Art Boma

On our way to and from Ruhaha National Park a few weeks ago, we passed thru a small town of Nzihi which advertised an Art Boma (art center). The sign was prominent in that it was a big sign with fewer than 200 (unreadable) words. I am not sure why they put road signs along the road. The vehicles who know where they are going don't need them and we can't decode the 10 lines of words on the signs as we cruise by. Anyway, later we heard about Art Boma from the woman who is its director. She was in Iringa a few weeks back and encouraged us to go out and see their shop. So off we went.

The pavement ends about 10 km out of Iringa and we are back on the dirt and rock road. We rattled along for another 10 km or so and found our little shop.

The shop includes many crafts by local artisans: carvings, baskets, pillowcases, beadwork, wire sculptures...

Some of us just have to ham it up. I am sure many of you will see the results of this shopping trip and I won't spoil it for you. We will encounter this group again as they plan to participate in a "Christmas Craft Show" in early December.

School was rather uneventful this morning; I tried to explain the map coloring problem in 2 hours. The problem is how many colors are needed for a political map so that no two adjacent countries have the same color. The easy answer is that if you have 50 countries on a continent, color it with 50 colors. Unfortunately, the map printers wanted to limit the number of colors to the smallest possible. Turns out you can color most maps with 5 or 6 colors but no one has figured out a simple technique to decide the colors. If you thing you have the answer, write it on the back of a sleep number bed and send it to "Car Talk". Oh, I am sorry, I drifted off there and got lost in a podcast. Anyway if you can solve this problem you will get $1M and the Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

Just one more note for today. The power was out from 9 AM to 7 PM. We made mendazi by kerosene for lunch and stirfry by kerosene for dinner. Just as we ended dinner and sat down for a game, the lights came back on. We had been running out to the porch for the last hour or so looking at the lights coming on in various parts of the city. We had power all around us for a good 30 minutes before our block came on. We were tempted to go to a restaurant for dinner but most of them got power back when we did, so the kerosene was just fine. I now have the little single burner stove and two kerosene lanterns all cleaned up and filled and ready for the next outage. Ironically, this week we spent over $200 buying electricity for the upcoming month for all of the Bega Kwa Bega apartments and they still decided to turn off the power for 10 hours today. The country doesn't have enough power generation capability so they must use rolling blackouts to control the peak load. Ironically, when they turn the power off during the day, no one knows if they left their office lights on so the office buildings light up like Christmas Trees when the power is restored.