Back to Qaru Lambo!

Wednesday June 2, 2010

Up at what felt like a more civilized hour (after the past few early days on safari). Showers just not quite the same as at the Sopa lodges. Breakfast (same old - really great eggs) and then prepare for return to Qaru Lambo to plant 65 trees. Mix up the seating arrangements again so Janice doesn't have to be subjected to any more guy-humour. The drive (still quite bumpy, but were getting quite used to it and are learning to lean with the dips) is just as beautiful and takes us past lots of different houses (some mud, some brick, many under construction), lots of different crops (maize, pigeon peas, sunflowers, coffee), and colourful bursts of morning glory, bougainvillea. Many people are walking, cycling, driving carts pulled by either donkeys, cows, or the people themselves, and others herding cattle or goats as they travel with empty buckets to collect water for perhaps the first of 3 trips that day. Many of the goat or cattle herders were very small children, maybe 7 or 8 years old.


It is the last week of school before a 6 week break - the exams are already finished and students are pretty much putting in time until the break. As we pull up to the school we see that the kids are already out to meet us. The tree planting is somewhat loosely organized - Peter's phys. ed. background was making it very tough for him not to take over and form everyone into more effective teams. We arranged our selves - 2 QL students with each Canadian and one primitive hand hoe and began to dig into the dry clay-like soil. Very tough work! We kept passing the hoe around so no one got too tired, but the African kids were obviously far superior when it came to this basic farming skill. The hole I was trying to dig was basically taken over by one of the QL teachers - he was trying to be polite, but I could tell he was thinking "we haven't got all day!" After the whole was the prescribed size (thank goodness the trees were actually just seedlings), we added a bit of manure for fertilizer (Pete got the nice fresh stuff, much tothe amusement of the QL children he was working with), plunked the tree in, covered it a bit and added a large plastic water bottle with a hole punched in it so it would drip-irrigate the tree. We planted guava, fig, orange, papaya, and croton trees - all about 8 inches tall. They will be fruit-bearing in about 2 - 3 years! After the trees were planted, the fun began! Some of the sports equipment from Canada was brought out and we demonstrated frisbees and badminton, When the skipping ropes came out - the QL kids went nuts - they are master-skippers! Usually in pairs, even on the small ropes. There were kids all over the place. Devin played gorrilla and had the small children chasing him screaming all over the school yard and up a tree. In what surely could be construed as a criminal act, our kids taught the Tanzanian children the Bird Dance (bad enough we have it in Manitoba, no need to infect the rest of the world). Our girls learned one of the songs and dances the African children performed for us - very cute and involved much tiny booty-shaking.
When it is time to leave, the math teacher had all the students line up in a remarkable display of order. He then said one word and all the children stamped their foot and turned right. Another word and they all stamped and turned left - all in their military-straight rows. Assemblies at KEC could definitely benefit from this sort of behaviour! I mentioned it to our students and they didn't seem too keen on adopting this practice. The Qaru Lambo kids sang us a Tanzania song and we presented the teachers with keychains that we had made to help raise funds for their tanks. They led us into a classroom and served us each a bottle of pop, which we had to finish before we could leave. This meant Susan had to visit the CPAR constructed, KEC-funded pit latrine one last time before we hit the bumpy road back to town.
After lunch at the hostel, we walked down the road to visit UMATU.