March

First half of March:

Had an emotional first couple of weeks in March (beware the ides?), some reminiscing and relationship woes. But can’t change anything so why spend energy on it. Boring at site, no classes going on, and all my coworkers are away at BTP assessment (where they go assess the student teachers who are practicing how to teach in various areas of the country). With the exception of a few students teaching in neighbouring villages and their respective assessors, the campus is deserted. I got verbal permission to arrange a trip to Manyara to set up labs from PC/Tz though, so I stayed busy preparing the software packages and finding tools for that. Should be good, hope I’m prepared, as its the first time for me. Bill was kind enough to offer me some advice on what to bring, so I should be in good shape.

Second half of March:

I went to 2 villages Manyara. It took 2 days to arrive, and I spent the night in Singida. My trip was work related: I was asked to set up some computer labs for other volunteers at their respective secondary schools. Actually, they asked that I do this over a month ago, but at the time I “had class” at the time. Well, TTC was in session, but I’ve already gone over my rigorous teaching schedule elsewhere so I’ll not bore the reader with that diatribe again.

The road to Dodoma was uneventful, the dirt road from my town was recently repaved (with dirt) so there weren’t any pot holes to speak of. Further, I was lucky that it hasn’t been raining much (to the dismay of my maize) here so there weren’t any mud pits in the way. It did take 4 hours though, due to an unusually long stop over at a rest spot I assume (I was actually asleep most of the way, a handy skill I’ve picked up from road trips in my childhood). The ride to Singida from Dodoma wound up costing me 15,000 shillings and 4 more hours. For the amount of time the trip took, I was a bit surprised that it cost so much (my trip from site to Dodoma took the same amount of time but cost only 4,000). Well, at least it was a fast ride, and fortunately all but half an hour in the middle was on tarmac roads. Apparently they’re in the process of paving the entire run, which is awesome news for those of us who have to use the bus system–it gets hard to fall asleep when you’re getting bounced around on a vehicle with no shock absorption.

In Singida I met another volunteer who was in my training class. She lives close to the city, and was nice enough to show me around as well as to a cheap guesti where I was able to ditch my bag. I also unloaded a litre of date wine on her. We ran some errands and then went to a compound that was owned by some Chinese guys from Henan who were in Tanzania to lay fibre optic cables for high speed internet. It was really nice to be able to use Mandarin Chinese again, although the first 20 minutes or so my language was a bit off, as I hadn’t had the chance to use any of it for almost six months aside from the two(?) brief phone calls from my folks. An added bonus was that they had green tea, which wasn’t very good tea, certainly not dragonwell or anything, but compared with the crap Tanzanian stores market as green tea was simply heavenly. A further bonus was that we were invited to stick around for dinner. Dinner was, as one would expect, Chinese food: nothing extravagant, just your standard steamed rice, veggies, and meat. The only difference was the veggies were Chinese, and everything was cooked to be eaten by Chinese people (Anyone who doesn’t know what that means should go to a cheap Chinese restaurant and then go to over to their Chinese friends’ for dinner). Oh, and the veggies were grown at their house because Tanzanians don’t seem to grow it…
All in all, by far the best meal I’ve had this year. mmmm…Not only was I full, but it was good food and I was content and had good conversations. I only felt a little awkward because the other volunteer was there at the same time, and she doesn’t know any Chinese.

We spent the night in Singida town, and the next morning I caught an early 7:30 bus to Manyara. After a long and dusty ride I arrived around noon in Manyara, where I met one of the two volunteers I’d be staying with. We walked around her town and caught up, as we hadn’t talked/seen each other since the end of training. Later that day, we hiked to the other volunteer’s site, a 90 minute walk, give or take, mostly uphill, during the hottest part of the day, carrying a rather heavy bag. At least Manyara was much cooler than Dodoma!

Unfortunately there was no power at his site, so I was forced to pumzika (relax) for the rest of the day. Truth be told, I was worn out from walking and the bus ride earlier in the day, and being forced to chill for the rest of the day wasn’t too horrible.

Next day (Wednesday) I got to take a look at the computers, and with my trusty case of tools (assorted screw drivers, forceps, software) this time (unlike last month’s swine flu adventure…). There were 6 computers, two of which turned on. After a day of tinkering around, I was forced to come to the conclusion that 3 power supplies were dead, 2 keyboards were not working, 1 mouse was also broken, at least 4 pieces of RAM were dead, as was a motherboard, and one monitor wasn’t working either. The only real constructive thing I did was to put more RAM into the two computers that did work, and make an inventory of things that needed to get replaced (Unlike Aron’s site, Zach’s didn’t have a back room full of miscellaneous computer hardware of dubious working condition, so there wasn’t much that I could do beyond cataloguing and consolidating.)

Thursday was my software day, where I tried to update some antivirus programs (and install them in the first place!). I really wished I had a SD card reader or a USB flash with an external, physical, read/write locking mechanism, so that I could copy files from my flash without worrying about having them get infected (which would have sped up the process considerably!). Installing the virus scanners was the easy part, the hard part was sitting around for 7+ hours waiting for them to finish scanning. I ended up walking around Zach’s village/area and hanging out with a health volunteer who came to loan Kristin a laptop via dropping it off at Zach’s, which meant after a few hours Kristin walked over and we had a nice pow wow of wazungu.

Friday very early in the morning (5am) I got on a daladala and rode back to Kristin’s site. Beats walking I guess. Spent the rest of the day working on her computers. After 3 days work, I got her lab set up–5 computers, 4 of which were PIIIs (yuck) but 1 was a P4. Also did the standard virus check on all five (which was why it took the extra day…). Saw another PCV who visited for a day, and the following day we all went to Singida, where we spent the night. I left for home the following day, and arrived home late Monday evening.

In retrospect I should’ve probably visited another volunteer and set up a third computer lab, but frankly I was tired of bus rides… Although being at site for the last week has also been quite dull, since my TTC has been on Easter break for most of the time. I’ve been invited to go to Songea to set up a couple of labs, so maybe I’ll explore that option in May when we’re on break again… At least in a week or so I’ll get to see some more people at IST. Too bad it’s in Dodoma though, it seems like I just can’t get away from this region (not that there’s anything wrong with it, I’d just like to see more of Tanzania!).