Well it’s been a busy week. I have learned what it means to run on “Africa Time” On Monday I spent the whole day searching out materials for a square-foot garden I am building for a small school on the outskirts of Arusha. This is the same school I mentioned in my last post where I met my friend Jacaca.
My friend Tanya and I spent the whole morning out searching for the various materials we needed for these gardens. Fortunately, there are many people in Arusha that build things so there are many hardware shops and they even gave us, for the most part, African prices. Often we get what are called Mzungu prices, that means “white person” prices. Basically they think, because we are white, that we are rich and will pay much higher than reasonable prices. Anyway, we still got Mzungu prices but some were pretty reasonable. Throughout our search for materials there was only one thing we couldn’t find, which happens to be the most common thing in Arusha and that is…drum roll please…dirt. There is no where to buy good dirt in Arusha.
Every hardware store we went to had all of the tools and materials we needed for gardening but none of them knew where to buy dirt and even looked at us funny for suggesting we would buy such a thing. Apparently, they’ve never tried to grow their own garden. Well after bouncing from store to store for about 2 hours we came across Trio Hardware and Irene. She knew where to get good dirt and even called the guy to supply it to us. As it turns out, she later explained, people in Arusha don’t know the English word ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’, which explains the quizzical looks. Thanks to Irene we’ve got our dirt and the gardening project is still on (pending project approval). This will be a great blessing to the kids of Morning Star Primary School.
After this week of shopping it’s become clear to me how little we appreciate time saving conveniences like cars, the internet, reliable electricity, and one-stop shopping. It’s taken me days to put together the plan and price out materials for this school. In America it would take maybe a morning to do all of this work, most of which would be done on the internet followed by a quick trip to Home Depot. It’s no wonder progress in Africa works on “African Time” the whole infrastructure we’ve come to expect and rely upon is completely non-existent out here. There’s a lot of work left to do.
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