Where tunakunywa bia

Habari za juoni? How are you tonight?
Nimechoka na rafiki tulikunywa bia. I’m tired and my friends drank beer. More explanation to follow in english.

Another full week of work behind us and a week of vacation ahead. Exciting times. We did a lot of briquetting this week and a lot of kiln burns. Old hat by now. We literally have hundreds of briquettes out drying in the EARD-CI yard right now. Or had as we just gave part of our stash away to two of the groups we’re working with, Vision 4 Youth and the Upendo group in Moivaro. Tucker and I brought the briquette batch to V4Y on Thursday for them to test themselves so they could begin thinking about pricing. But even more exciting, we also gave V4Y a grant to begin their briquetting business. We just funded a start-up. Yeah, we’re pretty legit. We even had a whole grant letter written out with an itemized list of what we wanted them to purchase with the funds. It went over really well until we realized that we had listed one of the parts with measurements in inches. That created a bit of confusion. Ah well, habits are hard to break.

Now, after a full working week, we are taking some time this week to relax and try the touristy side of Tanzania. Anna and Liliana came up from Dar for the weekend and James’ father and brother flew in from New York for the week. It’s quite a full house. Friday we went out to the Mango Tree bar where EMORG was hosting a fundraising trivia night. We defied all American stereotypes and won the trivia game. Sweet. Ok, so we Americans won the first two rounds by ourselves and then we were joined by our 8 European friends (our Dutch house mates plus some of their friends) for the last few rounds and they were quite helpful. And maybe we were 16 people on the team when the other teams only had 4 or 6 members. But hey, it was fun.

Another weekend highlight was a trip to the snake park. Thanks to Emily’s research we arrived on Sunday afternoon, perfectly in time for the weekly feeding. We watched, fascinated, as live chicks were tossed unceremoniously into the snake cages and the snakes sedately slithered their way over to the chirping birds, bit them, and, well, swallowed them. As I learned, eating is quite the process for snakes; some snakes took twenty minutes or more to consume a single chick. As long as I disconnected myself emotionally from the food, it was fine to watch. Emily took a lot of video and we actually found the video more disturbing to watch then the live performance which was interesting. But the main event was the python feeding. The python got a full, fat, live, rabbit to eat. We have plenty of pictures if anyone is really curious but I’d rather not post them here.

Now for the beer. There are four common beers in Tanzania: Serengeti, Kilimanjaro, Safari, and Tusker. We’ve had several discussion in our house about which is the best and if you can even taste the difference. So tonight we hosted a blind beer tasting. Emily, Gerrianne, and I were the pourers and the tally keepers. We decided to give the contestants a taste of all four beers first along with their names to start. Then we had 8 rounds of blind taste testing. After each round, all contestants had to write down their guess and then we’d bring out the next round.

What entertainment! After a few rounds of pouring, we pourers got a little bored. So to spice things up, so to speak, we added some Konyagi (a local alcohol, apparently very bitter/sour/blah) to one cup to see if the recipient would even notice. Nope, no response. Ok, so what will it take to get them to notice? We tried mixing two beers together. Nothing. Ah! Brilliant idea. Let’s add vinegar. We pour a bit of vinegar into each cup, add the beer on top, and swirl it around a bit to mix the contents. That ought to do it. We hand out the cups to our drinkers.

“This foam looks funny,” was the first comment. Damn, on to us already.

“Did you guys mix beers?” Well we’ll answer honestly, nope, no beers are mixed in your cups.

They shrug and sip the beers. No reaction. Some lip smacking, more sipping, but nobody pursues the questioning of the flavor. If we can mix vinegar into beer and have nobody comment on it, just saying, the standards of beer taste need to improve.

In the end, we had a tie for most correct answers: 4 out of 8. Now that’s a fail. As the Mythbusters would say, the myth of the distinctive flavors of Tanzanian beers is Busted. But still, fun to test. Even if the kitchen smelled a bit like a frat basement after the trials and after Emily’s failed attempt at balancing a try of full cups on her head.

