Bye Bye Babati

As we were coming to the end of June we needed to say goodbye to the people and the project in Babati. We had been there on and off since February working with the drillers to drill more water wells. However a series of delays by the rainy season, break downs of the drill rig and tooling, waiting on funds transfer for more fuel and the likes meant we had not been able achieve anywhere the progress we had wanted to gain by this date. We had other commitments already in place and so it was time to leave Babati. Not having reached our goal made it hard to leave though. It had seemed back in February that there had been plenty of time to finish the drilling, but these delays after delays had thrown a big wrench in any plans and expectations. The project local staff thanked us for our time there and graciously gave us parting gifts of a Kanga wrap for Ramona and a Maasai Shuka wrap for Ross. Even some of the staff at the little motel we had been staying at and whom we had gotten to know quite well, shed a few tears at our departure. It is hard to tell people you are leaving them and not coming back. They always say ‘Karibu tena’ which means ‘welcome back again’.


All throughout the Babati Project we had been working on and off with Darren of PCI USA who is the donor for the Babati project. He is the coordinator between PCI and the project. The locals had problems pronouncing his name and it came out like Darn, so that was the name he was stuck with in Babati. Darren was from the USA and used to live in Austin Texas as we did a few years ago. So we had a lot in common with him. We have become good friends and will miss working with him and his intelligent sense of humour that he never seemed to run out of. Darren is staying with the project till it is finished early next year and we wish him all the best with his work in years to come.

In one of the last days in Babati we drove to one of its outer sub villages to inspect 7 proposed drilling sites. These were all tucked up under the escarpment of part of the Great Rift. There must have been a thermal region not too deep underground at one of these places called Maji ya Moto (hot water) as here they showed us hot water coming out of the ground. The people said the villagers would come there every Friday to bath in the hot water. We never out found if that was mixed bathing or not. At another place there was a little mound that had steam coming from it. The top was quite spongy and would bounce up and down when jumped on. Hot mud could be seen in little vents. The local people said this mound was growing all the time so it appeared to be a very early stage Volcano we concluded!  Let's see what it is in a 100 years!