East of Iringa is a town which houses Image (Im-Ah-Gay) Secondary School and if you remember back in September, we visited the school a couple of times. One of the teachers there started work on a weather station for recording local weather. The coordinator of the weather service here in this area was not available at that time, but finally got hold of me this week. Along with the second headmaster from Image School, he came to Iringa and stopped by my office this morning. His name is Michael Ashuburi and he is the Regional Meteorological Officer stationed in nearby Njombe (neo-m-bee). This amazing fellow is coordinating about 27 schools in the region to set up weather stations and train the teachers and students to be weather observers. He first showed me the standard weather "enclosure" that houses the instruments at the school. We looked over the Image enclosure when we were there.
Included are: a rain gauge, an evaporation gauge, anemometer (wind speed), wind vane (wind direction) and thermometers for temperature and humidity. By making all the weather stations standard throughout the region, Mr Ashuburi can assure that all the measurements are made the same and all the data are comparable. He showed me his training program and was adamant that a "weather station" includes both the instruments and the trained observer. The headmaster, Mr. Longo, believes he has some teachers and students interested in this project and Mr. Ashuburi plans to go out to Image next week to train his observers. We in the U.S. had a very similar program called the Cooperative Observers. Usually farmers far from airports or other weather facilities, would record the high and low temperatures, rainfall, snowfall and other weather condisitons and mail off a card with the summary of their observations every month. Tanzania is using secondary (high) schools to do that here.
I hope that I can help them by getting some of our Meteorology texts to the surrounding schools and perhaps getting them help with more complex instruments such as sunlight measurements and soil temperatures. Both of those require electrical hookups but there are commercial instruments that run off battery that might be useful here. I am going to contact my colleagues at Augsburg and ask the Introduction to Weather students to contribute their textbooks so that the next group that comes over here from St. Paul can bring some books for the Image School library.
Other than that we have had normal teaching days. The kids are getting some basketball and soccer time in up at the International School. The weather has been downright blustery with gusty winds and temps all the way down to 65 F at night. I know! That is downright frosty for here. I know I am getting no sympathy so I won't tell you that it is cloudy today and the forecast is for 80% chance of rain.
We are headed to the Orphanage this afternoon to work with the kids. We have been out there a couple of times and it is great fun just to play soccer, frisbee and talk to the kids after school.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that I drove the truck yesterday. I didn't go far and except for the one little old lady who is still brushing herself off from leaping in the ditch, things are fine. Dale does most of the driving (as the truck belongs to him for his stay). I found it fun and it really didn't feel unusual to blast down the street on the wrong side. I would advise all of you to stay off the road in Minnesota for the week after we return. I cannot guarantee that Dale nor I will be able to drive on the right side. We will just flash our headlights and honk our horns and hope that you get out of the way!
No comments:
Post a Comment