Update #4

Hello!

A few things have happened in the last 10 days 🙃.

In the orphanage, I spent the whole week comparing offers for my shelf wood and making a plan for how it should look and what should happen next. On Friday, I actually managed to get everything together. The cut wooden boards, brushes and wood paint (or something similar), nails, sandpaper, and on Monday also a plane, which I don't use because I don't always have help to hold the boards. So I sand everything down with two different sandpapers and then paint it. Whether it will stand remains to be seen 😂. All together it cost 30,000 TSH. If I had commissioned a fundi (who can be anything from a carpenter to a construction worker, I believe), it would have cost 200,000 TSH. So I'd rather do it myself...

Malema (the owner of the orphanage) invited me to her house one afternoon. She lives not far from the orphanage with her husband and currently has 11 chickens for eggs, 3 cattle, 260 chickens ready-to-sell, 373 medium-sized chickens, and 310 chicks together. The chickens take about 1 month to be ready to be beheaded and sold. For each chicken, she gets 3000-7000 TSH. The children help her prepare the chickens and sometimes they are allowed to take the heads and feet and prepare them at the orphanage... Yes.

Malema also prays every morning from 5-6 through a loudspeaker, which I can even hear at my house. It starts with a siren, then comes music and prayers. Every day.

Last week, there was a meeting because the orphanage received a letter from the government. Among other things, they want letters about each child's past and an assessment from the police and psychologists or social workers. In addition, a cook and a patron are to be hired, and it is said to be too dirty. They don't care where the money for this is going to come from. I didn't understand anything from the meeting, but a letter was drafted discussing these things. Let's see if there will be a response or if the next letter will say the same thing again.

Since over 600€ have already been raised on my donation page, I was able to arrange for the continuation of the construction work. We are now taking everything step by step and seeing how long the money lasts. Unfortunately, it turned out that the targeted 1000€ are only the material costs. I hope to find out what else needs to be done in the next few days. So please continue to donate!!!

Yesterday, Wity and I went to a small shop by the roadside and ordered 30m^3 of sand and 600kg of cement. An hour later, everything was there and the fundi will soon continue with plastering. Maybe we can negotiate that I help him and it will be cheaper 😂.

I spent the weekend in Moshi. On Saturday morning, I got up at 5:30 and was on the bus to Moshi before 7. The whole journey (and the whole day) had a perfect view of Kilimanjaro, without a single cloud that often obstructs the view!

From there, I went to Materuni Waterfall with 6 other volunteers. The journey led through a dirt road through small villages with houses directly on the slopes and lots of banana trees and lots of greenery. The landscape was simply amazing! We got off at 1500m and continued on foot. The hike led on narrow paths past small and large fruit plantations, and thanks to our guide and driver Honest, we even got a bit of plant knowledge and saw 3 chameleons! After 1-1.5 hours, we arrived. 95m high, no other people there. Everything around us was shining in various shades of green and the water was crystal clear, after all, it comes directly from Kilimanjaro. The natural pool was inviting for a swim and almost everyone dared to jump into the cold water. You could even swim behind the waterfall and it was almost like being in a cave. It was really great!

On the way back, we stopped at a coffee hut. There, the locals explained and demonstrated the different steps to enjoy coffee, so in the end, we could all drink freshly roasted coffee. By the way, the coffee is not grown alone, but mixed with bananas to avoid the use of pesticides. It's quite ingenious!

On the way back to the car, we passed by a "banana beer brewery," imagine a barrel filled to the brim with banana beer over a fire. It's a traditional drink of the Chagga people. And of course, we tried it too. So gross! It doesn't taste like bananas at all, just sour in some way. The banana wine later was unfortunately not any better 🙈.

Back in Moshi, we went to Friendship, a local restaurant, for dinner. There was no menu, so we more or less let ourselves be surprised. There was typical Tanzanian food: Ugali, beans, cabbage, and fries with egg. In the end, we were full and happy and paid 13,000 TSH for three people including drinks. Amazing. We spent the evening relaxing with Cadbury chocolate and playing Yahtzee.

On Sunday, we wanted to hike to a rice plantation and have a picnic there. We didn't know exactly where it was, so we just went in the general direction. It sometimes looked like rice, but somehow we ended up in a village and had to find out that the plantation was 5-6km away in the direction we came from. So we turned around and walked along a gravel road with small factories or companies. After a short time, there was a delicious smell of fresh bread, so we wanted to buy some. Unfortunately, it didn't look like it. The scent came from Baba Loaf's bread factory, without a shop. When we were about to leave, Baba Loaf himself suddenly appeared at the door and we spoke to him, started a conversation, and quickly Francis (Baba Loaf) showed us his factory. The bread and rolls are still shaped and bagged by hand there. Francis wanted to buy his machines in Germany, but then his friend Adolf in Munich gave him a contact in South Africa where he could buy the equipment much cheaper. You can't see any German influence in his bread though, it's simple toast bread like everywhere else here. When we were about to leave, he gave us two bags of warm bread and didn't want us to walk the 3km to the plantation because one of his workers knew where it was. So Francis loaded us into his car and we stopped every 100 meters or so to ask for directions. But we arrived and since we're staying here for a while, he invited us to his home for an evening. Incredibly nice!

The plantation was simply beautiful. Blue sky, green fields, trees and palm trees in between, and faintly recognizable outlines of the mountains in the background. We found a shady spot and then had banana bread and mango. A really nice afternoon!

The way back to the city led briefly through a jungle and then along the old railway tracks of the Dar es Salaam - Moshi route. They were shut down last year because the tracks broke so often. The rain probably just washed them away.

My bus ride back home was super fast again, I'm starting to figure out which buses to get on and which ones not to. 🙃 With luck, you can be in Moshi in less than an hour!

By now, you can also tell that it's actually the rainy season. The sun only manages to break through the dense cloud cover occasionally and there are occasional showers. But still not as much as there should be. Definitely better than the gloomy weather in Germany! 😁