The near sleepless 2nd night

I went to bed at about what would be the normal time for me at home. So it seemed I had adjusted to the 8 hour time change pretty easily. I began to hear a gentle rain at about 10:30. This was not good news since I had set up a cultural walking tour of the village the next day, but it might not happen if we had an overnight rain. The main road would be very muddy. I guess I fell asleep around 11:00.

Well, now it is 1:30 in the morning and I am wide awake. So much for adjusting to the time difference. My body was trying to tell me it was 5:30 pm, no where near bed time. It also has been and is still raining out. So, unable to sleep, I decided to write some thoughts in the journal. I watched the people of Moivaro Village and Arusha from the car on Saturday as Jackson showed me around the area. I got a glimpse of how these people lived. My interest in them and their lives was now piqued. I desperately wanted to get out among the locals to get an up close view of what their world was really like. I just hope that the rain does not wash out the walking tour. I laid on the bed wondering just what life would be like living in a house without electricity, water, and virtually every other "luxury" that we take for granted. I just thought that with all that we have in our lives, there must be some way to give back to these, so far, seemingly wonderful people.

We saw many partially built houses on Saturday as we were driving around. When I finally asked Jackson about them, he explained that people bought building materials as they had cash to spend. There was no such thing as a home loan or a mortgage in this world. Thus, you could drive down the road and see houses in various phases of development. There would be one house with three walls and a pile of bricks near by. A few yards away there may be a house with all four walls but no roof. I saw one with a tree growing up out of the inside of the house. There was another with all of the walls that had the wood rafters in place, but needed the corregated steel for the roof. Even after a family had enough bricks purchased to build with, they may have to wait a year or so to save enough money to pay a brick layer and and tender to lay the bricks. Jackson said it could take ten years for some families to build a house. And these are only small 2 and 3 room "huts". I was told that the average income in this village was about $2.00 a day. It could take a long time to save up enough money to buy materials to build even a simple house on that kind of wages.

I think I finally got to sleep around 4:00 am. With the time change and just being too excited to see the new world around me, I really didn't care if I slept. There was just too much to see and do.