The Steffensens World

The power has been out every other day for the past two weeks, and it looks like it will be the same for quite a while…

Lake Mtera, the main power source for most of Tanzania, is running out of water. The government and power company (a government entity) officially blame this on recent drought, but all of the papers and most people you talk to blame mismanagement of upstream water on the Great Ruaha River. There are huge rice fields upstream that divert millions of gallons of water every year. What’s worse is that the official diversion numbers are way low because local corruption allows many “leaks” in the levies to flood fields that were never supposed to be irrigated.

You might be asking yourself, “Why are they trying to grow rice in a semi-arid environment?” Or making a note like, “We don’t try to grow rice in West Texas, even though we irrigate there.” If you did, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Apparently this is not a short term problem, it’s one that’s been building for years. Even though the government and lots of people know about it, and the economy is taking a huge hit from every-other-day power outages, the rice fields are still there. Amazing and frustrating.

The corruption here is supposedly not as bad as it is in Kenya. We haven’t personally seen any. All of the government officials we’ve dealt with, including police and bureaucrats, have been polite and have not hinted at “rushwa” (Swahili for bribe money). But we’ve heard stories that Tanzanians have to pay bribes to get driver’s licenses and passports and even money at the bank. For example, if someone gets money wired to them, the bank teller will say “Oh, no it’s not here yet.” But it magically appears with some rushwa. My impression is that larger corruption is the real problem. Like the corruption that allowed a huge rice production to go into place upstream of the main dam. Like the corruption that allows officially-sanctioned monopolies to companies that have the “winning bid” in a given industry. I don’t have anything to base this on other than the press. It is a free press, but it does tend to be a little sensationalist. To be fair, the press does point out that the government is taking active steps to reduce corruption, but it seems to be aimed at the small-scale corruption. I’m not sure about what is happening at the top.

In the meantime, we only have power every other day…

We finally have our car, and it was worth the wait. It’s 15 years old, but it turned out to be in better shape than I expected. It looks and runs like it’s only 4 or 5 years old. I don’t know anything about the previous owners other than they were Japanese, but they only drove it 90,000 kilometers (about 55,000 miles) over the 15 years, and they obviously took excellent care of it. Here are a couple of pictures of us with the car (from our Ruaha Safari in October, since I’m cheating and writing this at the end of October, but dating it right after we got the car…)

Greg and I took the bus to Dar Es Salaam on Friday and picked up the car at MAF late in the afternoon. We were going to shop and explore Dar on Saturday morning, but it was raining hard and we were tired of dealing with the traffic and lack of road signs, so we headed back to Dodoma. On the way back, we saw much more of the country, since we were looking out the windshield instead of a bus window. We saw many Masai herdsmen with their herds. They all waved as we went by.

Today the boys and I went out to our side yard and began to build a labyrinth. I had it in my mind to do one for the campus. Our plot of land around the house is very large and mostly dirt. There is far to much for us to use, so I thought there could be some public use. I had a sketch from instructions on a website, a tape measure, a shovel, a rake and a hoe. One of our neighbors, Pendo (sister of Lilian Gaula,) came to see what we were up to and asked if she could help. She even brought another hoe! We really started digging when she helped. Within two hours we had dug the pattern into the clay pan and the neighborhood children had gathered to assist with watering our lines. A little water sets the lines. We will plant some succulents on the outline, so the path will be permanent. Now we have a new activity for the students. I’ll give a class on what to do - those that passed by were a little stymied. I explained with words such as “meditation” and “contemplation” and then resorted to “peaceful”, “quiet,” and “prayer.” We’ll test drive it soon. Last weekend we added a hedge to the back so we now have a private zone with a new path across the back. This week a labyrinth. Next week? They’ll be taking bets…
My teaching is going well. I have to figure out how to grade papers. I’ve decided I need to write a grading rubric. I’ll post it so there will be no complaints! I’ve had success with the quizzes. Those have gone well and most everybody seems to be understanding the lessons. In three weeks we’ll be giving mid-terms. I plan to ask essay questions - I’m immune to murmurings.

