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.