Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

Where is our House?

Saturday, October 20

After yesterday’s journey, sleeping in late this morning was very welcomed. We got up, showered, ate a light breakfast, and headed back to the office to use the internet and sort through the other things to choose what we wanted to take back with us to Riverside.
Dana and Melanie dropped Marcelo and me off at the office then went to the market to shop. A few hours later they returned and I had most of the items sorted upstairs to take with us, leave in Mbeya, or let Dana decide. She chose less stuff than I was expecting… good thing.
We spent a short while online checking e-mail, getting the latest news, etc. then left for lunch at the Karibuni Center. Lunch ended up taking about 30 minutes for them to prepare (Dana had lasagna and I had pizza) so in the meanwhile, I went outside and took pictures of the courtyard that is filled with flowers. There were a group of kids playing with a make-shift soccer ball who nearly trampled each other when they noticed this mzungu had a camera. “Piga picha! Piga picha!” they yelled out as they ran in my direction. That means “Take a picture! Take a picture!” The kids here love to be photographed and laugh hysterically when they see themselves on the little LCD of a digital camera.

I proceeded on to take picha za maua (pictures of flowers) when a Tanzanian man about my age walked up to me and greeted me in English. I responded in Swahili to show him I knew some of his language and that started a 10-minute conversation. Aside from the greeting, we both only used about 5 English words the whole time. That was very encouraging to me that I was able to stand there and talk to him that long and learn a lot about each other. His name is Zawadi (Gift in Swahili) and he has 3 children, 2 boys and a girl. His oldest is named Clinton… go figure! I told him all about me and Dana and even that we were planning (at least at that time) to travel to Nairobi to have our first child.
“Lunch is ready.” ended the conversation as he told me about his job as an artist. He showed me some of his work; hand-painted cards & a hand-crafted wooden photo album were my favorites but I didn’t want to buy anything at that time. I told him to keep an eye out for me as we would soon be living in the area.
After lunch, we dropped off Marcelo at the office for him to finish some computer tasks and then went to look at a house on the Baptist Compound (BC). It is a 7-house establishment built by the IMB almost 50 years ago. John & Kay (landlords) are in the process of buying from them. When we looked at the house, I LOVED it but the rent was considerably more than the rent of the house out in Ifisi close to where Marcelo & Melanie live. So, we pretty much wrote the house off as an impossibility.
We picked up Marcelo and headed for their house. A short bit after getting there we walked down to the look at the other house. It is nice and the rent is $100 less per month but the layout of the house is off. Three bedrooms, the living room, and dining room are in one building and the kitchen, bathroom, and 4th bedroom are on the other side of an open 15-foot wide courtyard in a separate building. Ick.
Dana and I were in the bed that night talking about the houses when we realized how close in cost the 2 houses actually were. Factoring in the fuel cost between Ifisi and Mbeya, they got close enough for us to have to really consider the house on the BC again.
I went to sleep hoping it would end up being the one.