I remember saying something about having a relaxing day today, with all of our business done on Monday. Put a strike through on that blog post. Today turned out to be a busy day. That is not a complaint mind you. It was filled with blessings that we had not anticipated at all. It started off very well with the 6:00 AM worship coming through the walls of our hotel from the Lutheran church accross the street. It’s an awesome sound to here and a very nice alarm clock too! We got up as the music ended and just started moving along slowly, thinking we had plenty of time to do whatever we wanted. Little did we know what was in store. As it turns out, Bishop Makaya had arrived in Dar the night before. He gave us a call and asked if we could meet after breakfast, which we did. In talking with him, we mentioned about going over to the Air Tanzania office to check the status of our flight and talk with them about the extra 135 Kilograms of weight we are bringing with us (AKA, all of our the computer equipment and such). Bishop Makaya said he would go with me to see if we could get a price break on the extra baggage fee’s. It turns out that he was right. The rep suggested that we send the extra weight items over as cargo instead of extra baggage at check-in. All in all, even with various fee’s paid to Air Tanzania Cargo handling along with other movers and handlers at the airport, it turned out to be about half the cost to send as cargo. The thing is however that we needed to get the stuff over to the cargo terminal by 5 PM to put it through the paces of shipping. What paces you ask? There is getting through the security gate, then there is negotiating with the cargo agents for Air Tanzania. Then there is getting it wrapped up on a pallet (and paying the person who wraps it), as well as negotiating the fee’s with Swissport, who are the ground agents who move cargo around for the various airlines. Then there is the witnessing of the pallet of stuff being security X-rayed and finally the tipping of the movers and shakers who made it all possible. I know I missed a step or two in this list, but you get the idea. It took a couple of hours to complete, but even with all of that, it was still worth the price break and the assurance that it would be going with us on our flight to Kigoma. It all worked out in the end, but it made for a very long day as going to the Airport in the middle of daily Dar traffic is an adventure all by itself.
Tomorrow we leave the hotel at 4 AM to make our way to the airport for the 6 AM flight to Kigoma. I’m looking forward now to leaving the hot, humid city and getting out to the higher elevation and dryer western side of the country. It is always a pleasure to step off the plane and walk down the tarmack to see our friends waiting and waving to us. I know Daudi and one of the drivers will be there, but I don’t know if we’ll see any others from the Diocese this time. We did give them fair warning that we have a lot of things coming with us. The plan it for us to stay in Kigoma and eventually go on by boat to the village of Kagunga, while the driver takes all of the equipment up to Kasulu for safe keeping.
I’ll post some more tomorrow during the day hopefully so you can see us going on in the boat, etc…
Have a great evening you all.
Bill
Well after a two day black out of our web blogs, we are back online. It turned out to just be a reboot of our cable modem to get things working again.
So today, we spent some of the day gathering more equipment. We picked up 5 computer monitors, network cabling and a color laser printer for Kasulu Bible College. Our vendor, Ideal Computers in Dar had everything ready for us and delivered it to our hotel, so it was just a easy walk over to their store, make payment and then back to the hotel to receive the delivery.
Tomorrow we will have a pretty easy day. Most of our business is complete. Just need to get another SIMM card for the Android tablet I’m testing out for possible future use at DWT. We usually would be leaving for Kigoma in the morning on Tuesday, but I found out after making our overseas airline reservations that Air Tanzania does not have flights to Kigoma on Tuesday’s. Oh well, we could have left a day later from home, but the nice thing is that we have the extra day to get our jet lag straightened out and take some time to visit with friends in Dar. This worked out well because we were able to have dinner tonight with Bishop Mpango and his son Jesse and daughter Bweza. It was great to see them again. Mama Rose could not be with us because she is back in Kigoma working at a school there that just started up their new academic year.
Another cool thing happened when we arrived at the airport yesterday afternoon. Some of you know about our friend Alnoor. He was our computer equipment vendor here in Dar for many years. Last year we could not get in toch with him. His store phone was disconnected and his e-mail was no working either. We thought we had completely lost contact with him. But then on our way out of Tanzania, while we waiting in the Airport for our flight home, guess who showed up at the airport with his entire family to take the same flight? It was Alnoor. We exchanged E-mail addresses again to stay in contact. So this year, I tried to contact him, but I did not get an answer through his E-mail. Once again I was wondering if I would be able to see him. But when we arrived at the airport, got our bags and were waiting to get through customs, guess who shows up getting his bags as well? Alnoor just came in on a different flight that happened to be 2 hours late. I mean, talk about God – instances. I joked with him that we have to stop using the same travel agent. So we will get together with him sometime tomorrow, since we have the extra time.
Thanks to you all for your continued prayers. We have felt the blessing of those through our travels so far. We are also grateful to our nephew Chris who is back home taking care of our house and pets. He also got us back online today.