Apple announced great news for tired air travelers and harried flight attendants today:

Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power to charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.

This kind of news makes you want to go out and jump on an airplane but we won’t start seeing planes with this feature until mid 2007.

Read more

If you have ever had a hotel bed that seemed all oddly lumpy, the problem may not have been caused by the hotel chain. It might have been caused by the crowd at the Hotel Bed Jumping HQ. You can go here to post you pictures of hotel bed jumping. What’s next? Hotel towel stealing HQ?

I added an article on an adventure from our trip to Spain on ezinearticles.com

travel

day 1

day 2

day 3

Game Parks

day 4

day 5

day 6

Selian Hospital

day 7

Kikarara

day 8

day 9

day 10

day 11

Timaini University

day 12

day 13

day 14

MAASAE Girl’s School

day 15

New Life Band

day 16

travel

day 17

day 18

We only had some cleanup to do on the chapel project before the bus from JM Tours arrived at 10am. We drove through Arusha to the MAASAE Girls’ School. It is not the Maasai Girls’ School as I had been saying. We learned that by law the school cannot have more than 75% of the students from one tribe so it is the Maa Speakers Advanced Education school. The school provides secondary education for girls from the Maasai and some other pastoral tribes.

We stopped in town to pick up some school supplies as a gift and got to the school at around 11am. All of the girls in the school are sponsored and 2 of the ladies in the group are sponsoring a girl. Those two girls plus other girls sponsored by others at our church came out to greet us and to help lead our tour. This added greatly to the enjoyment of the tour. We also heard the girls’ choir sing which was wonderful.

We learned that the acceptance of the school has grown greatly since the school opened about a decade ago. The reluctance to see the daughters educated has decreased now that some have returned as nurses, teachers and even 3 lawyers.

We walked into a computer class in their fairly well appointed computer lab (Windows 98 era machines). My expectations to what it would mean to teach a computer class in Tanzania was reset. The lesson we heard was how to turn on and off the machine. Oh yeah, these kids grew up in a boma and did not start using the mouse by age 2 like mine.

The other problem that they have had at the school is that most of the girls have no experience with flush toilets and use too much force when flushing and break the toilets in the dorms. So they have pit toilets for the girls to use as a backup. They are more comfortable with these toilets because they find the idea of going to bathroom in the same place you sleep unhygienic. This seems odd to me as most of them were used to sleeping in a house made largely of cow dung. The chaplain also said that they clean their own dorms but their standards of clean are not the same for similar reasons.

The chaplain at the school is Jean Wolstrom who is from the Seattle area. She and her husband Marv have been here for 8 years. Marv was the only teacher for the first few days of Tumaini University because the school had to wait months for approval to open. When they finally got the green light to open their doors they learned on a Sunday that they could open the next day.

When we asked Jean what she missed from the United States he answer was Starbucks, bookstores and sugar-free Jello. They still follow their Mariners via the internet (although their connection is 500 baud which is unimaginable to me.)

We visited the home of the Jean and Marv which is a round house about 1000 square feet but very cool looking with a spiral staircase in the middle to a half loft second story. They have hooked up a battery backup system so they can be watching a movie when all of their neighbors are without power.

They recommended a restaurant in town that they go to when they need a break from African food. They called a friend “CG” in town to get the number. CG acts as a central information clearing house for the American

Expats in Northern Tanzania.

We got a little more insight into the Maasai and Tanzanian AIDS problem in conversations at the girls school. We learned that the Maasai husband expects sex every night (and beatings were mentioned earlier if a wife resisted). It makes me think that polygamy may have been the women’s idea. This also seems to be why teachers and nurses may have higher rates of AIDS as they often have to take a job away from home and apparently the ideas of abstinence and faithfulness are very foreign.

After a wonderful stay we returned to Arusha and shopped at the ShopRite shopping center for snacks, beverages, spices for tea, etc. This is the place where the wazungu shop and I have not seen so many white people for some time. Some also went into the Stiggybucks for their fancy coffee and ran into CG from the previous paragraph.

We dined as the only diners at Frame Tree. It is a very expensive restaurant by Tanzanian standards. With wine and dessert it came to about $20 a person before tip. But we had a wonderful dinner of steak, calamari, pasta, etc. The food was wonderful.

We returned to the seminary where I was soundly beaten at Scrabble.

We were surprised when we got up that the power was out again. It was supposed to be out Tuesday and Friday from 7am-7pm but Thursday apparently was thrown in as a bonus. This put a crimp in our plans to use a power drill today or the internet.

