bright eyes + blue eyes

Money Strands

Despite our best intentions, since we got married we haven’t gotten into a good routine on budgeting until now.

We tried in Berlin, but it never really gelled. Most of H’s costs during the week were reimbursed because he was travelling, and that was hard to keep track of. And we had two incomes for most of that time, so while we wanted to keep to a budget, we knew we were spending less than we earned. Thus, we didn’t really have to turn every penny over twice [as they say in German].

In Tanzania, we also tried to budget. But it was boring to budget there because we spent our money on exactly the same things every month. There weren’t that many options as to where we could spend money. Plus, we had other things to deal with – like plumbing catastrophes and puff adders.

Well now, we’re both students and living on savings and one half-time job at the moment. So we needed to find a way to budget that works for us, and we have a winner. We’ve started using a website called Money Strands. We’ve been really good at keeping a budget for four months now. These are the things I like about Money Strands:

• It’s in the ‘cloud’, so we can enter expenses any time we’re at a computer – not bound to one particular computer on which a piece of software is installed.
• We can input items in any currency. That may not be a selling point for most people, but we routinely use three currencies, so it’s great to see the overall picture at today’s exchange rate.
• The graphics are very attractive and dynamic. I particularly like the monthly pie charts with the breakdown of budget categories – you can keep on clicking on pie segments to get more and more detailed information about expenditures. I also like the splash page bar graph that moves as you spend throughout the month, tracking your “progress” in reaching the budgeted max for a category.

They also have a feature that allows Money Strands to sync with your online bank account and credit cards records. It’s a cool services, I guess, but we don’t use it. I suppose we still like to have that element of privacy, even in these linked-up, modern times.

Like a lot of things in life, I think budgeting is something that you have to figure out what works for you. So if you’re a paper-budgeter, an envelope-budgeter, a got-it-all-in-your-head-budgeter, or good-ole-excel-spreadsheet-budgeter, keep up the good work. However, if you don’t have a system or don’t like what you use now, then you should have a look at Money Strands.

Bad Road

Before coming to Tanzania, I’d heard plenty about Africa’s bad roads. I was always sure that descriptions of the bad roads weren’t exaggerations, but I had a hard time visualizing what a bad road would look like. I think I had so much experience with good roads that I couldn’t really imagine what makes a road challenging to navigate. Pretty much, when I thought of bad roads, the piece of I-40 in northeast Arkansas, outside of Memphis came to mind (where driving on the interstate at 70 mph sounds kind of like you’re in a horse drawn carriage).

Well, I will illustrate for you today what a bad road in Africa can look like. You sure as heck can’t drive 70 on this road. You’re lucky if you can get the speed up to 20 mph.

The bad road I am showing you is a stretch of 60 km of dirt (slash mud) track on the main “highway” from Dar es Salaam to Mtwara. It’s the only road into the underdeveloped southeastern part of Tanzania. In the dry season, the road is dusty, bumpy, and uncomfortable. In the rainy season, it can look like a lake in spots, You can’t tell how deep the water is or what kinds of potholes are lurking below the surface. Can’t go over it… can’t go round it… gotta go through it.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get behind a bigger vehicle, such as a truck, and can follow in the wake of their waves. That way you can see how deep the water is and how the driver navigates the road. Bus and truck drivers who are familiar with this route know exactly where the big stones and drop-offs are. And they’ve learned from experience about how to avoid those hazards.

If you’re not lucky, you’ll wind up behind a bus or truck that’s gotten stuck. Depending on how the vehicle is positioned, it can stop traffic in both directions until it gets cleared.

Thanks to Christoph & Eva for letting me use their pictures. When they came through town, they arrived as colleagues and departed as friends.

Ironic

Isn’t this tooo ironic? 

(I really wish I’d known how to use macro and/or manual focus when I took this picture.) 

In other ironic news: All of Masasi’s electricity dreams are coming true, and we’re hooked up to the power generated from offshore natural gas.  Since mid-March, we’ve had more or less constant power.  Since then, we’ve had only short little 30-minute cuts and one 24-hour-long unexplained outage.  Unfortunately, the long cut coincided with the Tanzanian Minister of Energy’s visit to Masasi.  The minister chartered a flight from Dar to Masasi just to witness firsthand the infrastructure developments underway down south. When he arrived, everything was dark, so to speak.  A few hours after his plane departed Masasi, power here was back up and running. 

Now that’s ironic. And yeah, I really do think.

Team Work

During the dry season, we have fresh water delivered by a water boy.  During the rainy season, we collect rain water in a 500 Liter tank.  When we moved into our house, there was already one improvised rain gutter.  It was made of bent corrugated metal, attached to the roof by a few wires.  It looks pretty rickety, but it withstands hard rains surprisingly well.  My husband decided we needed another gutter to collect more water at one time.  So one Sunday, he built a new gutter.

