You wanna know why? Because as an unexpected side effect of
my recent food poisoning, I lost a bunch of weight clearly (there’s no scales
here so I don’t know how much…but you can see it in my face so it’s probably at
least a kilo…). This means that I spent the whole day today pulling my pants up
because my belt is now too big HAHAHAHAHA. So, the first thing I did when I got
home was put a new hole in my belt…which was difficult to say the least…all I
had at my disposal was a pen, the metal rod thing on the actual belt, and a pair of nail clippers…anyway it worked so
I’m happier now.
So, today.
Today was…well…long…and a little bit tedious. When George and I got to the
office, Elizabeth greeted us and started the rundown of the weekly schedule…although
she’d forgotten her laptop…and she hadn’t uploaded the updated schedule to the
dropbox yet…so she did it from memory! We all listened intensely but it was too
much information…and she stopped after Tuesday afternoon HHAHAHA and we all agreed
that we’d just look at it when she got home and uploaded it to the dropbox,
which she’s now done!
Anyway, my
whole day was basically one long business visit…not “basically”, it actually
just was one big, long business
visit. Marjolein, George, Rachelle, and I all left the office at about 9:20 (so
early right!?!?!?! hahahahaha), walked out the front of the office, and hopped
on a relatively empty Dala Dala (we did
have to wait for about 5 minutes for one that wasn’t totally packed). We all
took our seats in the van, and prepared for our overly cramped, sweaty, hot, 25-minute
journey on the Dala Dala (again, read my post that talks about Dala Dalas if
you don’t remember it). When we got off (and stretched for a few minutes…and
let my kneecaps recover from being pushed up against the seat in front of me)
we walked for about another 10-15 minutes before we finally got to Irene’s
house. She invited us in through the front gates, up a footpath, and along a
short but seemingly invisible path through some trees and fronds to a long
wooden table.
Her
business, as we soon discovered, was making batikis, which are kind of like wrap
dresses…but ones that you literally wrap around you…not the first-world, pre-sewn
equivalent hahahah. The process was actually kind of interesting. She takes a
plain coloured fabric (the three that she had today were white, white, and
beige), then uses these sponge stamps to stamp patterns onto the sheet using
melted wax. The wax then dries, and she soaks the fabric in a dye for 35
minutes, with a brick on top. After that, she pulls the fabric out of the dye, washes
it out, and hangs it in the sun to dry. Since the dye can only affect the exposed
fabric, you’re left with the pattern in the base colour (this time white/beige),
and the rest of the fabric in colour. She repeats this process with various designs
and dyes to create these beautiful final products that she sells for 25,000Tsh each
(they cost 18,000Tsh to make). Irene was really a very nice woman, she included
us a lot in the process, even letting us stamp the 3 fabrics most of the time!
Despite that, stamping was a one-person job…so most of us sat around vaguely
watching, but also having to entertain ourselves with various activities
throughout the day. We made a list of suggestions for her business, as well as
providing her with some possible advertising outlets. Here, have some pictures
so you can better understand what I’m talking about:
The sponges used to stamp out each pattern.
The pot containing the wax, held over a bowl of hot coals.
George stamping out a pattern over the top of one that we had already done.
A couple of the fabrics we worked on today!
And Marjolein in the background working on one of them.
Irene had quite a beautiful garden too!
After that,
Rachelle walked us back out to the main road where we got on a Dala Dala back
towards Arusha. She didn’t come back with us since she lived within a few minutes’
walk of where we were for the whole day hahahaha. The trip back was…exciting…to
say something of it. So I was sitting in the very back row, in the left corner.
There was nice ventilation, since the windows were open…and I was kind of forced
to have half my arm and shoulder outside of the van…which really didn’t fill me
with confidence, so I tried my best to keep it inside the van…Oh well. The driver
never slowed down for speed bumps in the main road…which are very tall…and are
about every 500-1000 metres…so I was almost thrown against the roof a couple of
times…which is very high up…like you can stand about 2 thirds tall in these
vans…so there was about 1 and a half feet between me and the roof…yeah that was
interesting. Then! The van stalled after taking off from picking up some
passengers…that should usually be a small thing, right? Wrong…the van had a
flat battery…I could hear the motor struggling to turn over about 30 times
before they abandoned it… So, they got a couple of men out of the van in an effort
to push the van into a rolling start. It worked! But the engine stopped again after
a few seconds of waiting for the men to get back on board…So they shepherded
everyone out of the van and onto the side of road, by which point there were plenty
of vehicles almost rear-ending the van…at speed, too…It was still occupying one
of the two lanes of traffic. After a minute or two, this larger bus pulled up
behind us and took us all in. It was much more spacious than the Dala Dala, and
only 500Tsh instead of 400Tsh! The only area it was lacking in space? They had covered the entire ground of the bus in
boxes containing ten 720g packs of liquid soap each…this wasn’t that much of an issue though since it
was quite literally the WHOLE floor. So you just walked on them to get to a
seat…and then had your knees tucked up a little higher than they otherwise
would be…it was still a hell of a lot more comfortable than any Dala Dala I’ve
been on…I’ll keep an eye out for those buses in future! They seem to run the
same routes as the Dala Dala vans. Anyway, after that, the trip home was fairly
uneventful…got off at the Mianzini stop, got on another Dala on the other side
of the intersection, and got off again at Sakina Supermarket (you can look all
of these places up on Google Maps), and walked home.
So that
brings me to right now…where there’s no power, so it’s dark, and I’m lying on one
of the couches in the downstairs living room (yes there’s and upstairs living
room too hahaha) with a candle next to me, listening to songs that make me not
miss home as much…tomorrow is the half way point! And I get to finally do my
negative numbers presentation on Wednesday! Provided the morning group rocks up
this week! Fingers Crossed!
Alright well,
as always, thanks for reading! See ya in the next one!
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