Week 3: The hardest week and the final push

Officially the hardest week of the project and in the running for the hardest week of my life thus far! We all worked as hard as we could  and I at least learnt that I could power through when you think you've hit bottom. But we knew we were working to finish something brilliant and beautiful, and we wanted it to be the best we could muster!

Monday was spent mainly on the remaining book sorting, cataloguing and referencing with some finishing touches to the painting of inside. Tuesday saw us starting to sand down and varnish any shelves that the fundi's had completed, and I finally finished books! 3785 in total, and that is excluding the book-by-book ones and the ones the school already owned :S Lets hope there are enough shelves!

Steff and I were lucky enough to go back to Lindi on Wednesday to print bits and buy even more solvent! (Going through it like water!) While we were gone the girls were working so hard! Came back to find the blackboard repainted, the other outside wall was being painted and the fundi rangi (painter) was half way through the library rules on the wall. This was such an upbeat day, because I started to think that this impossible task was doable by Saturday!

We had had to change the date of the opening ceremony from the Friday to the Saturday because of Form 2 mock exams. This meant we lost a day of travelling but realistically it meant we could spend longer and involve all of the students, which was the whole point of us being there.

Thursday and Friday saw us working harder than before as the days to opening ceremony grew closer and closer. The metal grids on the windows were FINALLY being removed by the fundis, and the mesh going on, so we needed to paint the grids the pale dutch blue of the bars. After that every chair had to be sanded down and varnished with two coats, which was a laborious job and one that was made even harder when we ran out of varnish!! 

By the end of the late night, we had almost finished all of the furniture, all of the painting and moved all of the boxes of books over from the ICT store room to our semi-complete library space. Our guest house -host, kaka Doula, was kind enough to make us all chips or chipsi mayai for lunch and transport them up to the school, because we couldn't stop to eat. Unfortunately a 2nd member of our 7 had to go to the hospital today as she had malaria, so we were two down and desperately under-staffed, but somehow managed to cope. The floor was 'cleaned' of dust and dirt, although white spirit and soapy water did not remove the paint and varnish splodges on the floor :( Even still, we had just over 24 hours to go and it was really taking shape. 

Dinner tonight was a bowl of rice krispies with powdered milk; I was too tired to make yet another vegetable omelette. 

The final day had arrived and it was yet another rushed breakfast and early start. Today we actually put the first books on the finished shelves in their pride of place. I thought this would be the relatively easy part...oh how wrong I was! The neatly arranged sections of general science, biology, physics, chemistry and maths had to be taken down and moved more times than I can count, to  make way for stray books and better organisation. It was such a pain to have a nice finished section of Form 2/3 Maths books squeezing brilliantly onto one shelf, to then find 5 Form 1 books and have to move everything along and across. Science and maths are no longer in my top 5 subjects of all time haha.

When all books were on, we moved the 'finished' desks and chairs into the space and sorted the comfy corner. It was surreal to think it was 4pm and everything was more or less finished! We decorated the library with bunting and balloons, put a blue ribbon around the door, and made posters detailing the library floorplan and explaining the colours and coding system.

Dinner tonight was yet another bowl of cereal, then packing and an early night was in order. It was strange to think that 21 days had passed in Phaisha Guesthouse so quickly!

Weekend 3

Saturday saw us working in the library again. We had a slight lay in and met at 10am, where we had breakfast and figured out our day plan. Books were to be done, and bits of paperwork like the library guides and the design of library information posters. It was a reasonably stress-free day and the school was very quiet. For dinner we went into Mtama town to the little restaurant and ordered without the help of Grace and Ema! Most people got what they ordered, chipsi mayai and kuku (chicken). I, however, did not get my kuku, and just had a portion of ugali, spinach, tomatoes and maharagwe (beans). This is the second time now I have ordered chicken and been bitterly disappointed! Oh well. Konyagi o’clock it was, with Mary and I sharing a bottle. I still have no idea what is in it, except for Konyagi. That obviously doesn’t help one little bit, although it does smell like gin.

On Sunday Mary, Viki and I took a trip to Lindi to buy provisions, while Eseelle and Steph worked at school on the library. On the way to Lindi we passed three bad crashes in the space of 15 minutes along the same stretch of road. Thankfully they were all empty cargo trucks rather than full dala dala’s although it didn’t exactly settle our nerves! We had a successful day buying 5 ltrs of white spirit, blackboard paint, fruit and veg, kangas and chocolate, and even had a small amount of time to sit on the beach and get our white legs out. I need to excitedly mention that for lunch I had a whole red snapper (with head attached!), roasted/fried vegetables and a separate plate of rice, and it was INCREDIBLE. The fish was meaty and great, with a few bones. None of this struggling to get meat off the bone malarky with chicken.