On to the next great adventure: safari time!! We plan to head out bright and early tomorrow for our four day safari in Ngorogoro National park and Serengeti. Super exciting!! That’s all for now. Our internet is once again not fit for uploading pictures so I’ll try to upload after we return next weekend. Kwaheri!

Trials of Communication

Communication through the language barrier is a tricky balance between talking down to people and expecting too much of an understanding of English. Heat measurement devices, for instance, are difficult to explain. We were preparing to light our kiln on Friday while a VICOBA meeting took place in the other corner of the yard. Our activity around the kiln proved too much of a fascinating distracting for the meeting attendees and we were soon surrounded by a small and curious crowed. One man began asking questions about our work; what are you doing? Is that going to light? What is this for? I tried to answer as many questions as I could, assisted by Tim, one of the Dutch students who has taken an interested in our briquetting work and knows all about the work we do.

“What’s that?” asked the man, pointing to our heat sensors that we were inserting into the wood shavings.

“That’s for measuring temperature,” explains Tim. A blank look. “To see how hot. For heat. Like a…thermometer? It tells you how much heat there is. Like, uh, how warm?” Gesturing with his hands he trails off.

“Oh, thermocouple. Ok,” the man says nodding.

I swear Tim’s jaw hit the ground. He looked quite taken aback.“Yep. That would be it. That would be the technical term.” Turning to me, “Yeah, didn’t see that one coming. Thermocouple.” Priceless.

At dinner that night, Tim told the story to the group to much laughter. “But Tim,” says Tucker. “The thermocouples say thermocouple right on them, right on the side in bold letters.” Well then. Does this make the interaction better? I don’t know but I’m still giggling.

It was a busy week of kiln burns and briquette making and briquette testing and cooking and wandering around Arusha and lots of planning. On Tuesday we re-plastered the kiln with mud mixed with lime in the hopes of preventing air leaking into the kiln once we seal it up. Our previous burns have produced a lot of ash due, we think, to leakage of air into the kiln through the walls. Lime, which consists of very small particles and is used to make concrete, ideally would prevent our mortar from cracking and would block up any holes in the kiln walls. And our theory worked! The first burn we did on Friday with the new lime plaster produced maybe 5% ash and 5% uncharred wood shavings to 90% charcoal. Sweet. Though the kiln did run for 50 hours and after 50 hours it was still hot. That’s a good sealing job we did.

On Wednesday we had our first official test of briquettes to make food by an authentic Tanzanian cook. Naiomi used 13 briquettes to cook a pot of rice. Positives: the rice cooked (to clarify, by our western standards and by Emily’s standard—she’s Chinese and cooks rice quite often so I’d consider her an authority on the matter—the rice was perfectly cooked through. However, by our cook’s standard and whose standard is the only standard that really matters, the rice was not quite done. Picky.) and there was minimal smoke. Negatives: there was smoke, and the rice took an hour to cook. Just to compare, rice normally takes 20 minutes to cook on a charcoal stove with charcoal. So not really ideal. But the briquettes she used were from all different batches that we had made, many of which had a very high cassava flour content. We think that the high levels of cassava in the briquettes caused them to smoke excessively and to burn less efficiently. So we have another batch of dry, low cassava content briquettes for Naiomi to try on Wednesday. Fingers crossed these work…

James and I had another meeting with Vision 4 Youth on Friday to talk about kiln design and the carbonization process. The group is excited to get started on their operation; funding is the only thing holding them back. After our meeting, James and I met up with the rest of our household for a night free of dish washing. Eating out is the best.

Saturday, big shower day! Clean hair feels oh so wonderful. The four of us headed into Arusha to attend the official opening of the library that we helped to paint last week. Lots of introductions, followed by speeches, half in English, half in Swahili. During the meeting, I offered a soda to a Muslim girl who was fasting for Ramadan. I felt so rude. Many apologies. Then home to a delicious Dutch dinner of mashed potato and veggies, a meat sauce, and fresh salad.

