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.