The Watering Hole

By Thursday, we were finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable at WEECE.   The girls wait for our arrival to begin morning prayers.  They usually start with a song (usually in Swahili).  On Thursday they sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ in Swahili….it was beautiful! After the song, they go into the Hail Mary and the Our Father (both in English, which means I can participate).  It has been a great way to start off the day.   Mama Mrema came in for a couple hours, and since her eyesight is bad due to diabetes and recent surgeries, we took turns helping her with her emails as she cannot easily read the computer screen.  She had one more surgery planned for Friday, so while she really wanted to be at work, you could tell that she had other things on her mind.

Day 2 of the Excel lesson with the girls went very well.  We taught the girls how to budget and had them build a budgeting tool in Excel.  I think most of the girls understood – we asked sawa sawa? (ok ok?) and they said yes.   It’s amazing how eager these girls are to learn!!! The idea of saving money is completely foreign to them as most of them come from very poor families.  Every shilling is used for food, clothing, shelter, or school….if they are lucky.  In many families, the husband/father controls all of the money, and will spend much of it on beer.  Unfortunately, this is a big problem in this country.  Even the men that work here at CCS admit that most men in the country are lazy.  The women do all of the work, and then the men spend the money on frivolous things like banana beer rather than school for their daughters.

Anyway, we told them they would need at least 10,000,000 shillings to buy a car (~$9000 US), and gave that item as a stretch goal to save for.  Most of the girls at WEECE either walk a couple miles or take the daladala (bus) to class.  It is very doubtful that anybody in their immediate family has a car, so giving them this goal seemed to work well and add a little excitement to the exercise.  Combining the clothing sales and production  spreadsheets with the budget, the girls were able to determine how many pieces of clothing they would have to make and sell in order to obtain their basic needs, put money into a savings “account,” and buy fabric to make additional clothing.  In addition to teaching the girls these skills and showing them how to track this information in Excel, I am making an Excel template for them to use in the future.  For each thing we introduce to the group, we try to think of a way to make it sustainable after we leave (Gotta love the Control phase in DMAIC!) 

The best part of the week was Mel’s “PE Class.”  From 10-10:30 every morning, she leads different games for all of us as a break between classes.  On Thursday, we taught the girls the Macarena!!!  It was so funny!  Luckily, I had my little video camera with me, so was able to get some of the action recorded.  When I showed the girls the video a little later, they were so so excited.  I’m not sure if any of them had ever seen themselves on video before, so this was a real treat.  They want to watch it every day now, so I think I’ll upload it to some of the WEECE computers next week so they can watch it whenever they want.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to post the video to my blog from here in Africa, but I will try to post on Facebook this week.

On Thursday night, I finally ventured out to the bar for the first time.  11 out of the 15 of us headed out to The Watering Hole, an expat bar about 2 miles from home base.  It was great to finally drink some Tanzanian beer (Tusker).  Now that we’re all settling in, I’m sure there will be many more evening trips in the future.  So many beers, so little time!  :)