Coffee, Bats, and Euchre

Back to the university today to get moving on our projects. There is so much to do, but the projects are filled with challenges that all add time to the schedule. We're getting ready to run a workshop tomorrow and to spend some time with our UDOM team of TA's. We took a slight detour this morning to try to find our contact at the diocese building in Dodoma. we were assured he would be there this morning, so we started early to try and catch him. Rather than have a huge group descent upon him, we split up. Three of us went for a brief coffee at Roses Cafe - and of course it was closed. It is neither on swahili time or non-swahili time..it just seems to always be closed - despite adjacent shopowners insisting it is still in business.

We did end up at the Executive Cafe - just around the corner - which was open. We did our best gesturing to the young man who seemed to be working there. Gesturing as if we were drinking back a cup of coffee, gesturing to show the movement when you scoop coffee out of the can to mix coffee. I kept repeating the common brand name of the common coffee - but with no luck. Sandip came up with the word for tea. The young man finally gave up and went for help. We sent Wolfgang in after him to see if we could somehow end up with 2 cups of coffee and one cup of tea. As he finally returned, we got a call that we were ready to go. But - Wolfgang had worked so hard to gesture 'with all his body parts' to order our drinks - he didn't think we should be rushing. We got our drinks a few minutes later - and sat outside in the beautiful weather, and then headed in to the university.

Today's highlight was Dan flying into our room suddenly - and slamming the door as fast as he could as if he were running from the law. It was quite an entrance!.. turns out somehow a large bat had entered the building..and it was chasing him down a long hallway. He sought refuge in our room - lucky we were not having a deep meeting with those outside the team. Over the next 10 minutes or so we monitored the position of the bat in the hallway until it had moved from our intended path as we left for the day.

We also tried to arrange for dinner at a local restaurant. The owner asked that we please call in advance (at around 3 pm) and tell him what we wanted to eat. It was an Indian restaurant and he assured us he would make whatever we wanted as long as it was from North India. Over lunch Sean meticulously got input from everybody, as well as our questions - so that we could call ahead and they could be ready for 10 people. Some time in the afternoon they called the owner...which was followed by a call from some relative of the owner telling us he had to leave town....no dinner for us there tonight!... We returned to the hotel, sat outside in the courtyard and ordered our meals at the hotel...followed by a competitive game of euchre - though it was aslo a teaching session as we prepare for great competition across the teams. I have a feeling there is going to be alot of euchre being played.