Dedicated to Todd

My younger brother Todd is clearly feeling unloved by his big sister...so this blog entry is written in his honor. I know this is what he would like, primarily because he has mentioned this to me several times. If you would like a special dedication, you will have to be at least as persistent.

Its going to be a challenge to beat the popular appeal of a Tanzanian Safari, but as I am here to work, I cannot be on safaris all the time. So today's blog is about what we did today.

We started the day with a brief visit to the Mackay House building in Dodoma, trying to meet up with the elusive Brian from Australia. Success! We eventually found Brian in his office at the diocesan house and had a short visit to talk about the work we were doing, and the work he has been doing in Tanzania. He's been in this country for most of the past 25 years, and we were hoping to learn more from his knowledge of the area. He shared his background on agricultural hands-on training and his current development work, and we shared our work as part of the corporate service corps. We also took the opportunity to ask about getting flights from Dodoma to various points in the country - possibly Arusha, Moshi, or Zanzibar. The location we may travel to next weekend will be largely determined by availability and cost of flights. Right now its just about information gathering. Like many things here, information is not available online, and if it were, the access would be very slow until they can get the fiber optic cable linked and working in the country. Its really all about phone calls and hope.

We got into the office and spent the day tying up all the details of the past two weeks of information gathering. It is essential for this project to ensure we have well documented deliverables, and a path forward for the university to work, and for potential future team projects. We are shaping all we've learned and finalizing our recommendations. We are documenting and process mapping, and data modeling, and prototype building, and presentation and report building...We are all aimed at moving the ball forward..so there is alot of work to do as time ticks down. We capped the day off with a nice dinner outside. A smidge of a threat of rain never came to be, and we continue our run of no real rain to speak of. The evenings are pretty wonderful here all the time.

More progress tomorrow. I'll post more pics as we get them.