Sunday we spent the morning working on the kiln and in the afternoon Emily and I went to the Usa market. (For the second time this week. We run through veggies ridiculously fast.) To give you a sense of the prices, we bought 9 fresh bananas and 3 perfectly ripe avocados, also as fresh as you can get, for $1 USD. That’s the normal price here. Wonderful. And delicious. At 4:30 we started cooking dinner and didn’t finish until 8:15. Our finished product: 45 chapati, a veggie sauce/soup with coconut milk, and an egg, spinach, and tomato dish. It went over quite well!

Burning stuff and pressing the burned stuff was the order of the day for Monday and Tuesday. Lots of pressing. We made over 200 briquettes on Tuesday. Sweet!

Somewhere in the week we also managed to squeeze in a viewing of Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom. The music is stuck in all our heads.

Also fun fact, not that I’m keeping a tally or anything, I have received 4 offers of marriage to date. How ever will I choose? Two teachers, a rather inebriated man on a dala-dala who professed his love and asked me to “say you love me.” Get off. And the fourth a friend of our neighbor. This last man spoke almost no English and his sentiments were expressed through our neighbor acting as translator. “He says he’d like to learn about the work you’re doing and how to make charcoal and he is also looking for a fiancé. He likes you a lot.” Tucker has kindly offered to act as a stand in husband for the future. Now that will be fun to act out. I wonder how you say "Hell no" in Swahili. That will be the next word to learn. Right after thermocouple.

Out to dinner with the group! 

Making chapati with Emily. Quite the operation.

Unloading the kiln with Tucker. I stuck my hand into the bucket to check the
temperature. Yup, it was hot.

Shoveling!

Briquettes out to dry. We're getting better, our newest batches don't crumble
so much.

Just another work day in Tanzania.

New Rafiki!

Ever wonder where your donated clothes go? That free t-shirt you got from your high school’s football team which you never wore anyways or that long sleeved Abercrombie shirt you never really liked. Or perhaps those old soccer cleats, a little worn on the spikes but still functional. We’ve found them all. And then some. Men wear Yankees baseball caps; I’ve passed one man wearing a Michigan cap (I was tempted to shout ‘Go Blue!’ to him but I reconsidered and thought perhaps maybe that wouldn’t go over so well) and one man wearing a shirt commemorating the Red Sox winning some pennant or other. Young woman walk by me on the street wearing Abercrombie and Fitch shirts, looking a little dusty but in good condition, or wearing worn t-shirts with writing so faded I can’t make it out. It’s a perfect combination of cultures: American t-shirts on top and colorful wrapped skirts on the bottom. So far from home, and yet, so similar.

Speaking of home, we have new house mates! As I mentioned earlier, the four of us are living in a rented house with five bedrooms, a gas stove (a very big deal around here), flush toilet, and running water (most of the time). The first comment from our housemates upon walking around the house, “Are we still in Africa?” Yeah, I wonder the same thing sometimes. Sure, dinners are a bit of a squeeze, but totally worth it. These guys are awesome. Tim, Dennis, Meral, and Gerrianna are four students from the Netherlands. The first three are first year masters students at University College Utrecht and the fourth is a second year at the college. They are doing a school field course on East Africa for the summer. For four weeks they traveled around Tanzania and a bit of Kenya doing various home stays and learning about culture and development. Now the group (originally of 23) have split up and are doing internships around East Africa. These four are working with EARD-CI (our partner organization), two on cultural tourism and two on community banks.

Their second night here we played peeon for a few hours. The next night the eight of us crowded around a computer screen to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Last night they cooked pancakes for dinner and we played Resistance (my favorite group card game. Involved lots of accusations and yelling and deceit.) for hours. Between events, we’ve talked about life in the Netherlands, discussed technology and its role in society now and into the future, debated the merits of different ways of getting energy in the slums of Nairobi, discussed gender roles, and talked a lot about the East African experience. Something tells me this whole housing situation is going to work out quite well.

We've worked out a cooking schedule where we cook dinner on alternating nights for the eight of us which can be quite the undertaking in the small kitchen. Last night was their night to cook so Tim and Gerriane made stacks Dutch pancakes to be served with avocado, beans, jam, tomato, onion, and sugar. Avocado and beans are exactly typical Dutch, but hey, we’re all about mixing culture here. So yummy.

