Farewell Focolore

You may not have enough patience to read all of the events of Wednesday. I will attempt to summarize the important points.

The Stiles have a microwave. It has been out for 6 weeks and on its way from Dar all that time (a 10 hour drive).

The Stiles have no light in their kitchen; the wall switch fell off. We will get a new switch Thursday. What do folks do without a complete hardware store and tool kit?

The Tumiani faculty had an all day meeting on teaching. Students were not told about the meeting and most of the faculty didn't show up for their classes -- effectively cancelling all classes. The presenter showed up at the designated start time of 9:00 and most of the faculty trickled in by 9:30. The presenter exhibited an excellent example of "death by Power Point" by putting up slides of so many words they were unreadable and then read the slides to the audience. Need I go on?!? (The emphasis is mine.) My students asked to have a help session at 2 PM, but by then they had figured out that none of the other faculty were holding class -- the students went home. I could have had an all-day help session, but I waited in the classroom until 2:30 and when it was obvious that no one was coming, I left too.

I was able to restart the computer on my desk at Augsburg from here. It had crashed some time in early November and I needed some documents from it. It had been very stubborn and wouldn't let me log in. If I couldn't log in, I couldn't find out what was wrong and fix it. I just guessed some passwords and one worked. I suspect my students had put that password in recently and I just stumbled across it but I was in. Looking at the log files it was obvious that one of the services (called Open Directory -- which it clearly wasn't doing) was not a service. I trolled the Internet and found a one line solution and voila! a server is reborn. This was an amazing amount of luck from 7,000 miles away, so I carefully put my computer away and thanked the computer gods for letting me live one more day.

I stopped at Radio Furaha to check if Internet had been installed -- still waiting on a money transfer from the bank.

I stopped by city hall to find Robert working diligently on their network. I showed them a little about creating a firewall; he understood and took over. Robert is the shining star among all of these. He knows more about networking than anyone here and just needs a little kick start to get him to try another feature of their network management system.

We went back to Focolore school for a little presentation. The students were excited to sing us songs and say "thanks for coming and come back soon to Tanzania". You know, some things have made this trip worth it. Focolore was one.

On our way out the door to Focolore, Sharon noticed water running out from under the door of C-1, the apartment on the first floor of our building. Most likely, someone turned on a tap during the water outrage (misspelled deliberately) and left it on. When the water returned, whatever it was flooded and now is flowing out from under the front door. Now, in most apartments, the manager would use his key, open the door and turn off the water. Here, manager? Is there one? We have no clue. The guards looked at it and argued about something, but clearly they didn't know who to call. (In spite of the fact they are calling someone all day and night from their phones.) Anyway, manager's key? Another interesting problem. All of the apartments have iron gates locked by owner provided high security pad locks. No one else can get in. So we left the water run. Later that evening, after the other apartment dwellers had arrived home we found a woman who knew the phone number of the mother of the woman who lived in C-1. A few minutes later, someone showed up with a key and we saw folks scurrying around starting to clean up the mess. The unintended consequence of this security system is that a fire cannot be fought and a flood goes on until someone who knows someone who knows their mother's second cousin's phone number happens along the scene. No one really considers these problems in the big picture.

We have water and electricity and it is beautiful and the Focolore school was very rewarding. We are blessed with each other, your prayers and the opportunity to do all of this.