Katoro

 Today we are driving to Katoro where Hamisi, another of ACTT’s agents, lives. We intend this to be our base for the next 3 nights.

We leave around mid morning. Kahama is a large, busy town and is certainly the place to come if you want to replace your motorbike tyres, they sell them everywhere!!

This morning we drive as far as the town of Uyovu where Hamisi has arranged a teacher training course for 24 teachers from 8 surrounding schools. Hamisi has invited us to visit Uyovu Primary School where the training is taking place.

The drive is interesting and we take a few photos along the way, including a “mobile clothes” shop!!

We are meeting Hamisi in town so we stop here for lunch while we wait for him. We take quite a while looking at different places to eat, Robert isn’t really very impressed by any of them but in the end he picks one. They cook us chicken, goat, bananas, rice and vegetables. We watch as the guy chops up the goat meat with a small machete and then a sharp kitchen knife. I was happy to see that they did wash their hands regularly. The food did take a while to come but we were in no rush as we knew it would take Hamisi a couple of hours to get here.

Once Hamisi had arrived we drive the short distance to Uyovu Primary School. On arrival we are met by the Head Teacher and a variety of other teachers and shown around the school. 

We are then taken to the Head Teacher’s office where Robert and Hamisi explain about our project. The teachers are very enthusiastic and keen to apply next year. It was a really good discussion.

The teacher training course is run after school for 3-4 weeks. All the computer equipment needed for the course including laptops are provided by ACTT. The teachers pay a small fee to attend and end up with a Microsoft Certificate if they complete and pass the course. Only schools whose teachers have attended one of these ACTT training courses can apply to our project for computers.

We are then taken to the classroom where Hamisi’s trainer (I can’t remember his name) was just setting up, ready to start the lesson and teachers were arriving from other schools. Again we had a bit of a discussion with the teachers about the importance of ICT in everyone’s lives these days.

We are at the school for a couple of hours and everyone has seemed very happy to see us. Can you spot me in the photo below?

We leave the school and continue our drive to Katoro. Hamisi has reserved us a room for the next 3 nights at The Giant Hotel which is a new hotel. 

When we arrive we check into a room that costs TSh 80,000 so is a bit more expensive than we have paid on most nights previously. However once we have sorted ourselves out we realise that there is no toilet roll, no soap, no bottled water and only one towel. Not a great start. Anyway we report all this at reception and go to the bar for a drink and a snack. In the bar we are given the menu but told that all the prices are wrong and everything is more expensive……Mmmm, now I am really not impressed!! We then say we won’t bother with food and miraculously the chef comes out 10 minutes later and tells us, ok we can have the prices on the menu…..suspicious or what!

Anyway we order a snack and some drinks. Again Pete is not happy that they don’t sell local beer, only Heineken…. very odd, but this did seem to be true. But they were charging TSh 5,000 for it when we have been paying TSh 2000 ( about 60p) for local beers like Serengeti or Kilimanjaro, in all the other places!!

So, after waiting an hour our food has not arrived, it’s 9pm so we leave and tell them to bring it to the room……which they do a bit later.

So eventually we settle down for the night only to discover that the air conditioning unit makes a very loud noise intermittently through out the night continually waking us up!! As you have probably guessed we decide to move to a different hotel the following day.