The dala dala home was fairly quick… until it broke down in Ningaya (sp), a small village 5km away from Mtama Secondary School. We sat on the bus with everyone else for an hour before I got off to make conversation. Everyone was ignoring my attempts at Swahili and all the local children were following us around or laughing through the window. Eventually another bus came past, but it was far too over-packed, with people sitting on others and standing on people, and it drove away with three-deep men bowed out of the door clinging on. We were left us three, and a handful of other Tanzanians, one of whom spoke a little English and was also heading to Mtama. The bus driver tried to put us on ‘bajajis’ except they were actually boda bodas – basically motorbikes where you clutch hold of the driver and don’t wear a helmet. We ruled that out straight away, because we were told another bus was coming. Finally it did, although it was the same bus as before just turned around, and the people on there were angry that it was picking more people up, and moaning about mzungu mzungu. I was getting a little bored of it now. I can hardly help a bus that is broken down! 

Home safely though, and bed was well needed when we got in.

The Reno: Week 2

This week we cracked on with filling the holes in the wall and sanding them back, sanding down the rusty metal bars and painting the library; white and blue walls inside, white outside with blue border. We also had the carpentry fundi's working in the library making the shelves for us, which was exciting to watch. It was slightly frustrating having to work around them, trying to paint walls while they sawed wood, but we didn't have a choice and made it work. First problem arose when the ‘sky blue’ paint we had bought turned out to be rather greyer and more expired than we had hoped, but eventually got a nice blue that we mixed with some white paint. The rollers had to have branches attached to them to reach the top bits, and Steff stood on tables to reach the edges! Nice and safe.

By Friday all of the second coat of blue and the third and final coats of white had been completed and we made a start on painting the metal bars blue, which we had already painted with an anti-rust paint. As the fundis refused to take the outside metal grid off, we painted through it carefully with a toothbrush dipped in the oil paint. That was very fiddly work. Finally we painted around the frames with thick white to cover any blue drips. We left at 6.10pm as the sun was setting and were very, very tired!

Monday 12th – Friday 16th August. More Books!

Book referencing time! Or what I like to call the fun stuff. The general plan was to sort all the books in their subjects, catalogue them onto an excel sheet (title, author, level, publisher and quantity) and then attach coloured tabs to the spines to distinguish their subject when on the shelves. Sounds quick, but first you had to organise every book into piles where there were duplicates, of which there were hundreds. That involved lifting lots of books into a different place. Then the counting and cataloguing, before attaching the colour paper tab with sticky tape and boxing them back up. It was long work, but fun, because I like to sort and sift and organise :) The perfect job? I also like to paint haha.

It was a long week of sorting books and running out of sellotape! By Friday we had three extra rolls, and all of Fiction, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, Business and Economics were catalogued onto the excel spreadsheet and labelled. Just general science, English and reference books left, phew!

Our system is quite simple to make the use of the library easier – each subject has a colour, like red for science, blue for English, purple for fiction and so forth, and is then split into levels by the writing on the coloured tab. All of the fiction books have the first three letters of the authors surname written on the spine, with an added circle for plays and a cross for poetry. Maths books suitable for Form 1 have an M 1 on the yellow spine label, and just an M if it’s a general book for all levels. Simples?

Thurs 15th August

Today we split book cataloguing and painting the room between us as a group. I helped to paint the blue walls which was messy fun. More so because our rollers are attached to branches so we can reach the top sections! We also stand on tables to do the edges neatly near the roof... not sure if that complies with the health and safety but it is quick and effective! The blue is such a lovely sky blue and it really brightens the room up. 

We went for dinner in Mtama town, but unfortunately the chicken I ordered didn’t actually have any chicken on, just bones. Sad times. But I had some good ugali, beans and vegetables so that kind of made up for it. I had a quick shopping browse for sellotape, as we ran out, and as I didn’t know the word I ripped a piece of tape off a box and waved it around, with no luck surprisingly! After dinner we went to the street sellers for mendazi. These little bundles of love were being sold by local women who sat in a line with a bucket each with various snacks in, lit by an oil lamp in each bucket. It was really quite pretty, a line of candles. I wish I could have taken a photo, but I don’t think that is allowed.

Wed 14th August

We’ve been getting a few power cuts this week, obviously meaning no lights, sockets or ceiling fan. Tonight the power decided to go off just as I was taking a shower… so I lit the room candle, put it in the bathroom and showered by candlelight! A cold shower by candlelight in a bathroom where you have to be so careful to not fall down the toilet is definitely an experience! Maybe not one I'd like to do often...

Netball!

So today we had a netball match of teachers vs students netball, which was hilarious in its self because many of us hadn’t played it since primary school! I was a sub, then wing defence, then goal defence. Safe to say I didn’t make much difference or score any goals but it was fun! We were drawing 5-5 at half time, and finished on what I counted as 9-6 to us. But the students were adamant that it was an 8-8 drawer! Oh well, it was all a bit of fun :)

We played with two teachers and the headmistress, who bought Salha along as our mascot. 

Salha was really good at catching and throwing!