He is proudly displaying all of the tools and materials that he used to construct the new gutter, featured on the right.  It’s not much more than a PVC pipe, a measuring tape, a pencil, and a screwdriver.  He can channel MacGyver when he wants to. With two gutters, the tank is filled within a matter of minutes during a rain.

There was just one problem.  When we opened the tank lid, mosquitoes got in and laid their eggs in the water.  Mosquito eggs in the water inevitably leads to mosquito larvae in the water.

Now, there’s something very unnerving to me about seeing little creatures thrashing around in the water I’m going to cook with or filter for drinking.  Even if I know that it’s just mosquito larvae, not worms, and they can’t do anything to hurt me.  I just don’t want things swimming in my water.  I got pretty worked up about this problem one long, hot afternoon.  MacGyver came up with the idea that we could put pantyhose around the lid.  I didn’t have any pantyhose, but his suggestion got me thinking.  The next time I was at the market, I wandered around, scheming about what I could use as a permeable barrier.

This is what I came up with: a bicycle tire rim.  The spoke holes made it easy to stitch a piece of muslin to the tire rim. 

 

Ta-da! When it rains, we simply remove the lid, place our improvised filter over the hole, and wait for the tank to fill up.

power, Power, POWER

Remember that Tim Allen sit-com where they used to grunt about power all the time? Living in Masasi has made me grunt about power a lot, too.  Today we had no power from 6:00 am until 10:00 pm.  However, many of the recent power cuts aren’t because of generator breakdowns.  Nope, we’re getting connected to 24-hour-a-day power, which a Canadian company generates from supplies of natural gas found offshore of Mtwara in the Indian Ocean.  It’s annoying to have really irregular power cuts while the new company is working on the lines, but it’s exciting to see these guys hard at work.  Current estimates are that Masasi will be online with the new power supply in March (but previous projections have spanned from November to February, so we’ll see when they actually flip the switch…). It’s a question of when, not if, though.  That is great news for the area.  Reliable power will bring Masasi  many new opportunities for development.

Bajaji

These little motorized rickshaws are all over the place in Tanzania.  They’re cheaper than taking a car taxi, and much safer than taking a motorcycle taxi.  Motorcycle drivers around here tend to be kind of psychotic (but not as crazy as the bus drivers). I think the top speed of a Bajaji is about 25 miles per hour, so they can’t really zip and swerve around. I prefer slow and steady, given the road/traffic conditions.  I use Bajajis sometimes when we’re travelling and on rare occasions in Masasi.  They’re slow but not exactly sturdy, so I mainly stick to using them where there’s not much traffic. 

I think Bajajis are cute.  

photo courtesy of my dad, Onboard Doctor Eyes

Shelter in the Storm

We had a mega storm last night.  I want to tell you about it.

Our power was out, and after finishing two episodes of The Unit, it was late enough to allow ourselves to go to sleep.  As I was laying in bed, I kept seeing flickers outside the windows and thought it was our outside lights coming on.  (We have fluorescent light fixtures, and they flicker a few times when turned on.)  After about ten times of “the power trying to come back”, I realized that the flickering was actually lightening. It’s been miserably hot, so I assumed it was heat lightening.

I drifted off and woke up a bit later to gigantic, powerful thunderclaps.  The rain started slowly and then became an absolute torrent with unrelenting thunder and lightening.  It was the kind of storm that allows no space for sleep.  We got up for a while to look out the windows.  After getting back in bed, I laid there and listened to the storm and thought about all the people here who live under palm-thatched or grass roofs. 

Allegedly, palm thatching is pretty good at keeping the rain out, but I have no first-hand experience to support that idea.  I’m skeptical that it would keep things dry in a downpour.

The worst must be grass roofs.  The grass roofs are pretty much made by bundling dried grass and stacking the bundles on a roof frame made of sticks.  I’d say about 50% of my neighbors have grass roofs.  And we live in town. Villages are poorer, so there’s a greater proportion of grass roofs there.  A house with a grass roof gets completely soaked during a rain like we had last night. It’s many families’ ambition to save enough money to buy corrugated metal for a roof, but the metal sheets are relatively expensive, so it becomes an intergenerational family goal.  In the intervening years, people and their meager possessions get drenched in every storm.

I am left with a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings when I consider how many kind, generous, hardworking people have such inferior roofs over their heads.  I really don’t think that their homes give a real sense of providing shelter from the storm.

Spend a minute today to thank God for the shelter you have. And pray for wisdom about how to help those who have inadequate shelter.

Water Boy

We all have those moments when we hate our jobs, if only for a while.  The next time you have one of these moments, may I suggest realigning your perspective by thinking about all of the jobs you do not have to do.  If I had to pick a job that I am grateful not to do, it would be the job of “mkokoteni” or “water boy”.