Tim, Gerrianna, and Dennis working on the pancakes.

One stack. Ok, actually the only stack we ever really had as we kind of
devoured the other pancakes as they came off the skillet.

Meral and Emily waiting for more pancakes.

Besides the new housemates, we’ve had quite the productive project week. On Tuesday, the Vision 4 Youth group came out to our space at EARD-CI to check out the briquetting operation we’ve set up. We walked them through the process of making briquettes from collecting and drying the biomass, to using our kiln to turning it into charcoal, to making a sticky mixture of charcoal dust and cassava flour, to pressing the mixture into briquettes and letting them dry. Judging by the laughs and the questions and the ideas on how they would improve various aspects of the presses, I’d say they really enjoyed the session and learned a lot from it. Success! We are going to continue to work with them and help them to set up their own operation on some land they have in Arusha. Very exciting.

Talking about our kiln and charcoal production with the group.

Working on pressing briquettes.

As soon as that group left, the four of us headed out to Moivaro, a small community a 20 minute dala-dala ride away, where we met up with, Sossy, a pastor from the village. Last summer’s DHE Tanzania group had met him quite spontaneously on a dala-dala ride and had done two short teaching sessions with the women he works with last summer. We met with Sossy and four of the woman who were part of the original briquetting group in Sossy’s center that he had built. We quickly learned, with Sossy as our translator, that the briquettes had completely failed the women’s cooking tests and they had since abandoned the operation. Yikes. But Sossy was eager to hear what new technology these four ambassadors from America had brought to Tanzania, a new fuel perhaps or something more exciting. James spent the succeeding fifteen minutes in a rather circular conversation explaining that, yes, we are still working with briquettes but this time they are different because they have charcoal with makes them burn much better and, no, we have no other technologies to teach. It was interesting how much Sossy expected us, the Americans, to swoop in and solve their problems for them. Once we had all sorted out exactly what DHE had to offer, the women still seemed a little skeptical of our briquetting offer and justifiably so as the briquettes they had made hadn’t worked out at all. We offered to make enough of our charcoal briquettes to bring to ten of the woman in the group for them to try to cook a meal on the briquettes as a test. If the women like the briquettes, we’ll be happy to teach them our new method for briquetting. This was an agreeable proposition for all.

The press the Moivaro women were using.

Through our conversation, we also learned that the average monthly wage for the workers in the greenhouses (the main employer in the area) in this community is 80,000 tsh. That’s $50 per month. The woman said they spend 45,000 tsh per month on fuel for cooking. Cooking fuel is more than half their monthly wage. Do you even know how much you spend on cooking fuel? I certainly don’t. For us it’s so negligible we don’t even think about it; it get all wrapped up with the electricity bill or the gas bill. Here, gathering firewood is illegal and charcoal is trucked in from farther and farther away as the government tries to discourage the production of charcoal to preserve the forests. Charcoal prices are rising and sometimes children are asked to wiggle through the fence surrounding a nearby hotel to forage for sticks in the hotel’s forest—dangerous due to the snakes and the security guards. It seems the government, in its valiant, and honestly necessary, effort to slow rampant deforestation, has left many woman like those in Moivaro without alternatives for the daily task of cooking food. Hopefully, if the woman are impressed by our briquettes, we’ll be able to spend more time with them to teach them the tricks we’ve learned about fuel production to make cheap, clean, and successful briquettes. I think a lofty, but attainable goal.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were three more work days, unpacking the kiln, loading it up again, lighting it, making a briquette mixture with the haul of charcoal from the kiln and cassava porridge (we’re getting quite adept at making cassava porridge), pressing the briquettes, and leaving them to dry. We get into a rhythm and it’s actually quite enjoyable.

The four Dutch students arrived Wednesday (can I gush a little more and say how awesome they are?) and on Saturday two of their fellows from their field course who are interning in the Nairobi slums came down to visit for the weekend. On their bus down to Arusha, the rope that was holding all the luggage on the roof of the bus broke, and all the luggage flew off into the road. You always wonder if that ever happens. Well I guess it does.

