Dear Friends,
I am writing my second update from the second floor bar of the Tilapia Hotel overlooking Lake Victoria. The breeze is warm, the view stunning, and the beer cold. I am not quite sure about the Afro-techno music videos but 3 out of 4 ain’t bad.
As usual, the time at Imani VTC has flown by. Sophie and Amandine have been frustrated by our elusive Black Soldier Flies although they have set up an extensive network of traps which comprise rotten tomatoes in the plastic storage boxes that we shipped the hand tools in two years ago. Even though the boxes have been labelled and decorated by Amandine in Swahili, our most promising box got dumped by the gardener who thought the rotting tomatoes were just more trash. We are putting a bounty out on the flies this week in the hope that the students can find a secret stash to start our colony.
In the meantime, Amandine has been very successful in growing and transplanting the local variety of cherry tomato collected on the “tomato runs” into some surplus shipping boxes. It is our hope that these will provide nutritious snacks for the students and dissuade them from pilfering un-ripe produce from the garden. We want to compare the local variety to some hybrid types from North America, but this experiment may have to wait for next year.
Sophie has spent a lot of time compiling video she and Olivier have been taking of their experience and we hope to upload some of this after she has edited out the most embarrassing segments. The pieces I have seen didn’t cause me any concern, but she is rightly applying the adage that internet uploads are forever. We hope to incorporate some of these video clips into the newly created Imani VTC web site (www.imanivtc.com).
The web site has been a long-standing deficiency of our project and I am infinitely grateful to Greg John for finally get us on the web. It is very much under-development as we add content in consultation with the sisters. They are very supportive, but this is new territory for them and we want them to feel comfortable with their interface to the digital world. Sophie and Amandine are helping to build the picture content as they wait for their wadudus, so check it out as it advances.
Joe and Olivier have also been exploring new personal frontiers as they fabricate the first of the rocket stoves. They have been working with our metal fabrication shop and adjusting the design as issues develop that weren’t mentioned in the U-Tube videos. There is a lot of interest in these stoves, both at Imani and elsewhere, as cooking fuel becomes scarcer and scarcer. I am noticing that my premonitions from previous years are really becoming noticeable in the local community.
Two weeks ago we went on a short safari to the Ngorongoro crater with a stop at a Maasai village for lunch. We got an extended visit in the small boma which was the enclosure of one Maasai hearder, his four wives, a dozen children, and the family’s cows and goats. Apparently my jumping skills have not improved since my last visit to a Maasai village, so I would still be single in their culture. Given the four wives, this might be a good thing.
Last weekend was spent at a large farm on the slopes of West Kilimanjaro. The farm is run by a first generation, Tanzanian-born, son of a Dutch family who bought the farm in 1980. They have over 6000 acres of wheat and seed been crops and are a major supplier to one of the breweries and a large commercial bakery. They also have a large market garden and raise their own beef. While the kids decided to cook their own food, I splurged on dinners prepared at the lodge and had some of the best beef I have eaten anywhere. This is definitely a worth-while stop for our rotary group next year.
Last week at Imani was a little crazy as the school raced to prepare the new guest quarters for Guido Kuemin, his wife Verena , and four friends from Switzerland. Guido has been supporting Imani since before I started coming and much of the new infrastructure is due to his generosity. In the same week Rene Mueller and his wife Josie were also in Moshi. Rene, through his NGO, Waterkiosk, provided the new domestic water infrastructure Ted and I worked on in 2014. We continue to cooperate with Waterkiosk, sharing resources and expertise, in support of each other’s projects. I have taken Rene and Josie up on their offer to stay with them in Zurich on the way back to Canada this year, and if the weather cooperates, I am hoping for one early season ski day.
Leaving Moshi on Friday, I arrived in Mwanza around noon, and decided to try the “local” transport from the airport. Just beyond the guarded gate of the airport (complete with mandatory green-fatiqued private security with AK-47s) is the local dala-dala bus stop. The Toyota Hi-ace was waiting, door wide open and a big smiling face welcoming me to join them. In very un-daladala fashion there were only two of us to start, but we quickly added 23 passengers (12 legal, 11 not so much). I repaired one purse strap, got an offer of a safari guide and got spat on by one baby, all for 500 TZS (about 30 cents). All in all, a lot of country flavour for 1/50 the price of a tourist taxi.
I met Bartolomeo, my project manager for the Rotary project on Ukerewe Island as well as Shu Bwire, David Beking and the rest of the CACHA Shirati medical mission. Shu and David have a very interesting business opportunity which we hope to incorporate into the Community development project on Ukerewe. It is still in its infancy, but if it works out should be a great combination of philanthropy and business investment. Stay tuned.
Today we are again hanging at Tilapia. Shu stayed for lunch while setting up my accommodations on Ukerewe, and I am meeting with two other Tanzanian friends this afternoon. One is the nephew of our patron, Bishop Lukanima, who we lost two years ago. The other is a young woman sponsored by the Rotary club of Moshi, who has grown into a young leader in the local community and continues to give back in the same spirit that was extended to her. She has extensive experience in micro-finance with one of the local banks and I hope she can provide us some guidance with the financial institution we are working on for Ukerewe.
Tomorrow we leave the luxury of Mwanza for the simple pleasures of Ukerewe (cold showers, warm beer, and fresh Lake Victoria Tilapia). It is with great regret that I will not see my friend Stephan Cesca, the French pisiciculturiste. Apparently Tanzanian Immigration Authorities and his business partner were not able to see their way around government red tape, and he was sent back to France. This is a huge loss for the island, and I hope that he can eventually return to carry out the fish farming that he was so passionately pursuing.
As in the past, I will have to stay in Nansio, the capital city on the island as there is no accommodation at the site of our project at Kabuhinzi. I have been keeping the yoga up in preparation for the 45 minute roller coaster ride on the back of the BodaBoda motorcycle taxi. One week of this will cure any middle-aged desire to own a motorcycle.
In addition to completing our work at the Kabuhinzi school, we will be investigating a permanent base of operations for the next phase of our community involvement. This will likely be in Murutunguru which is the largest village in the ward which includes the Kabuhinzi school. We will be laying the ground work for the next phase of my Rotary Club’s Signature project and there are some really exciting developments which I will save for the next update.
Peter