What I miss most about the US right now is green grass and leafy trees. I found a book on the Great Smokey Mountains in our library and savored every picture of green mountains and waterfalls. Today I listened to NPR shows on streaming internet broadcasts. The boys and I sipped our mid-morning tea and listened to “Wait! Wait! Don’t tell me!” We knew all the quiz answers, too. Then “Stained Glass Bluegrass” on WAMU came on. I made a big batch of granola and hummed along. Thank God for the internet! Although the campus is filled with music most days, it feels good to get our soul-food now and again.

Our hearts will be home tomorrow, September 11th. We’ll be praying for peace and for those we lost that day, and those we nearly lost. I give thanks for missed meetings, late starts, and thick walls.
Love, Leslie

I am writing this on one of the computers in the Msalato Library computer room. It is one of five thin clients that I finally sucessfully configured to boot over the network from one Edubuntu Linux server. Ahh, the simple things that make a computer geek happy!

The ultimate goal is to get the College off of Microsoft Windows. Almost all of the computers on campus are running Windows 98 because they’re too old to run XP. Also, Microsoft has started their Windows Genuine Advantage program to crack down on pirated versions of XP. If you have a pirated version of XP, Microsoft will not support your computer with security updates. It is very hard to purchase a computer in Tanzania that does not have a pirated copy of XP on it. So, the whole Diocese is going to shift to Linux.

Now I just have to retrain all of the students and staff on how to use Linux and Open Office. They’re both fairly intuitive, if you’re used to using computers; but for many of the students, this is the first time they’ve ever used a computer, so change throws them for a loop. Wish me luck.

The trick with posting something daily is that you have to be really careful. On the one hand, we’re here in Africa, and I want to give a realistic view of what it’s like here. On the other hand, I don’t want to paint an overly bleak picture of the place and miss out on the bright points.

It’s true we’re living in a near desert and I’m not teaching what I thought I was going to be teaching, but there are still bright points to every day. Today, Greg finally found one of the giant scorpions that lives around here. We’ve seen dead ones, but he found one in a hole. He thought it might be dead, so he poked it with a stick and it backed down the hole. He was very happy about that.

Another bright point was coming home and seeing Jambo wagging his tail. A dog’s unconditional love will always warm the heart.

Most of you are probably familiar with “Hakuna matata,” Swahili for “No worries,” made famous by the Lion King. Two Swahili words I’m getting to know well are “Hakuna umeme.” They mean “There is no electricity.” Monday there was no power at Canon Andrea Mwaka and today there was no power here at Msalato. The Tanzanian power company, Tanesco, is building some new plants for Dodoma. One should be online by December and the other by June. These will help eliminate the rolling blackouts, but in the meantime, since almost all of the Tanzanian power is from hydro-electric power and it hasn’t rained as much as the historical average for the past 10 years, there isn’t enough water in the reservoirs to produce at the required rate. So we get 12-hour rolling blackouts.

It affects those of us who are slaves to technology more than the average villager who doesn’t even have power. Most people here cook on charcoal fires or kerosene stoves and use kerosene lamps in the evening. Electricity is a luxury that most cannot afford. So it’s hard to complain too much about not having it, when the majority of the families in the area don’t have it at all.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that I’m also running two networks in my spare time. At Canon Andrea Mwaka School, we only have about 15 computers, but they’re all all old and take a lot of care and feeding to keep going. At Msalato Theological College, there are about 25 computers with a mix of old and new. Both schools get an internet connection over a wireless connection and at Msalato, we have a wireless mesh setup to distribute the wireless connection throughout the campus. I set up the mesh using Linksys WRT-54G wireless routers and an open-source software package, Freifunk, that replaces the software on the routers. The Freifunk team has about 300 of these routers spanning across Berlin to provide free internet access. Right now we only have 6 of the routers, and I hope to add 6 or 7 more over the next year to improve coverage across the whole campus. I’m also becoming an expert on Ubuntu Linux, because the Diocese is moving away from Microsoft Windows 98 to Linux to get a modern operating system. Even at the cheapest charity license of $30 per copy of Windows, the Diocese cannot afford it.

Hi All,

Sorry for not posting more often (or at all for that matter…) I could make excuses like we’ve been terribly busy adjusting to Tanzania, teaching, and unreliable power/internet access, but I should have been getting on more often. I’m going to try to make it a nightly habit before going to bed.