We spent the weekend playing Resistance, reading (Hunger games is being passed around and devoured by everyone), walking, and generally relaxing. Now the sun is shining, my laundry is drying (clean underwear! Woohoo!), the road beyond our house has been explored (Emily and I took a nice long walk this morning to see what we could see. Lots of corn.), and Mt Meru is out in all its towering glory. Beautiful. A good way to pass a lazy Sunday.

I hope avocado is one of those miracle foods because I may soon turn green from all the fresh avocado I’m eating.

Mzungu! Mzungu!

“Mzungu! Mzungu!” Yes, thank you, I do realize that I am a white foreigner. No need to point that out to me with a tone of surprise.  Fine, when we’re struggling to communicate where we want to go in the Dala-dala in our broken Swahili (ok, more then broken. More like shattered.) and we make complete fools of ourselves, laughing at the silly wazungus is what should happen. I mean we sound ridiculous. But on every street corner, all the way down the street, the catcalls and the looks get old real fast. This is a situation I have never been in before and it has been quite an, shall I say, interesting experience for me. In all the places I have been in my life, I have never been so completely in the ethnic minority and stood out so prominently in a crowd. But hey, at least drunk guys on the dala-dala don’t discriminate between mzungu and Tanzanian. Dude, get off my shoulder. The affection is not mutual.

In between the always thrilling dala-dala rides, this has been quite a busy week. Now that we have the kiln up and running, we have been spending much of our days collecting biomass, burning biomass, mixing that biomass-turned-charcoal with cassava flour, and pressing that mixture into fuel briquettes. We have set up our own production site to make the charcoal and briquettes so that we can be confident in the technology before we present it to others. Hopefully by the end of the week, we’ll have a production process and briquettes which we can confidently share with other groups. We strive for perfection.

The briquettes we’re making are a mixture of charcoal dust produced from rice husk, wood shavings, sawdust, and corn husk (really whatever biomass stuff we can get our hands on. And the looks we get from Tanzanians when we ask for their leftovers. You want what? To take my rotting wood scraps? Well ok…) and a cassava flour mixture which acts as a glue and holds the briquettes in their shape. Interesting fact, that cassava glue that we’re using is what makes up Ugali, a local dish, that is cassava paste served with mboga, veggies. It is literally a starchy glue. Yum. (But actually, I think it’s quite tasty.)

When we fired up the kiln we noticed that the dirt on top was
quite hot. So we buried some potatoes in it to cook. They came
out well though we did have to boil them a little extra.

Emily pressing briquettes! With Naomie keeping watch behind her.

The technical work has been the constant throughout the week. Between work sessions, we’ve had several meetings and also met some new friends from down the street. On Wednesday, James and I met with this awesome organization that works with youth, aged secondary school through university, to teach entrepreneurship skills, family planning, and communication skills. Vision 4 Youth has a group of seven university aged students interested in starting a briquetting business. And here we are, a group of university students, offering to teach briquetting. How perfect! As James talked about what we as DHE were doing in Tanzania and how we could run training sessions, the look on the woman’s face went from interested to pleased to straight up overwhelmed at the prospect of what we were offering to do. She seemed thrilled!

On Friday we went back to Vision 4 Youth to meet with some of the interested students. Iit turns out the operation and the tools they want to shoot for are nothing like what we’ve worked with in the past. It’s the difference between the stone age and the industrial age. Makes sense really, as they are an urban based group while we’ve been thinking almost exclusively about rural settings. (Our funding comes from an organization interested in the lives of rural families so we’re going to have to spin this group and somehow make our impact relate to rural families. Should be fun.) But Vision 4 Youth recognizes that they have to start small so we’ll show them our ancient technology for pressing fuel and see what they think. I think we still have a lot to offer so we’ll see how this pans out.

Fourth of July came and went with a small dinner celebration at home with time spent watching the sun set over Mt. Meru. [Side note: Day changes to night so abruptly it makes timing the sunset very tricky. You’d think it’d be easy to catch as the sun sets exactly at 6:45 every day without fail, but it only lasts for about 5 minuets. At 6:30 it’s sunny and light out then by 6:50 it’s pitch black. Boom. Light to dark. No in between.]

