To Protect and Serve

In Mid July we were asked to accompany another manager to Gairo to access the progress of the projects Latrine construction and Rain Water collection sub-projects. While there we wanted to go and visit the supplier of the pumps we have been waiting on for months. The three of us drove down in our 4WD. It takes 10 hours. Along the way you drive through various villages along the road side. A good part of the way is a very dry area and the villagers must be very poor. The houses are mainly single room mud brick with thatch roofs. Very few crops or animals in sight. Every time you pass through a village the local police are out standing on the road. They don’t have any vehicles so they can’t go far from their office (shack). They stand out on the road and flag down almost every truck and bus and some cars. They stop them to check registration papers, insurance papers and anything else they can think off to find an infringement and get a bribe to let the driver go. This happens in almost every village. It must take the trucks hours and hours of extra time to make a trip with all the stopping they get every 20-30 km. In between the villages you can drive as fast and as bad as you like..Since the police have no cars they can’t go out to patrol the roads. They do not appear to be too interested in road rule infractions, just stopping trucks and cars to get a bribe. Even on the road from Usa River, where we are based, into Arusha, any police from a western country would have a field day. The driving is so bad and dangerous. The amount of traffic tickets they could give out and earn revenue for the government would have to be very large. But none of it gets caught. There are drivers passing on blind corners, coming over hills, some pass on the left, some just pull out into the opposing land and flash their lights at the then oncoming cars to try to get them to pull off the road to be let by. At some times the traffic going one way is 4 wide when the road is 1 lane each way. Not often thank fully though.

Anyway back to the Gairo trip. We got stopped three times on the way down. Check registration, check insurance, check to see if we have a fire extinguisher... We did get one speeding ticket and we were going over the posted limit. The car behind us was going faster and they tried to wave them down to but he just kept on driving. With no police vehicle they have no way to catch them. The guy behind that got pulled over too but he left in just a few minutes, where as it took about 30 mins for them to write out a ticket in triplicate to us. I asked the ADRA guy with us how come that driver got to leave so quickly. He said he saw him slip a note out the window.

There are some entrepreneurial teenagers trying to sell ears of maize along the side of the road at one place. They just may not last long at the job however. They stand out in the middle of the road waving ears of maize as you drive up at highway speed then at the very last minute step aside.

We have the Pumps!

We spent two days at Gairo making notes on the project. We also visited the pump supplier for the pumps we had been waiting on since April. After a few hours of drama we finally got the situation worked out and took the pumps back to the ADRA office in Gairo.
We had taken 3 soccer balls down to Gairo to give to the kids down there we had become friends with then back earlier this year. They were so excited to get a gift from the mzungus. They raced off to show their mum and other family members. (No fathers around) It was good to see them happy as they have such a little.
On the way back to Arusha from Gairo we got stopped another 3 times. Registration papers, insurance, ... We came across yet another two dead trucks i.e. trucks and trailers lying on the side of the road after rolling over.
We’ll be going back down to Gairo in a few weeks to finish the installation of the pumps which will be good to see the villagers get what they have been waiting for.

Back at Usa River in the meantime we have been working on writing a manual for the use of QuickBooks that ADRA is going to implement to its accounts staff in the next few weeks. We listed all the common functions the staff will need to do and have written detailed instructions on how to perform those steps. We think they will be so excited to use such a modern program after being with a DOS based program and manual documents for so long. It will be about a 40 page manual by the time we have finished. Max arrived back from his trip to the United States and bought back 3 new notebooks for the accounts staff to use. The internal battery of the notebooks will prevent them from losing their work when the power gets shut off with no notice which is a frequent occurrence. We had some network cabling installed in the accounts office to set up a little network for them so they can communicate to each other through the computers and share the various accounts files. These are all big steps for the staff to take and we know we will have to take a lot of time to explain all this new setup they are being introduced to.

The female dog on the ADRA campus had 7 puppies 8 weeks ago. They have just now learned they can run around and chase each other. They are little balls of fluff. Their faces are so cute with their big puppy eyes. We built a moveable mesh pen for them so they can stay outside during the day to get fresh air. They just love it. They yap and stand up with their little paws against the mesh whenever we walk by.