was a book all about how to use your pocket calculator!

or how to gain UNLIMITED POWER!

or perhaps a great work of literature to add to my "suggested readings" bookshelf...

It was a lot of sorting, and we still aren't done yet...actually, I think the real librarian work has just begun...but at least all the boxes are empty.

Here is the computer lab at St. B that Charlie has been setting up too. funny how so many projects come at you at once...and to think, when we first arrived back in July, we were both struggling with the boredom, trying to find things to do, projects to get involved in. everything in time...

finally, here is a picture of the installation of Fr. Angelo as the new headmaster of St. Benedict. He will be very good for the school.

We are currently planning a trip to the central western part of the country for next week, but before we can go on that, we have to sort through the donated books that arrived last November, and decide which ones are best for St. B.

thanks for reading!

The Mountain, goodbye, and Nole

Actually, this post will have nothing to do with this little chicks at the Hanga chicken farm...but they are pretty cute aren't they?

Almost one week ago we made an expedition to the mountain with a cross on it a little way outside of Hanga (about 13 km) on the way to Songea. Anne, Lennart, Eva, Wilma, Francesca, Maria, and Clare all went on foot, and I came a couple hours later and met them at near the base of the hill with my motorcycle :)

I unfortunately left Hanga with only a few drops of gas left in the tank, so I had to find the "petrol station" along the way. I bought 3 liters...i think they poured it into the tank from old cooking oil bottles...but it smelled like gasoline.

Here is the crew at the church at the base of the hill.

15-2, 15-4, and a double run equals 12. Ahh cribbage in the afternoon.

As Clare was scheduled for departure early this week, there was a goodbye party for her! above is the beautiful cake...best one in Tanzania so far...with chocolate, peanuts, and mango icing. DELICIOUS. Below is the party back in the hostel. Goat meat included. mmmm. I also discovered that melted blue band vegetable spread is pretty good on popcorn! the low fat option to butter...

Br. Odo saying thanks...

The young women volunteers of Hanga

left to right: Anne, Patricia, Eva, Clare, Maria and Francesca.

On Tuesday morning we traveled by car with Br. Theodore to Njombe and then took another ride later in the day with Fr. Michael to Nole to see Hanga's "outstation" there. It is a larger complex than i thought. One of the projects there is the water bottling. the water is called Chemchemi ("fountain" or "source" in kiswahili).

This is inside the bottling room.

and some more pictures from around Nole.

Although it took an hour to drive to Nole, which was only a little over 30 km from Njombe, and although the road was in the worst condition of any i have been on, mainly because it is the rainy season, the trip was well worth it. Just the view from the road along the way would have been worth it. It was fun to see the shocked look on so many kids faces as we passed and they saw two wazungu in the car driving past their house (i dont think they get many foreigners passing down their road!) This site of the hydro-electric generator in Nole was one of the most beautiful places I have seen here in Tanzania as well. The landscape and climate (cool enough that i wanted to wear long sleeves and long pants the whole time i was there) reminded me of the Rocky mountains in CO...somehow it didn't feel like eastern Africa.

On our way back to Njombe to spend the night we stopped by Fr. Michael's home village of Uwembe. We visited his parents and siblings who still live at home. Though we only stayed for about 20 minutes, his mother gifted us with a beautiful chicken as we left! So, there was no debate on what we were having for dinner. It was probably the freshest meat I have ever eaten :)

On Wednesday morning Clare left on the bus to Dar Es Salaam, and later in the morning i caught a bus back to Songea, and then another back to Hanga.

The last two days I have been helping sort books (still a lot of them!) in the library at St. Benedict. Charlie ordered 10 sturdy shelves from the monastery carpentry shop and they were completed this week. It is fun sorting through the endless boxes of books. My favorite is the "suggested reading Great Books" collection that i am setting aside.

Tonight I will eat dinner in the girls cafeteria at St. Laurents and after dinner we will watch Sleeping Beauty together on the newly installed TV on the wall. Me, Charlie, and about two hundred 1st-7th grade girls. should be pretty exciting, and loud.

thanks for reading!

Late Christmas, Rain Showers, and Ugali Pizza?

Short clips from life in Tanzania...

the first picture here is of course the Late Christmas...Carolina loved her little horses from McDonalds! thank you Ceili!

almost one month ago it was the feast of St. Placid. Since the guest house in Dar Es Salaam is named after this saint, there was a party that night! here are some shots from the festivities. i have a good video of the Cake song if you ever want to see it, too. As Clare was at the guest house for a visit that afternoon, she was of course invited to the party as well. It was a good first chance to meet the monks!

We traveled back to Hanga on January 18 and there was a bonfire that night to celebrate our return! We got to burn the old Christmas wreaths too. that was fun. Oh, and here we are roasting bread on sticks...STICKBREAD!


these are from out trip to Songea the next weekend. Here we are sitting at the Songea bakery (PCV Mateo from Peramiho joined us unexpectedly as he was just passing through)

Clare and I went with one of the monks to visit a place in Songea where this woman makes her own wine. We got a couple bottles of banana wine, some rosella, some rose, and of course some grape. It was pretty neat to see the process.