Fourth of July on our porch. Strange celebrating without fireworks.

Emily and I dressed in our aprons for cooking!

With Saturday came a much anticipated work break. We piled into a dala-dala and headed to Arusha for a cooking class which we arrived for right on Tanzanian time (otherwise considered half an hour late). Hakuna shida, no problems. Zainab took us to her home where we learned how to cook ugali, mboga, a pea sause, rice pilau, and chapati. Drying laundry dangled over our heads and little kids scampered in and out of the tiled courtyard in which we cooked, disappearing into the darkened interiors of rooms leading off of the narrow open space. The food was delicious. It is a mark of how satisfyingly and deliciously filling the food is in Tanzania that I’ve been eating the same four dishes every day for nearly a month and I’m not sick of it yet. In fact, I still very much enjoy rice and beans. There is something very comforting about walking into a street-side restaurant and knowing exactly what options they’ll have (rice, ugali, or chips served with veggies and your choice of meat or fish) and knowing exactly what’ll you’ll eat so that when the waiter inevitably asks for your order the moment your bottom hits the thin plastic chair, you’ll be ready. Anyway, the cooking class was excellent.

Emily rolling out chapati. Yum! I see lots of homemade chapti in our future...

Saturday night we went out to see Monsters University. Talk about a culture shock. Squeezing off the crowded dala-dala into the popcorn scented movie theater was a little jarring to say the least. Needless to say were were surrounded by mzungus in the theater. But hey, fabulously hilarious movie.

Sunday was another work day, firing up the kiln, and making more charcoal. The four of also took a few hours break to have lunch at our new friends’ house down the street. The four sisters, aged 12 to mid-twenties, are staying in a house owned by their mother (who isn’t there right now, she’s living back in their village) for school break. All speak English quite well (lucky, otherwise it would have been a very fleeting friendship) and are very generous and welcoming. Over lunch, we learned about the over 120 different tribes in Tanzania and the different occupations the girls want to pursue after school. And of course we played with the eldest sister’s baby who is 3 months and adorable. We promise to stay in touch when they return to school this week.

Our friends! After having lunch at their place, we invited them over for American/Chinese fare for dinner: chicken, pasta,
and an egg dish. I don't think they were huge fans of the food but they are too polite to say so. Ah well.

Monday we painted a library. It looks quite good if I do say so myself. Didas started EMORG, his organization, in 2011 to build this center consisting of a library, several classrooms, and a place to instruct teachers. Even though the place hasn’t officially opened yet, the tables in the library were already full of students studying as we painted outside. In the government schools, there can be as many as 80 or 90 students in one class. Not grade, classroom. With a single teacher. Then students head home to a house crowded with, say, six siblings and no text book of their own and attempt to study. Challenging to say the least. Didas has stocked the library with school textbooks for kids to come to have a quiet place to study or even read for pleasure. It is a wonderful vision and it’s in a pretty epic location as well. The library is the last building in the village before the vast expanse of the plains. Flat topped trees and several oversized mounds, too small and too abrupt to be hills, jut out of the surrounding landscape. It is beautiful.

The back of the library. Lookin' good. Rolly brushes for painting are so. much. fun.

I was just starting a coat on the final wall of the building when I heard the faint sound of buzzing. Rapidly the buzzing grew to a roaring drone. I look up and along the side of the building and there, 20 feet away and closing fast was a gigantic swarm of bees. You know those flocks of birds which all land in a single tree and then spontaneously erupt into the sky in a black cloud of bird? The bees were like that. They made a beeline right for the edge of the building which I quickly scooted around. Just after I rounded the corner I turned to watch the swarm pour past, hovering at a very constant 7 feet off the ground (I could judge this quite accurately as I measured it off of Tucker’s head conveniently located at a little over 6 feet above ground). Loud, dark, mesmerizing, and terrifying. Especially when Didas started talking about swarms taking down large mammals. Shudder.

