Visitors

July 13th, 2010

Another emotional rollercoaster ride this past week. After news of receiving funding consisting of a grant for start up costs and a loan to cover the first six months of rent we ventured to Ngaramtoni to share the wonderful news. On our arrival, however, we were discouraged to learn that traditionally in Arusha it is common business practice to deposit a full years rent to secure a space rather than first and last month’s rent as we typically do in Canada. This came as a surprise and meant that we were short six months’ rent. With hopes that the landlord would accept six months, rather than the full 12 months we were disappointed to learn that this would not be acceptable. So we were back to the drawing board. We have spent the past few days working on other ways to fund the remaining six months as well as waiting to hear back from our funders with hopes that they would be willing to increase the overall loan. Today we learnt that this would not be a problem. We are now able to proceed. We will be meeting with the Mama’s later this week to provide them with adequate business training and we will help them elect a chair to lead the women moving forward. Hopefully we will be able to put a deposit down on the location this Friday to ensure renovations and fix up proceed immediately. Now it is imperative that we finalize a lab location to culture the probiotic strain. This is the major task at hand, as everything else has fallen in to place.

This past weekend Dane, an intern from the Mwanza kitchen, came to Arusha to visit and check out the work we have been doing here. He arrived late Friday evening and is leaving early tomorrow morning. On Saturday we showed him all around Arusha and took him to Ngaramtoni to meet our program coordinator and show him the location we have secured. Sunday a group was headed to the waterfall and because we enjoyed it so much last weekend we decided to do it again with Dane. It was another extraordinary day. This time on our way down the mountain we stopped in a little mountain side village to visit the family of our tour guide. His parents had prepared stakes of lamb for all of us. We enjoyed the most delicious meat overlooking the most beautiful view. Sunday night, although exhausted, we enjoyed the final World Cup game. Yesterday, out of curiosity, we all decided it would be very interesting to sit in on a trial at the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda), as a lot of the friends we have met here are law students interning for the UN at the ITCR. Unfortunately the case was closed when we arrived, but it was still fascinating to tour the facility and read about recent case verdicts. Today, after a long day of work, we took Dane to Mama Stella’s to show him our home-stay and to introduce him to Mama Stella herself. We enjoyed an amazing dinner with her and made plans for Marta and I to visit next Monday and have her teach us how to make chapattis.

We have a busy week ahead of us but things should be moving a long in no time!