Arusha, Monday, January 16, 2017

What a lovely day.  I stayed in the Kundayo compound and tried to catch up with my email, read, cook, and do some laundry.  John can’t stay still for long, so he went out on a hunt for a small plunger to use as an agitator when we wash clothes in the 5-gallon bucket.  He ended up needing to go to four or five shops until he found one, but he returned triumphant and did a bucket of socks for us. He was also covered with dust and coughing badly, so he gave in and finally wore a face mask for part of the day.  The nearby road construction and lack of rain have made the air quality here much worse than usual.

I had a lot of difficulty getting into my Hotmail and wasted far too much time trying to solve the problem.  For some reason the wifi here does not like Macs as much as it does PCs, and I finally have to give in and use John’s computer.  I hate that because he always makes remarks about how my wonderful Mac isn’t doing so well. Today my connection seems better.

My only big project was making beef stew for dinner. Because the burners on our stove do not have a genuine low setting, we kept having to turn the burner on and off to keep the pot from boiling all the time. In the end, however, the meat and vegetables turned out perfectly.  Except for occasional quirks in food preparation or cooking, it’s fairly easy to make meals here. We have a lot of stews, often with rice. There is always plenty of wonderful fruit for dessert.

For those of you who have been reading my postings in past years, I have great news. The incredibly LOUD next door neighbor we had in 2015, Marjoline (sp?), showed up here yesterday.  We heard her out on the road long before she entered the gate. We greeted each other and caught up on her NGO which does something with sports for youth. I’ve always suspected it may do more for Marjoline than Tanzanian youth, and indeed she said she had been back and forth to the Netherlands four times last year. I was pleased to notice that she was rather conservatively dressed and not wearing her favorite cut-off jeans with the metal crosses riveted all over. And, I actually felt regret that she was not our neighbor again.