To be honest, part of the reason I haven’t posted much is that it’s been a rough couple of months, and I didn’t feel like posting much for fear of the blog becoming a “complaint zone” and sounding overly negative. We have had a lot of wonderful experiences and made many great friends, but it has been a difficult adjustment. My biggest gripe is that we still don’t have our car after two months of being here, when it was supposed to be ready for us to pick up when we arrived in late June. It turned out that the Tanzanian Parliment enacted a new duty on foreign car imports for cars that are more than ten years old, and that tax-exempt persons (like us since we’re working for the church) still have to pay this tax even though we’re exempt. I spent a week trying to find someone who could show me this in writing, so that I could make sure that our $2000 was going into the Treasury and not into a tax official’s pocket. I finally did find someone who could show me the law, so we paid the extra tax. This was after a month-and-a-half delay (two weeks still on the ship, three weeks for the Diocese and the Tax Revenue authority to agree on tax-exempt status, and a week for me to find the law). Now we’re two weeks into getting the car out of the port, approved by the police (as being a legal, not-stolen, car) and getting license plates. Every step has to happen in series. None of the bureaucrats are capable of working these issues in parallel. Ahh well, it should finally really be over in a week or two.

In the meantime we’ve been borrowing the Canon Andrea Mwaka School truck, AKA “The Cage.” Here’s are some pictures of all of us going to the first day of school in The Cage.

We’ve adopted a puppy. His name is “Jambo” which is the slang Swahili used to greet Wazungu (white people). The proper Swahili is Hujambo (literally: “Do you have any problems?” figuratively, “How are you?”), but Jambo is often used to mean “Hello, how are you? Now reply back to me in English.” If you reply with the proper Sijambo (literally: “I have no problems?” figuratively, “I’m fine?”), they assume that you’re fluent and launch into a stream of Swahili. A blank stare usually gets them back down to 4-year old Swahili that I can understand. Anyway, Jambo was on the verge of starvation when we adopted him. He was born in April, but his mother died when he was a week old and his previous owners could not afford to feed him anything more than uji, a thin corn-meal gruel. He was the runt of the litter and was not winning the fights for food with his siblings. We saw him digging in our trashpit (more comments about the trashpits in a future post…) and tried to feed him for a couple of days. He would let us throw him egg yolks, but would not come to us. Finally after a couple of days, Leslie called him one time and he came up to her, wagging his tail. She got him to follow her home. We bathed him, got seven or eight ticks, and a couple of hundred fleas and mites off of him and fed him. Here is a picture from his first meal at home:

He was really pathetic: emaciated, a horrible coat, and very skittish. He warmed to us almost immediately, and after only a week, he made great improvement in health. Here is a picture after only a few days:

The Tanzanians are not used to keeping dogs as pets like we are. They’re amused that we will hold him, pet him, and let him in our house. Most dogs here are viewed as guard-dogs to guard the houses and chickens, just barely tolerated so long as they don’t kill any of the chickens. At best they get fed a mix of these little dried fish called daga and cornmeal stewed together to form a kind-of dog food. Often they are left to graze in the trash pits. The Tanzanians are taught early that dogs bite, so you should be scared of them. So even if they meet a friendly dog, they don’t know how to pet it and play with it, so they end up getting bitten, reinforcing their views that they should be scared of dogs. We’re slowly convincing our neighbors that Jambo is friendly. It will help when he gets done teething and stops chewing on everything/everyone. It doesn’t help that he’s a racist. We think that some of the local kids were mean to him before we got him. Whenever he sees them he still sets off in a deep growl. When we first got him, he would growl at any black person. We try to remind him that he’s also a black African and needs to be nice. He’s getting better and now he only growls at the kids who we think were mean to him.

School is going well for all of us. Mostly good days, still a few “growing pain” days. One of the biggest adjustments is the reality that you can’t count on there being power. So, if you’re scheduled to teach a computer class, you can’t count on it really happening, and need to have something else in your back pocket. I’m teaching seven different subjects: Science - Forms I and II (eqivalent to 7th and 8th grade in the States), Physics - Forms III and IV (9th and 10th grades in the States), Biology - Form III, Computer Studies - Form III, and Religious Studies - Form IV. Leslie is teaching 6 different subjects, but I can’t remember all of them. I’ll put more detail in a future post.

That’s probably enough for now. I’m going to try to write at least a little every night!