I was swarmed again on the walk back to the dala-dala station but this time by much less threatening, though more talkative, creatures. Village kids wanted to try my sunglasses, touch my hair, and play with my camera. All with accompanied by a stream of Swahili. I’ll just nod and smile. I have not a clue what you’re saying but you are really cute.

And now it is midnight. How in the world did that happen. This week promises lots more opportunities for getting dirty and hopefully a chance to actually do laundry. My clean underwear pile is dwindling. Hopefully. Karibu! Welcome! 

Dala-dalas na getting dirty

How many people can you fit in a dala-dala?
Answer: One more. Plus a chicken.

Dala-dalas are the main mode of public transportation in Tanzania. All the dala-dalas seem to operate more or less individually with very little group organization. A dala-dala is, in essence  a retrofitted van. Start with a 15 passenger van. Now rip out the huge cushy seats and replace them with four rows of small, plastic-cushioned chairs. In front of the first row, throw in an extra bench for people to sit facing backwards. Then raise the ceiling by a foot and you've got a dala-dala. Every dala-dala has one driver and one guy in charge of payment and advertising the ride by beckoning out the window and sometimes forcible pulling you toward the vehicle. Then there are the passengers. Fill up the seats. Fill the bench. Squeeze two or three passengers next to the driver. All this extra aisle space? What a waste. Push 'em in, fill it up. Passengers pile in and stand, bracing themselves on seat-backs, leaning precariously over seated passengers. Babies get passed around depending on whether the mother managed to snag a seat. Bring you chickens along, why not. And just when the van is stuffed to over flowing and the conductor has left the sliding door open so that he can hang on to the outside, right when the mass of people on board could not possible compress anymore, the dala-dala stops and one more passenger pushes on board.

It sounds insanely dangerous but I fully believe that if the dala-dala were to come to an abrupt stop or hang a sharp left turn, we'd all be perfectly fine as there's no physical way for anyone to move in any direction, we're wedged so tightly in.

The record so far: 30 people at one time. Plus a large spider on the roof.

A photo taken very surreptitiously of the inside of a dala-dala.
And this wasn't even at the peak capacity. 

Besides the transportation, the rest of Arusha has also been quite exciting. We have set up our base in the community of Leganga and have figured out the layout of the surrounding area pretty well. On Monday we met with the director of EARD-CI, an NGO which DHE (wow, that was a lot of acronyms) has worked with in the past. EARD-CI is an organization which has established several community banks (called VICOBAS) with the purpose of improving the lives of rural families through affordable credit. They have kindly allowed us to use their lawn space to do our technical development and on occasion toss a frisbee as a break. As we were talking to Niaomie, the assistant director of the NGO, she mentioned, oh by the way, we have an empty house just across the street that we rent out to our interns and it's open right now. Interested? Hell yes! Now the four of us are living in a house just across the street from where we'll be working for the summer. There is even a shower (a bit nippy, but functional), a flush toilet (that usually flushes if you pray hard enough), and, best part, a full kitchen with a stove.

Since we have these superb amenities, a very important order of business was a trip to the market. A 10 minute dala-dala ride (only 22 people) brought us to Tengero market. We wandered through entire streets over crowded with tables and blankets filled only with shoes (I have never seen so many shoes in one place. Seriously, better than a shoe store.), rows of mboga (vegetables) and dried beans, and interspersed throughout everything were tables overflowing with various buckets and cooking supplies. People and things and more people were everywhere. And the requisite speeding motorcycles. How they manage to get up that much speed in a crowded market...Emily and I went off to load up on vegetables to varying degrees of success. Our attempt at purchasing beans (mind you, this is all in Swahili) was straight up laughed at by a older woman passing by. Samahani, apologies for not knowing exactly what each of the fifteen different colored beans are. Still don't know what they are, but the purple ones are tasty.

Fresh veggies for cooking! 

