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Thanks for the comments! My access to the internet is much more limited than might seem to be the case. I'll respond as soon as possible, but may not be able to do so until after returning to the states in mid-August.

Wednesday we carried water. We carried the same volume that local women and children carry, up the same slopes and on the same trails, and we were floored. One of the students, 6'1'', 240 pound Chris Drescher, Adventure West Virginia leader, high school football captain and, as is he is commonly called by kids here, 'big man', had as much trouble as anyone else. He took breaks, he took turns, he sweated, grew tired, and complained about aches – as we all did, and all the while a local woman steadily moved up the mountain, 5 gallons of water balanced on her head.

We were gathering the water to help the local masons with cement mixing. The cement is to finish the outside of the cement Water Tank at the Eden Center. (The plastic tanks we purchased the other day were for local women's houses). The local masons buy bags of cement, then mix the cement with sand to make the mixture go farther. On the inside of the tank they mixed at a ratio of 3 parts sand, 1 part cement, but on the outside where we're working now they mix at 5:1. The water comes from the valley behind the Eden Center.

As we walked down to fetch it we could see trails coming down from each of the nearby hills, converging on this point, and there were women and children coming and going. We did see one young man. He was carrying one can on his head with another tied to his back (this is twice the amount any one of us carried). Joseph suggested he was probably going to sell it, as men more commonly gather water to sell, while women and children gather it for familial use. I do know that the people one regularly sees getting water are women and children.

The cement mix came from a hardware store in Bukoba. But the sand was another story. At the Eden Center, over time, Joseph has had people dig down through sandstone. The sandstone is then steadily broken into pieces. We used a piece of wire mesh to sift the sand from the remaining bits of stone and then we carried the sand over to the mixing area.

After that – and unexpectedly – we went directly to Joseph's neighbor's wedding. The couple had been together for many years and had nine children. They were excited to make it official. They welcomed us, offered sodas and beers, and we danced. There were plastic chairs set out under tarps. The dance floor was straw. The music system was essentially a boom box reminiscent of the 1980s, and it was running off of a car battery.

One of the tarps over our heads had UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees) printed on it, signifying two things. First, we are close enough to Rwanda here that there were tens of thousands of refugees in the area following the 1994 genocide there. Second, materials in Africa get reused. Scarcity discourages waste.

I have a geographer friend who has done research in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He once pointed out how quickly things change in developing countries, how he has occasionally lost guides or interpreters to better opportunities, and how he really couldn't blame them for that. Since I first came here three years ago, cell phone networks have developed, the first ATM machine has been added to Kayanga Town, the town's first two radio stations have started, and the first large cement-and-stone water tank has been built in place of the small water line and hand pump that burst last year. Not only do things change quickly, doing any business is a constant effort to find the right resources, negotiate, cajole, improvise, and cooperate. Yesterday was another lesson on the pace of business in the Karagwe Region.

The day started with difficulty. One of our community partners, the director of FADECO (Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation), Joseph Sekiku, couldn't find the local mason who was to lead the students on the construction of the water tank at FADECO's Eden Center for Appropriate Technology. Joseph and I had planned to go together to Bukoba in any case, where we would buy additional materials for water harvesting systems for the homes of women identified by our other community partner, WOMEDA (Women's Emancipation and Development Agency), led by Juma Massisi.

I set about finding Mr. Bonaface, a teacher we had worked with last year who had approached me on the street the day before. He was hoping the students could return to his school for a bit of English conversation time with the students there. And this group of university students has a particularly strong interest in working with children, so they were anxious for that. We made the connection with Mr. Bonaface and the group went with our class facilitator Brandon Cohen to spend the day at Ndama Secondary School. After Joseph and I dropped them there we picked up a smaller car at his house, finished changing the tire and replacing the spare (a constant concern with the state of roads) and left for Bukoba, two hours away.

Our first visit was to immigration. There had been some disagreement over the costs of our visas at the rural border. The officer was a friend of Joseph's so we left the passports there for processing.

We then attempted the main hardware store in town. It was closed. A passerby who knew Joseph reflected the constant presence of stereotypes around the world, offering that the place was closed because, "That's the problem with working with Indians, they take long lunches." We drove up the street to another hardware store, actually run by another Indian merchant, which was open. We priced the water tanks – a bit over $250 for 1000 liters, a bit over $300 for 2000 liters, and a bit over $400 for 3000 liters. But there were no 3000 liter tanks in stock, and in any case the shop could not provide transport for the other tanks, and suggested we hire a truck. At some point in a series of phone calls about a truck Joseph discovered a truck already en route, shipping tanks from Mwanza to the Karagwe Region. Without other transportation alternatives, we offered to buy the tanks off of the moving truck, so long as it would deliver them. The driver agreed over the phone. We would add a bit over $100 to the price of each tank to make this happen. As I may have mentioned, the roads are rough and gas is over $6 a gallon here. Actually the day following this we had to fix a flat on the van we use.