Breakfast (again) consisted of a hard-boiled egg, sausage and bread and the group is starting to have some serious cravings for chocolate frosted sugar bombs. We were pleasantly surprised that our two Tanzanian “helpers” had gotten all of the screen installed the day before after all the wazungo got out of their way. We got most of the louvers installed by morning tea time (11am) and almost all installed by lunch. The power came back on mid-day which moved things along. Other workers are working on the roof at the same time so there is quite the cacophony.

I was able to connect my computer to the computer lab and check on my mail.

We worked until about 4pm when we were given a tour of the brand new lower campus that turned Makumira (swamp) seminary into Timaini (hope) University. It is quite modern and still under construction. Some of the classrooms are now in use and the students will move into the dorms after Winter break.

We were then treated to tea by a professor and his wife. It included a wonderful assortment of spice ginger tea, cookies, cake, peanuts, and sopas.

It was good enough to render the group speechless and we know how hard that is to do to a group of Americans. It is noticeable how quiet the average Tanzanian is versus the average American. We have been told that when you speak loudly here people assume you are angry. It does make it more difficult to understand even the Swahili that I learned because thy talk quietly and quickly.

Dinner in the cafeteria has taken on a very familiar look as the Tanzania food is good but has much less variety. We were serenaded by a videotape of MTV or BET playing at a high volume so we did not have as

much conversation.

Our evening again consisted of more internet time and visiting. We played some more Scrabble and then went to sleep to rest our sore muscles. I had been doing a lot of hand drilling on the tops of windows so could not lift my arms without complaint.

We got up and had breakfast at 7:30 (I woke at 5:30am again) to continue work on adding screens to the chapel windows. The morning went fairly quickly and making the screens went quickly all day but we had some quality control problems with the screens that made the installation take more work. Towards the end of the day we got an extension cord so we could use a power drill on the hard wood of the wood frames. So we hope tomorrow will go more quickly.

I tried to connect my computer in the computer lab but it fails to get an IP address. I can’t use the computers that are there because you need an account and password.

I won the scrabble game.

With a very early start (4:30am) and a modified strategy I was able to catch up on my email in less than 3 hours. Also in the 6 hours of internet connectivity I was able to chat with everyone in my family which was even better.

We left the hotel at 9am for the Makumira seminary which is part of the larger Lutheran University between Arusha and the Kilimanjaro airport.

We stopped briefly at the bank and a small grocery store on the way. They had expected us on Monday and it did not seem that our message that we were delayed had made it to everyone involved. The guys are staying in an empty faculty house and the women in the guest house. We met the bursar and had tea and introductions first. We then had a tour from Anne, a German missionary who has been at Makumira for 6 years.

Both she and her husband are pastors. Her husband is in Dar Es Salam this week so we will not meet him. Lunch at the old cafeteria followed lunch. They have opened a new cafeteria within the last week. The campus used to only be a seminary but law, music, and education majors have been added within the last few years and the school is growing rapidly.

After lunch some of us had tea at Anne’s house while we waited for the end of the lunch break at 2:30pm. When I asked Anne the hardest thing to get use to in Tanzania she had to think for a bit. She decided it was learning to deal with authority in Tanzania. She’d worked for someone who may not have known as much as she did so she sometimes thought what she was doing did not make sense, but more of an emphasis is placed on making sure respect is shown to everyone than necessarily getting it “right”. What she would miss is the very open nature of the people. When a friend leaves you need to walk them not just to the door but out to the end of your property or even further. But if you walk over half way to their house them you become the guest and it all has to get repeated over again.

Then we started working at taking out and resetting the windows in the chapel so that screens can be added to all the windows. We made a plan and started the process but the person who should be supervising us had been here on Monday but since we had not shown up had scheduled another job for today. We will meet him on Wednesday where we will see if our plan is anything like his plan. We are feeling a shortage of tools and may make a run to a hardware store tomorrow.

We did not participate in the 4:00pm tea but we also did not find enough to do to the end of the day. So we retired to the guest house and opened the 2 small bottles of wine I had saved from our airplane journey as well as a couple of bottles Pastor Rick had bought while out with Pastor Godbless trying (surprisingly unsuccessfully) to get someone to take 1,000,000 Sh to open a back account. Apparently you have to have a reference from two people with accounts at the bank. No one could provide a reason why. Rick stopped at a Shop Rite supermarket in Arusha. He said it was very odd because only white people were shopping there, mostly safari operators getting ready for trips, and tourists. Rick also treated Godbless to his first latte at a Piggy Bucks in the same shopping complex. He had told them he wanted to pick up coffee but when Godbless saw it was 2000 Sh he wanted to leave immediately because of the cost. He added a lot of sugar to his as that is what they usually do with the instant coffee the locals drink and then commented how sweet it was.