Sometime in the following week we decided that we wanted to have another bonfire with STICKBREAD! so we went to the kitchen to see what we could make from scratch...

Everyone watches as Charlie measures out the curiously grainy flour...

"this is kind of coarse isn't it?"
"i think it will be okay...just not as fine as we are used to..."
"wait, isn't this corn flour?"
"does that really matter? i think we might have made it with this same stuff last time..."

And then the collective reaction of embarrassed laughter as we realize we are not making bread dough...but a large batch of cold UGALI. hmmmm i guess that gluten stuff in wheat flour does something to hold it all together...kind of hard to stick ugali on a stick to roast it...

But of course, we didn't give up there. when life gives you cold ugali dough, you make...UGALI PIZZA!

it was pretty dense, okay it was really dense, but it was at least edible :) and we took some of the rest of the dough, added cocoa and mashed bananas and sugar and spice, and made a pretty good looking/tasting chocolate banana corn cake! i wont say delicious...but it wasn't bad....

Not the kind of pizza Francesca is used to at home, but definitely a good story to tell :) ("those crazy Americans..."

The past month we have been working to hand out the scholarship money raised by the volunteers from Saint John's that were here last year from their Phoenix Rising bike trip across Tanzania. Here is charlie presenting one of the students at the Seminary with his certificate.

And the rain shower...it was pouring one afternoon and i decided to run around and splash in the puddles. The slick tile in front of our hostel becomes a slip'n'slide when it is wet, too! And since the gutter leaks, there is better water pressure standing there under it than in my bathroom shower! Please excuse the 1/2 nudity.
Finally, one week ago the our Bennie volunteer friends came from Imiliwaha to visit Hanga for a few days. On Sunday we learned that some of the new nuns that are helping in the kitchen are learned in the art of roasting coffee! so, Charlie pulled our 15 kilograms of raw beans out of storage and we got to work! first you have to pound them to get the shells off the beans, then there is an art to separating the raw beans from the shell casings (sara was the best at it) and then they just go into the oven! So, for the past week there has been delicious fresh coffee almost every day from my coffee maker. DELICIOUS!

Clare and I will travel to Njombe/Nole tomorrow to visit the chemchemi water bottling plant that is run by the monastery. And from there Clare will head back to Dar and I will be back in Hanga on Thursday. I think there will be another group of German tourists here when i get back too...life is never boring here in Hanga.

check back next time for pictures from the bottling plant!

Life continues in Hanga

I have been back in Hanga now since January 18 and upon my return I realized how much more this place is feeling like home. I traveled back to Hanga with my new friend Clare. She is from Canada and we met on the ferry on the way back from Zanzibar! I hung out with her and her brother for a couple days in Dar Es Salaam and then told her she should come visit Hanga and see another side of Tanzania before returning home. So she came with!

I decided not to continue with the same teaching schedule at St. Laurent's this semester since I will be leaving before the first break at Easter. Instead, I have been focusing my efforts on completing a lot of the projects that I began last fall. The school is still being painted, we have installed the television in the girl's cafeteria (it had previously been sitting on the floor in the box in Kastor's office for the past 8 or 9 months), I painted the new ball box that is now being used every day at the school, I had some help testing computers and setting up the lab again to begin teaching some computer classes next week, and of course there is always more cleaning and organizing to do. Our Bennie friends that are staying in Imiliwaha also came for a visit last weekend, and Cara came to help me clean one of the storage closets on Tuesday morning. We happened across big pieces of molded plastic from a "little tykes" play set, and I assumed that it must be broken somehow, otherwise it would be put together and out in the open for kids to play with, right? It turns out, it was sitting in storage simply because no one knew how to put it together! So with Cara and Anne's help I muscled the thing together (pretty tight fit!) and now the kids have a new toy. I think they like it...
Here is me on the way to a meal sometime this week. I call the kid on the left the "tano kid" every time he sees any of us volunteers walking around Hanga he runs after us and yells, "mzungu! TANO!" so i smile and give him a five.

And the dishes after dinner. I like the drying the best. Here we have Lennart on the left, the three Italian vets in the middle (Patricia and Maria arrived just about a week ago to help Francesca), Eva in the back, and Clare to the right. Our total international count right now is:
1 Canadian
2 USAians
2 Germans
3 Austrians
3 Italians
Thank you WINCRAFT! Though I no longer teach the same students every day (who are now in Standard VII) I still like to stop in and say hi every day. Two days ago I stopped in the classroom in the afternoon and gave out Minnesota Twins lanyards that WinCraft sent from Winona! The kids were sooo happy. Now they are all Twins fans, too!


The Vikings pennants and Timberwolves signs are also from WinCraft. I think they will become dormitory and classroom decorations!

I also rode the motorcycle to Nakagugu pre-secondary school today where I will be doing some English tutoring a couple days a week.

So, a different schedule this semester, but I am still keeping busy! And somehow there is always time in the afternoon for a few games of cribbage and an episode or two of "The Wire" with Charlie. Life is good.

More pictures of projects to come soon. all for now.