Thursday, July 06, 2006

Mramba

Hello again eager parents, friends, relatives, siblings, and creepy stalkers. I will begin on this entry with June 29, when we traveled from Moshi (a city we now think of as our home) to Mramba Primary School. We arrived at the school to a warm welcome from Mfanga and Laurent, a teacher and the principle, respectively. They gave us a wonderful tour of the school and delegated a task list. During the tour, we observed chalkboards with chemistry, math, English, and history scrawled across them. Surprisingly, many of us had just learned a large amount of the material in school that we saw here. The two best options for tasks included painting classrooms and building walls between classrooms. There were giant openings in the walls between classrooms, and classes were being disruptive of each other. After a quick lunch, we walked into town to buy paints, concrete, sand, and bricks. On the way back, we stopped at the local market to marvel at the cornucopia of passion fruit, bananas, jackfruit, and oranges. Later in the evening, we played an enjoyable game of DEMOCRAAAAZYYY. After a productive day coordinating our construction efforts, we retired to our sleeping bags.

We awoke early the next morning to the sound of Laurent’s cow mooing near the classroom we stayed in. Our strategy: divide and conquer. Some of us negotiated with the Foondies (skilled workers) about the price to build the walls, Max and Justin stayed behind as the “Domestic Operations Coordinators” for the day (fondly referred to as cooks and maids), and the construction team began to sand classroom 1. We had a total of five classrooms to paint, and we decided upon a sequence of chores:
1. Sand walls
2. Plaster holes in the wall
3. Sand again
4. Coat of Primer
5. Add 2-3 coats of white water-based paint
6. Add coat of cream oil paint that extended about 4 feet from the floor
7. Wait 10 hours (drying time)
8. Add second coat of cream oil paint
9. Wait 10 hours (drying time)
10. Add red oil paint band that extends up six inches from the floor
11. Wait 10 hours (drying time)
12. Add second red coat
13. Mop floors
14. Scrape paint off floors
15. Mop floors
After this simple list of tasks, a room was finished. We spread people out through all five rooms in order to maximize our time. Throughout the week, we divided into teams. Chris helped the bricklayers do heavy lifting, and he continued to sand once they were finished. The entire team worked on miscellaneous sections of sanding in addition to Chris. Justin was our plaster master. Seth, Madison, Nihal, Greg, and Pete spearheaded the white paint and primer effort. Max and Elsa covered the majority of oil painting. Unfortunately, Nat was feeling sick for the first few days, and remained resting. We figured it was better to be sick there than on Kilimanjaro. However, once he recovered he enthusiastically launched right into working with the rest of us. During down time, we also taught English classes. We introduced students to basic introductions and conversational hints. In an effort to teach body parts and professions, we had students sing the hokey-pokey and act out jobs and make us guess them.

The next five days progressed in a similar divide and conquer manner as we rotated in and out of being DOC’s. One night however, we got a marvelous surprise. We were invited to a wedding of a local couple. We were instructed to give small cash gifts, so after the ceremony we danced up the aisle as the band played, shook hands with the happy couple, and deposited our gifts. We proceeded to dance back down the aisle accompanied by many joyous wedding-goers. The “cake,” as they called it, was actually a spit-roasted goat. The other amazingly memorable nighttime experience included a large bonfire on July 4th. We sang the national anthem to a small audience, and explained American independence. Other nighttime experiences included a short walk to a good viewpoint of the town and Kilimanjaro as well as stargazing.

By July 5, we had completely finished four of the five classrooms, and the fifth was ready for oil paint. That was okay though, because two more full groups of world challengers from Newton North were coming through in the weeks to come. We returned to Moshi later that day after a deep thank you from Laurent to find many more westerners in the town. This helped with the distribution of pesky vendors, who by this time we had developed strategies to deal with anyway. We were amazingly grateful for the showers and laundry services we found in Moshi, our base camp.

Today, we organized our expedition up Kilimanjaro with Zara Tour Co, and booked our safari for R+R week. We also had some free time to wander the city and buy assorted goods. Kili was looming over us in the distance all day, like a precurser to our next seven days. We are all amazingly excited.

Still no casualties,
-Max and the Kilidogs

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Max and all your friends, Elsa and Justin This is Max's grandma from deep in the heart of Texas and I send special greetings to all of you and have to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your trip...........hearing about everything... Your Dad just told me how I could comment to you so hope you get this message before the big day Thinking of each and every one of you...and send much love from all the folks you left behind.......Looking forward to more mail and sorry I haven't written before...Loved the story about the wedding, etc etc. xxxxxxxxxxfrom a very loving grandma..Thanks Elsa and Justin.........and to each and every one of you. Stay well until I have the pleasure of seeing you all in the USA

Anonymous said...

Dear Max et al--

GOOD WORK at the school. You accomplished a lot, and I am sure your efforts were appreciated.

Max you blog entries continue to provide wonderful information. THank you for keeping us current and up to date.

Onward and upward*!*!*!*!*!

Lots of hugs
Lots of love

MAma

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