As we conversed with the truck driver we also went into the small grocery store next door. In Bukoba it's possible to buy cheese, various kinds of candies and 'sausages' (basically hot dogs), but those things are not readily available in Kayanga. Joseph was buying some sausages when a tall mzungu (white person) walked in and started asking the merchant (also Indian) questions about the regional coffee traders. He said he was working with the World Bank and was hoping to do a study about regional coffee, and he had heard a rumor that it was largely controlled by Indian merchants. It turns out he is finishing a PhD in Economics at Cornell, and is interested in learning more about the structure of incentives in the local coffee market.

Joseph was excited to talk with him, because Joseph is currently quite upset that the local coffee cooperative and Tanzanian government offer growers a lower rate for their beans than what they can get if they would sell in Uganda. There are coffee checkpoints all along the road, preventing growers from selling to the north. Tanzania wants them to sell and export from within Tanzania because it increases the country's intake of foreign currency. But Ugandan buyers are willing to offer a higher rate, so there is currently a coffee smuggling problem in the region, complete with police confiscation and smuggling bags of coffee at night by bicycle and motorcycle.

We returned to the hardware store next door, having worked out the water tanks issue. And we purchased all of the pieces of aluminum gutter this store had – 31 pieces. That would be just enough for our cooperative efforts with FADECO and WOMEDA. We are constructing basically rain-water based harvesting systems, ensuring that all of the water that falls on the house during rainy season may be collected for use during the remainder of the year. We stuffed the two meter gutter pieces cross-ways in the cabin of the car, giving me a seat in the back. Then Joseph found an air conditioner man.

Joseph and FADECO developed the first radio station to exist in the Karagwe region. It turns out that in Tanzania the government requires an air conditioner in the radio equipment room in order to get full permission or government certification. Joseph had attempted to fix the air condition unit himself, but to no avail. We found the air conditioner man and Joseph convinced him to come with us. He got into the car with a screw driver and a wrench. They communicated in Swahili. We drove across town, dropping him off along the way. We met briefly with the Regional Chief of Internal Security. We picked up the repairman. He had two compression tanks and some copper piping. We again drove across town, dropping him along the way. We met the immigration officer at a gas station. He had our passports, all stamped and ready. When we returned to the air conditioner man he had a power drill and complete tool set.

While we rode around town Joseph mentioned to me that he expected the man to work hard because he was a Ugandan. We drove the two hours back to Kayanga. We had gotten our passports processed, located water tanks on a moving truck and purchased them, bought all the aluminum gutters a store had to offer, met with an economics PhD working with The Bank, made a courtesy call to the Regional Chief of Internal Security, hired an air conditioner man away from his job for 24 hours, and found all the tools he needed to complete his work.

Joseph and the Ugandan worked through the night on the air conditioner installation. It was working when I visited FADECO's office the next morning.

We flew over the Atlantic Ocean and Europe in a single bounce, watched the flight plan dip south on the monitors to avoid Israeli and Iraqi airspace, left our daily comforts and easy routines as far behind as our time zones, and then, in Dubai en route to Kayanga, Tanzania, we were only halfway into our journey. I think it’s fair to ask – why are we doing this?

It’s about curiosity, excitement, mission, and growth. The mission is to both serve and learn deeply about service. We’ll be constructing water harvesting systems for Amizade’s community partners in Kayanga, Tanzania, but we’ll also be learning about successes and failures in development history, visiting one of the UN’s 12 Millennium Development Villages in Africa, learning what the US Embassy has to say about development and – most importantly – listening to our local partners’ experiences and perspectives. The Water Systems will sustain access to clean water in a region where many people walk hours each day for access to what is in the end often dirty and insufficient water. The learning will help us sharpen our lenses in analyzing and understanding development and its history, will help us be better communicators in numerous intercultural contexts, and will help us better understand the connections between our living, learning, and values.

The excitement and curiosity relate to where we’ll be doing this. It’s enthralling and engaging to be at the edge of the map. After driving a day from Kampala to the far Southwestern corner of Uganda we’ll be visiting Ruhira, a mountainous and remote village targeted for intensive development by the UN, in cooperation with Columbia University’s Earth Institute under the leadership of Jeffrey Sachs. From there we’ll make another day’s trip over land, this time skimming by the border of Rwanda, crossing into Tanzania at an outpost so remote that it has made neither Let’s Go’s list of border crossings nor even the roads indentified on Lonely Planet’s map. After crossing in that under-reported space, we’ll travel on to Kayanga, Tanzania, the hometown of our community partners and the community at the end of the energy grid in that part of Karagwe, far Northwestern Tanzania. We’ll be there about three weeks before moving on to Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.

Finally this journey is about growth. It’s about growth for each of the students who is taking part in this 6-credit Political Science course through Amizade and West Virginia University. They’ll experience various kinds of growth in terms of how they understand the world and how they see themselves and their culture, their status, their money, and their experiences to date. It’s about growth for Amizade and WVU, deepening relations to our partners in Tanzania. It’s about growth in cooperation and access to water and growth for women who will no longer need to hike hours everyday for basic water access. And it’s about growth for me, continuing to learn from these experiences, from community partners, from students, and from all of our attempts, learning, and improvements at cooperating across cultures through service. We’re moving on to Ruhira.