Suzanne misses Moshi, and Moshi misses her...and of course Tom. Come back come back!!After a rather harrowing experience coming to Moshi, we are settled in our little house once again. Because of the one-way price differential, we flew British Airways and learned to our dismay, that the communication between Precision Air and British is virtually non-existent. As a result, despite our best attempts, we were unable to board the Precision flight and had to spend the night in Nairobi. The problem remained unresolved on Saturday when again Precision could not see our new reservation. Without the help of our friend Shafiq at Emslees we would either still be in Nairobi, or have arrived via bus from there. We found once we arrived that this is not an uncommon problem-British and Precision have a failure to communicate, and even when you present them with the electronic ticket or hard copies, they refuse to accept it. What a complete mess!All is forgotten (though not forgiven) when we arrive in Moshi and find that our house is green outside and loaded with flowers and immaculate inside as only Rose can make it. The weekend was on. We headed downtown—argh. Rats (panya) had taken residence in the car, and the urine smell was disgusting. My nose is particularly attuned to such smells, and it was pretty overwhelming. Thank goodness Aleem had odor sticks and one quite alarming lemon one is currently stuck to the front of our car. One unfortunate panya didn’t get out quite quickly enough and we found him partially churned up in the driveway when we returned from shopping. (sorry no picture, too disgusting)
So, here are the salient issues that we are dealing with now:
1. Rose and Pauli are fine. Pauli’s lady friend Lucy is adorable and still here! Anjela is tall, and all of a sudden speaking English…thanks so much Dana and Malavika! Her teachers cannot believe the progress that she has made. Imagine…96’s and 98’s on English tests.
2.The Panya (rats) are back. Sadly, Pauli and Rose say that there are many because it is cold outside and wet—so, Pauli climbed upstairs with the poison because we find that the panya are eating the chicken food as well. The chickens are fine even though the panya have been practically living in our car and their food.
(Pauli taking Panya Poisen Up to the roof this evening.)3. Speaking of chicken food….my chicken food fundi who was cured from diabetes in Loliondo, now is unable to walk again because of her diabetic neuropathy and her daughter tells me that she is really struggling to control the diabetes and hypertension. We hear of many people who are dying because they gave up their medicines when they went to Loliondo.
4. We have corn! Our sweet corn is a tiny bit past, and as tall as I have ever seen the corn. Remember the tractor? It seems to have given the garden a boost.
5.Avocados are falling 10 a day, limes begging to be picked, lettuce everywhere and delicious.
6. Other plants are happy--like the cactus!
7. It is cold. We are happy to have sweaters and warm blankets at night, but it is easy to forget that we are south of the equator and this is the coldest time of the year here. And it is cold.
8. We have a nearly dead tree hanging over the house. Will we get permission to cut it down? Only time will tell.
9. We have very little power. The biggest problem seems to be the power, umeme. There are now so many power outages that particularly on Tuesday and Friday there will be no power at all. We are contemplating a generator especially for the arrival of the visitors. But, they are so expensive, smelly, and dangerous that we are very nervous about it, and are looking for other alternatives.
10. Our car has many matatas, not the least of which is the brake light and the screeching of them when you brake and come around the curve. Argh It is grim.
9. We have not seen Kilimanjaro yet and are hoping that our pharmacist’s sister who is a seer will be able to wish the mountain out of the clouds by next week.
10. Friends can be screwed in the US and in Moshi. People lie, and the best people believe them!
11. Pauli has completed his masterpiece in the chair--the table is like everyone's so I won't include it, but the chair...great!
Sadly, the cushions seem to be missing!We did have a good Sunday. Nikoli set the hash along with his dogs and dad Greg went along just to make sure that they didn’t get lost. He set a brutal hash. We all got lost about 10 times. He set so many crosses and then put the new path totally off the path. It was crazy. We went across the river twice and down steep paths, through corn, sunflowers and beans. Nikoli was laughing when we came running back from the wrong direction and totally exhausted. What a day. I cannot tell you how good a beer tastes after that kind of afternoon. What great fun though to catch up with Greg and Terrie, to see Sylvie and Nick, and chat with new people.
Staff meeting brought us around to the issues in Tanzania-Some lab equipment is down, a freezer is on the blink and poor Shanette is just back from leave. But, she worked on the problem even from the states. Great Scott! The staff are working like crazy to get multiple protocols through the long time consuming regulatory process. Hopefully, things will speed up as deadlines have been put all around. We prepared people for our visitors from Global Health and our Duke President who will be coming next week. Stay tuned. Of course they arrive on “Saba Saba” Day which is a National Holiday (7th month 7th day) We hear it isn’t as big a holiday as “Nane Nane” Day (8th month 8th day) but nonetheless people will be taking time off for the day. We have begged our own staff to stick around and hopefully we will have a group there. I did massive shopping and dropped off clothes to Furaja who is just has happy and sweet as she can be. She was very excited about Lyriella’s hand me downs, and tried to eat them with her two brand new bottom teeth.
OU--Mukesh says the car needs about 5 medium jobs. None of them a surprise, but we will tighten our belts....and no Umeme!
