Our productivity came to a halt on Friday when the power went out for almost 24 hours. There have been many small outages throughout the past week, but this was by far the longest, and Weston said it has been worse than normal lately. It also coincided with the end of the water supply—aka showers—at our guesthouse since it hasn’t rained in a while. These are temporary annoyances for us, but have much more serious implications for the hospital. Although we hated the fact that we couldn’t work on any equipment, we did get to spend some more quality time with the employees at the study office. In this case “quality time” really means we lost many, many games of checkers. Then Weston took us to the next town over for a little happy hour.
Saturday was a very quiet day in Kisarawe. We wanted to make up for the lost work on Friday, but they didn’t have the key necessary to access the broken equipment in storage. Instead, Nathan and I both got a lot of reading done and spent some time with our friend Rachel at her family’s restaurant.
This morning our friend Victor took Nathan and I to a church in Dar es Salaam that has a bilingual service in English and Swahili. Since we had to take several buses, we ended up close to an hour late. However, we made it just in time to witness an engagement ceremony that ended with the future bride and groom crowd surfing off the stage, supported by their friends and family. Members of the church invited us to lunch afterwards. Then we made our way to the beach via a ferry. We tried teaching Victor to swim and soon our little lesson grew to a group class. I wouldn’t say any of our students are headed to the Olympics anytime soon, though.
Upon arriving back at our guesthouse, Stella (the manager) used some charades and Swahili to tell us that there was now water in the showers, and we all but raced to our rooms! It did rain a little bit this morning but we hadn’t expected it to be enough! Let’s hope that we have water through the end of our trip so that we aren’t hated by all the other passengers on our flights home.
