Tipp City UMC UPDATE June 26th
Greetings from Tarime,
This is written on Sunday, June 26th, the first day we have had electricity since the last blog. There was electricity for a couple of hours on 2 days, but we were not home to write. The blog of last Sunday took 6 tries between outages to send.
Everyone on the team is doing fine considering a lack of sleep, hot showers, electricity, pasta for every meal, fish with the head and tail still on, riding in the back of a pickup on the wrong side of the road, toilets that are flat to the ground and a language we don’t understand. Probably the most serious problem so far is that Judy lost our camera, but there are many other pictures from other cameras. Beth has become the official photographer and has taken over 800 photos so far.
The hostel is ready to start the roof tomorrow (Monday) and should be about finished by the time we leave on Wednesday. Dave is having good success with the chimes. We have had dinner with 2 of the Secondary School faculty. Tomorrow we will have lunch with Anna (Angel House Supervisor ) and dinner with Lucas, Headmaster of Angel Secondary School. These meals have been extremely helpful in understanding the local culture.
After our trip to the Serengeti, I can attest that the pictures in the National Geographic Magazine are not fakes, but real. The roads are gravel with big stones and rough on passengers and the cars. We were able to see elephants, rhinoceros giraffes, lions, cheetahs, hippopotami, leopards, gnu, zebra, and many more. Judy and I opened the curtains on our bedroom window at 3:30AM to find a water buffalo looking back at us about 6 feet away. As we crossed from the Serengeti to Ngorngoro Crater we stopped at the Olduvi Gorge in Maasi Country. This is a branch of the Great Rift where The Leakys made great discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s of fossils and ancient footprints. The trip back from the crater began at 7:00 in the morning and after 2 flat tires, a leaky radiator, broken roof support, heater that didn’t shut off for 500KM, (300 miles), water temperature gauge pegged on H, headlights that lit up the trees, not the road, and numerous police road checks, we almost made it home about 9:00 in the evening. After the second flat tire and a jack that didn’t work, Eric was able to pick us up in the pickup truck.
Larry & Beth