Mary, Susan, Lois and I started a scrabble game but interrupted it for dinner. We were joined by the professor of practical theology (preaching, stewardship, etc) and his wife for dinner. As it turns out, he and Rick had both attended Luther seminary in Saint Paul, MN and had overlapped for one year.

After dinner, we took our scrabble board to Anne’s house which is right next to the guest house. We took turns borrowing her internet connection while the rest played scrabble and chatted. We (me) learned more about Swahili. We also learned that you should stay out of the tall grass at night and carry a torch to keep away from snakes. The 2000 Sh for the latte earlier in the day was most of a day’s wage for Pastor Godbless and he like many if not most Tanzanians has a plot of land where he grows some of his own food. Anne told us not to assume all of Tanzania is like the lush northern part that we have visited. Some parts have had 3 crops fail in a row and all the cattle have died. Even in this area she said the cattle had gotten so thin you could count their ribs before the rainy season came and turned the grass green.

The silly rooster outside my window thought dawn was coming at 4:30am this morning. Upon further review he decided to crow at 5:30 also. I was able to get back to sleep both times. I got up at 6:30am and reviewed some of the sounds I have recorded so far. I have been labeling them in preparation for a soundseeing tour. I then washed up and packed (one suitcase inside the other). We ate breakfast and started saying good byes at about 8:30. Breakfast was quick but we said good byes for the next hour and a half. The church presented us with yet more gifts: keychains for Jack and I, and necklaces for Rick and the ladies, a Tanzanian flag scarf for Rick and one for Bethel, a sculpture with giraffes with their necks entwined for Bethel.

JM Tours bus showed up between 9:30 and 10 (it was due at 9) and we packed up and headed into Arusha. We stopped at the shop of Paul and his family for some serious shopping. I tried to do some computer consulting but even though the power was on the voltage was too low for the UPS (uninterrupted power supply) to allow the computer to turn on. Jack continued to shop from the vendors who started circling outside the store sensing fresh meat.

We headed to the Lutheran bank to pickup the laminated card that would allow Pastor Godbless to access to account and wire money but it turns out that the account was accidently set up as a Lutheran synod account and so he could not get money. The only solution appears to be pulling out all of the money (with penalties) and opening an account at a different bank. So while Rick and Pastor Godbless worked on that we went and had lunch at one of the two Lutheran hostels. Lunch was only 26,000 Sh ($20.80) for 12 people. Loretta treated because she said “how often can I take this many people to lunch for so little?” The rooms at the hostel looked reasonable when Jackie and Loretta checked them out. They are 18,000 Sh ($14.40) for two people for one night with breakfast.

When we got back to the bank Rick and Godbless were still entwined with red tape and had found a car to take them to Arusha later on. As the JM Tours bus needed to get back we headed out to the hotel in Arusha with only a brief stop at the bank to pick up more cash.

We scattered at the hotel. I went to the bookstore where I picked up a souvenir (carved wooden salad server) and then logged onto the (very slow) internet at the local hotel. It is only 1000Sh ($.80) an hour but I returned to our hotel to try that one at 3x the cost after an hour. Unfortunately it was slower. While I was on the internet Pastors Rick and Godbless drove into the hotel with a new (used) car. It is a Suzuki Range-Rover look alike vehicle and they were very pleased with it. They had finally been able to talk to the bank manager that agreed that since Rick put the money in the account he had the right to take it out again.

The group (sans an exhausted Rick) went out for dinner at Via Via again which again was a positive experience. Some of the group wanted ice cream for dessert but with the restaurant not having power in the daytime, ice cream was not on the menu and they returned to the Equator (which has a generator) for dessert. I opted again for yet another hour of internet but still ended the night days behind on email.

The bells of the church woke us up (except Jack) at 5:05am according to my watch and pealed for 5-6 minutes. I guess if you are walking up the hill you need more time to prepare. The rooster joined in at 5:30am. I managed to sleep until 4:30am but could not get back to sleep because of bad dreams. We cleaned up. Mr Mate offered to iron our clothes this morning and was fairly insistent, so I looked more well-pressed than I normally do for church. The power went out shortly before we left as they are rationing power. So my plans to recharge my camera battery were thwarted by forgetting that power during the day is unreliable.

We took a little tea or coffee and some yams for a quick breakfast before church. The yams were not our favorite Tanzanian food. Unfortunately the tea was pre-made and was very strong. Strong tea on a mostly empty stomach can make me nauseated so I tried only drinking half my cup but that still proved too much and I thought I would have to leave the service in the first 15 minutes to throw up. Fortunately the feeling passed in a few minutes. The first service started at 7:30 and went for over 2 hours.