Thursday: time to get our hands (and pants) dirty. During our meeting with Naomie on Tuesday, she pointed out a space in the EARD-CI yard where we could construct our tanuru, our kiln for making charcoal. [warning: science ahead.] The idea behind the kiln is to produce charcoal out of waste biomass (grass, husks, etc) which can then be pressed into briquettes. By first pyrolyzing biomass (heating up the biomass in the absence of oxygen) and turning it into charcoal, the remaining carbon structure of the material will burn cleaner when burned in a cook stove. Now you might wonder (or maybe not but it's good to know anyway) what about the detrimental effect of the emissions released from the kiln during pyrolysis? Does it matter that the biomass is being pre-burned and converted into charcoal before being used as fuel in a cook stove? There are two main reasons for making charcoal in this manner for the briquettes (besides the fact that consumers prefer charcoal briquettes). First, we have designed our kiln to allow the syngas (gasses including hydrogen, oxides, and others) produced by the burning biomass to undergo complete combustion before leaving the kiln. In other words, when making the charcoal we burn away the harmful emissions. If the biomass were burned straight in a cookstove, it could release that carbon monoxide and other gasses in the syngas into the space where the cook is breathing. Secondly, biomass in the form of charcoal is much more energy dense than un-carbonized biomass making it a more appealing form for cooks who want to spend less time tending their fire.

The science is great in theory but our goal is to make it great in practice. Thursday afternoon was beautifully sunny and perfect for mixing mortar (also called mud) with our fingers, smearing that mud over bricks and our clothing, and building our kiln up, up, up. Five hours, many pictures, and several wheel barrows of dirt later we had a kiln. Fire and biomass will go in and charcoal (hopefully) will come out. Or alternatively, as Naomie pointed out, fire and dough could go in and homemade bread could come out. Another very tempting option we should look into.

Me, Tucker, and Emily in the EARD-CI yard.

Building, building building.

Building the kiln! 

Finished! For now...

Friday was a slow day, we did some errands, worked on reports (jeeze, I think there is a full blown dog fight going on in the street right now. Wow. Anyway.), and spent time playing frisbee with some kids on the soccer field. They were quite amused with my camera when I handed it to them to play with and they even took a few great shots (among many shots of the dirt and grimy fingers covering the sky).

Me and some of our frisbee friends. They loved the camera.

On Saturday and Sunday we took a weekend vacation into the nearby town of Moshi. We got to our hotel and spent some time on the balcony looking for Kilimanjaro among the clouds. Nowhere to be seen. But then, look up, above the clouds and there it is, towering over the city, a majestic, snow-capped mountain. Wow. It's big. Like really big.

Mt. Meru, Kilimenjaro's little sister. Still, it towers over us.

On Sunday we took a guided hike up in the foothills of Kilimanjaro where we sampled many differed beverages (although that was not the intent of the excursion). We walked to our guide's home where he showed us the coffee making process and made some for us to sample (delicious.) and then on through family farms of banana, coffee, passion fruit, avocado (which grow on really tall trees. Couldn't figure out how they pick them.), tomato, spinage, peach, and uka all mixed up together. Eventually we came to a waterfall, had a quick swim (well some of us anyway. Emily and I opted to practice our Swahili with a boy who was following us instead), and hiked back. Along the way we stopped at a shack for the local brew: banana beer. Banana plus millet. Not recommended. A little further on, a small shop selling banana wine in beer bottles (actually you could see under the label that they were once Heineken bottles) which our guide encouraged us to try. Sour. I'll stick to my mango juice and solid bananas. An excellent weekend all around.

Kids on the hike. Helped us make coffee.

At the waterfall!

Also at the waterfall.

What the woman here are able to carry on their heads
is just incredible. Many carry buckets loaded with fruits
which look quite heavy. Their posture is impeccable.
Emily and I tried practicing conceled within the walls
at home. I think we'll stick with handles for now.

Finally, today we actually made a fire in our kiln. Gypsy queen skills to the fire making rescue. We really got it blazing. And smoking. Ok, so not perfect. We're going to have to make a few adjustments tomorrow. Actually a lot of adjustments. But, hey, science.

Gold star if you've read this far. Happy July (and Canada day) to all!

And Obama arrived today. He says hi.