These are teenage boys who go to the public water kiosks and fill up water into 20 Liter containers.  Then they fit six to eight containers onto a cart.  That's at least 120 Liters of water, which is quite heavy (120 kilos, which is about 264 pounds).  Then they drag the carts around the neighborhoods and sell the water for 300 Shillings (25 cents USD) per container.  They do this work under the hot African sun, and there are a few good-sized hills in town, too.  These are some strong kids, even though most of them are tiny.  I can barely handle one of the 20 liter containers.

It’s a High Pressured Job

We've had more plumbing problems this week. These problems stress me out majorly. Our home water situation is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because we have a public water connection, and a curse because the water pressure is so ridiculously strong that it breaks our fittings at least a few times a month.

It's rare to have a house with access to the public water line. I bet that 85% of houses in M. don't have a water connection, and they've got no hope of getting one. There are really limited connections, and they infrastructure is way too limited to cover the demand. So that means most people have to organize their water supply for themselves. Those with less money go to the public kiosks and carry water back home in 20 Liter buckets. People with more money get the water delivered by young guys who push water carts through town. The really well-off people have a tanker bring water. So we are fortunate that we can just turn a knob and get water.

At least, that's the theory…

Herein lies the curse. The pipes, knobs, faucets, joints, and valves that make up our outdoor plumbing are constantly busting, corroding, and leaking. For many months, these leaks were only a little annoying. Then they the pump station got a new pump. I don't know where they got this pump from, but it is seriously strong. Like water cannon pressure. Like it takes two strong men to direct the spray of an open pipe. So the leaks and bursts become geysers pretty quickly. And once the plumbers come, it only gets worse. They have to take the line apart, which means a zillion gallons of water in our courtyard, which makes us worry about the sewage tank getting flooded. It's no easy job for the plumber to connect two pipes when water is blasting his face and sending the parts flying into knee-deep muddy water.

Watching the plumbing repairs makes me want to run inside and cry. Sometimes I have done just that. The quality of the materials is not good to begin with, and I think you'd need industrial parts to withstand this kind of water pressure. What is so frustrating about our plumbing problems is that I feel pretty helpless. It seems like there is no good solution. I loathe spending so much time and energy on plumbing issues.

I can only hope that the stopper valve that we installed on Tuesday will be the magic one that can withstand its high pressured job.

And yet…my perspective adjustment / reality check is to remind myself that so many people can only dream about having they type of problems that I have.

what to wear?

The fabric of daily life in M is colorful, and the clothing that most people wear is much brighter than the rather neutral palate of most Western garments. 

The most ubiquitous clothing choice around here is the kanga.  A kanga is a waxed cotton cloth with a proverb, saying, or message printed on it.  Kangas are an all-purpose garment around here; they’re used for everything.  They can function as skirts, dresses, aprons, head wraps, curtains, bed sheets, etc.  It makes perfect sense that kangas would be so common, since they’re easy to launder. There are tailors all over town, using foot-pedaled sewing machines to make kangas into dresses, men’s shirts, tailored women’s outfits, and children’s clothes.

In addition to kangas and other locally-made garments, there are two other types of clothing available to purchase from the market.

1) Mass-produced garments: I imagine these clothes are coming from sweat shops in Asia. They're made of shiny fabric, often have sequins, and come wrapped in plastic. I can't find a neutral way to describe these clothes, so I'll just say it: this category of clothing looks cheap and cheesy. But it's a very popular style for little girls' dresses, for example.

2) Second-hand clothing from America and other Western countries: An amazing amount of clothing seems to have made its way here via Goodwill.  There is a surreal aspect to seeing all of these familiar clothes in such a foreign element.  It just strikes me as a bit bizarre to see a woman walking around Africa wearing a dress that my second grade teacher very well may have worn… ankle-length made of synthetic gingham fabric with integrated chambray vest featuring decorative snowmen.  A similarly peculiar sight is all of the SEC mascots I see featured on t-shirts around town.  If were to utter a “War Eagle” or “Pig Sooie”, though, the t-shirt wearer would have no idea what I was talking about. 

These Western cast-offs can be a bit embarrassing for me to see sometimes.  When I saw a gentle grandfather wearing a cap with a prominent marijuana leaf symbol, I knew he would have never worn the hat if he knew what it meant.  Likewise, seeing a respectable looking lady wearing a Big Johnson t-shirt just made me shake my head. 

All of these American clothes in Africa makes me think of a story I heard once.  I think it was on This American Life, and it was about an American woman encountering her favorite shirt from childhood while she was travelling in Africa.  The woman even found her name written on the tag of the shirt that now belonged to the African child.  I tried to find the episode, but my googling only led me to a book, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy.  Sounds like I might need to read that book.