The first service was in Swahili and we were told the second would be in Kichaga, the language of the chaga tribe but it sounded the same to my ear. The singing at the first service was all a capella. The second service had some brass and some electronic music, but too my ears the a capella singing of the Africans is the most beautiful. Of course we understood little of the service. Pastor Rick preached and Pastor Godbless translated the sermon. The sermon on the prodigal son left me in tears even the second time (which was hard because I was trying to record it).

At both services they had us come us and the pastors did a short introduction of each of us (This is Chris, he is a fundi ya computer). At first, the 9 of us filed in and sat on the left side. Then someone noticed that all the women were sitting on the right and the men on the left so the ladies left us.

When the time came for the offering we filed up to give our offering at the front with the rest of the group. They we saw a cross shaped box with 4 compartments each with a swahili name. I could not make anything

of the names so I just dropped in my offering. We found out later that the 4 names were the names of the 4 streets that comprise the parish.

Pastor Godbless was surprised when I said that nearly everyone from our church lives on a different street. These 4 streets each climb the mountain and we have been on 3 of them. Then right after that, they set out

a basket and people went up again. I was left without a guess what that was all about. Later we found that the first is for your pledge and people were dropping in envelopes. The second was a free will offering above the pledge. After church was out everyone recessed singing the last hymn and people congregated out the back door. Then one of the elders, Samuel, started auctioning off vegetables, eggs, fresh milk and even a rooster. If you are not able to meet your pledge in cash you can bring goods from your plot of land to be auctioned off and credited to your account.

After the second service, where firewood was also added, there was much laughter in the bidding. I could understand almost all of the numbers being used but then there was a word at the end I was not getting. Clearly some of the young men were involved in the joke. It turns out one of the young men were bidding but not keeping the goods, they were giving them to a friend (and it was his name that I could not decipher). He had just gotten married so they assumed he needed food in the

house.

We ate breakfast between the services. I arrived late as I ran back to the house to empty my iRiver digital recorder. I had filled it with singing at the first service and had not had space to record Rick’s sermon. We ate with more leisure than I expected because of the nature of African time the second service started nominally at 10:30 but really whenever the pastor shows up. That was an idea that appealed to Pastor Rick.

At the second service I took some video for Rick. I started in the balcony but very quickly figured out it was all children and my presence was somewhat distracting. I had asked Pastor Godbless for permission at lunch but that does not mean it didn’t distract adults and children alike so I probably videoed less than Pastor Rick would have liked. Audio recording was less obvious.

We ate lunch after church but it was have been about 1:30 by that time. As always there was way too much food. The last group they had were college students from Ohio who helped build the pastor’s house. We eat less than college students and were not working as hard. At lunch Pastor Godbless told us that word had spread already of our gift and that 25 more orphans from a nearby church had showed up. He will meet with the other pastor on Tuesday to figure out how to share with them. We had a fruit from Mr Mate’s yard which tasted like a mixture between a pineapple and a pear.

A soccer game started on the next field and there were to be sack races also but we opted for a hike up the hill, all except Rick who went with Pastor Godbless to pray with someone. We hiked up to Old Moshi which was where the original German fort was in this area since it has a view of a wide region. We toured the government primary school on the way with Mr Mate who is on the school board (primary is classes 1-7, there is not public Kindergarten although the church runs a free program). They are knocking down the old buildings and building new ones with some government funds given to the village.

We also saw the new secondary school which is expanding now that the government has mandated primary education (forms 1-4 and then 5-6, but I think this school may only have 1-4). Old Moshi still has some of the old buildings built in the early 1900s by the Germans as barracks which are used to house the students from the Lutheran secondary school at the top of the hill.

The signs on the school said “Thank you for speaking English” since secondary school is taught in English. We met with a teacher, the watchman and the head boy that Samuel was able to find (he is on the school board here, is the former chairman of the village and we learned he hopes to retire from his job as an accountant in 7 months to work on projects for the orphans). We also met a number of kids, especially girls at the school and Lois and Shareen, at least, have brought back the names of new pen pals. We still have not seen Kilimanjaro even though we have been climbing the foothills for the last few days. After our hike I washed up and took a nap.

For dinner we were presented with a very special Chaga honor of roast goat. I think Shareen and Susan were ready to become vegetarians on the spot when they saw the goat was still whole, head and all. It tasted much like a pig. It was surprisingly fatty. We also had more speeches, more singing by the choir and gifts from the ladies (in my case a picture of Tarangire).

After we came back to the house it started to rain softly; so far all our rain has come at night. The local red clay soil becomes mud very easily and carpets would be impractical in this area. Everyone seems to just have cement floors that can be easily cleaned. The church has mud scrapers outside.