Chato

 This morning we are visiting Bidii Primary School which we have been supporting for about 5 years.

Robert and Hamisi pick us up at 8.30 and the first place we go is the Chato District Council Offices to meet the District Education Officer. We had a short chat with him and he then assigned us a council representative to come with us for the visit.

It is only a short drive to the school and on arrival we are met by the Head Teacher, the ICT teacher and the Ward Education Officer. We have a chat in the Head Teacher’s Office and are then shown the computer room.

There are a group of students in the computer room, writing stories about themselves.

We give them one further computer to add to the 6 they already have along with a printer, projector and laptop. We have made the decision that today we will officially hand all the computer equipment over to the school. This will mean they are no longer part of our project, so no longer need to report to us and that all the equipment is now theirs.

Everyone seems very pleased about this and the Head Teacher goes and gets quite a few of the other teachers to tell them. 

There are then some speeches. The man we have brought with us who is representing the District Education Officer is particularly animated and seems really pleased with all the support the school has received. It is at this point that I realise that Joachim (the guy in the white t-shirt below) is here. He was the IT teacher at the school when we first started the project several years ago. He was really enthusiastic and great with the kids. He then went off to Dar to do some further studying and so Saidi took over,  who has also been good. I am not sure exactly what Joachim’s role at the school is now but it was great to see him again.

Once we had finished at the school we called back in to the District Offices to report back to the District Education Officer and then drove the 2 hours back to Katoro.

We dropped Hamisi back at his office. He had told us he had recently started a small cafe/canteen business just down the road so we went to see it. It’s called Maroba Restaurant after his young daughter.

 

As we leave Katoro to drive back to Geita the heavens open. It rains all the way back so when we arrive in Geita we decide to go back to Desire Park to get some food as we know it has an indoor restaurant.

We have a similar meal as before, chicken, mashed potato, bananas and chips but this time we all have hot drinks!!

Unfortunately we are then in for another hotel hiccup. We had arranged to return to Lenny Hotel today and saw them write it in the diary. After Robert dropped us off and left, we went in to be told no one had actually allocated us a room and they were now full for the next two days, this was despite us leaving two bags with them for safe keeping on our one night away!! Peter reckons (and I probably agree) that they got a corporate booking and bumped us. They taxied us to another hotel where we were shown a same price room at 1/3rd the size. A room the same size was Tsh 50,000 more per night. We got them to ring Lenny to ask them to pay the difference and Lenny said they couldn’t afford it!!! Despite being fully booked out for the next two nights. Anyway the new hotel I think took pity on us and have let us have a room somewhere between the two for the lower price. This all took about an hour and a half to sort out which I could have done without at the end of a busy day. 

We had a cup of tea and then a drink from the bar before having an early night as we knew we would have a busy day tomorrow.