Banana Trees

Yes, your read the title correctly, in Tanzania they make beer out of bananas.

Bananas are the main crop of Tanzania and they use them in just about everything.   Not only to they eat them plain,

A Vat of Brewing Banana Beer

they eat them fried and turn them into flour which they use for cooking.  My favorite banana dish probably was the banana soup.   The strangest might be the banana beer.  Apparently, if you cook green bananas, the sugars will convert to alcohol.  They add a little sorghum and some other things and create the most common drink in Tanzania, banana beer.

In order to thank us for our hard work, we celebrated with the villagers with a vat of banana beer.  We were all handed a traditional drinking class, a gourd on a stick, filled to the brim with this strange substance.  It has a strange smell and isn’t strained so has sorghum floating on top of it.  Not exactly the most appetizing thing in the world, but it seemed necessary to experience every part of the new culture.  If you could get past the texture, it did not taste bad and drinking from the gourd was kind of fun.  However, I quickly decided it would be a more pleasant afternoon for everyone to give my beer up to one of the villagers who absolutely loved it.

Before: Excited to Try the Traditional Beer

After: Not Exactly Tasty

The kids build a small section of the canal

One of everyone’s favorite days of the trip was when we go visit Mandaka Primary School, the school where about 500 of the village go to school.  When we arrive they greet us with songs and welcome u with tea.  They are so excited to have us visit yet I think I might have been more excited to be visiting them.  The kids are so cute.  They are in classes of about 40 and sit three to a desk, but they are so enthusiastic and joyful.

This year we hoped to teach the kids a little bit about our project by building a canal out of modeling clay.  Each child got a little section of clay to make a part of the canal that we connected and improved to make a working canal.  When we told the kids it was ready, they just about ran to the front of the room to see.   We put a hole in the wall to how that overtime the canal will break and water will escape, which out water did spilling colorful water all over the floor of their classroom.  We then fixed it to show that little repairs will help the communities get water.

Did we make a huge mess?  Kind of

Everyone excited gathers around to watch the demonstation

Did anyone care?  No

Did the kids fully grasp the concept of maintenance? Probably not

Did we at least help the kids understand the canal more?  Hopefully

Did the kids have a blast? Yes

Did the other EWB-Valpo members have fun? Of course

Was the day a success?  Definitely!

The villagers work hard to mix a concrete batch by hand

Building junction 1 required making a lot of concrete by hand.  This is not an easy task as the rock, stone, cement, and water are heavy and need to thoroughly mixed.   Now imagine mixing this with a shovel that is only 2 ft long.  That is what the villagers did for over 50 batches of concrete me made.  Although it was tiring and hard many of them kept mixing like machines to finish the work.  I was impressed since I was exhausted after mixing a batch before it was even close to being finished.

The mixing was hard, but I loved watching the people work together.  As soon as a batch was ready someone would yell “fall in” and everyone would line up and pass buckets of concrete down the line to get the concrete to where it needed to be placed.  The line was so efficient generally we did not have enough buckets to keep up.  I enjoyed it because it was something that everyone could take part in.  I joined the men and women of the village in line and laughed and smiled as we moved the concrete in order to fix their canal.

EWB-Valpo member Brittney joins the buckt brigade

These are my new friends

One of my jobs on the trip was to measure the length of rebar required to reinforce our drop box.  After the generator broke, I took my job to the market where there was electricity in one of the shops.  However, once the villagers started cutting they did not need my help.  Instead I played with three of the cutest little kids I have ever seen.  They lived off the market and on non-market days they used the booths as their personal playground.  They laughed and giggled and ran around.  I tried to teach them how to do some very basic dance moves, but they just laughed at me.  I got the same reaction when I tried to get them to make funny faces at me.  Eventually we started playing chase where they would run away from me laughing and I would follow them through the banana trees.  They ran past an old woman doing laundry a few times and with each passing she would give me this huge grin and laugh as I played with the children.   It was such a simple gesture that made the kids so excited.   Later that day when I returned to the market, the kids got my attention and then took off running through the trees wanting to continue playing with me.

Some of the many villagers who attended the meeting who wanted the canal fixed

The day before we arrived in the village, we received word that there was a landslide that blocked the water from flowing through the canal.  With nowhere else to go, the water forced itself under the wall of the canal causing the canal floor to cave creating a giant hole in the canal.  Panicked, I met with the technical chair and tried to come up with a solution to the new problem and completely revise our schedule.  We didn’t get too far before we heard from Canute, our main contact person in Masaera that the village did not want us to fix it; instead, they wanted to fix it themselves.  This was great news because not only did we not have to completely redo our plan, but it meant that the village was taking ownership of their canal.

A few days into the trip I had the opportunity to attend the village meeting to discuss the fixing of the canal.  From what was translated for us, it seemed like all the villagers were willing to pay money and donate their time to make sure the canal was fixed in a reasonable time frame.  At one point, all the villagers raised their hands and cheered.  It turned out that this was the official vote, that if each family did not contribute their 2,000 shillings (about $1.33) they would have to pay a $10,000 shilling fine.  I have never seen a group so willing to support a large fine.  I was surprised how important it was to do whatever they could to make sure the canal continued to bring them water.  It made me happy to see how the village was coming together and taking initiative to repair the canal.  This was the main objective of partnering with the village: to make sure that when we are not on implementation trips the village has the knowledge and skills to maintain the canal themselves.  Seeing this first hand was absolutely amazing.

Driving past a beautiful sunflower field

So getting to Masaera, Tanzania isn’t exactly easy.  First we flew to Frankfurt Germany, than Edis Aba, Ehthiopia, and finally to Moshi, Tanzania.   There were had about an hour drive to Masaera, the village we worked in.   This ride was at least gorgeous since you could see the mountains and shrubbery.  As strange as it may be, Tanzania is actually pretty green with lots of flowers.  I personally loved driving by all the sunflower fields.  I also just enjoyed people watching out the window as they moved on the roads with goats and cows.  It was fun to look at advertisements in English as they did not quite grasp the right adjectives to describe certain things.  Obama’s face and name was everywhere including on buses and having hair salon’s named after him.

Eventually we turned off the main road onto a little dirt road that took us up farther into the mountains.  The rains had deteriorated a lot of this road so it was really bumpy.  The ongoing joke was that you needed to apologize to your kidneys afterwards because you moved around so much.  However, I enjoyed this ride quite a bit.  The kids we passed would excitingly wave at us as we passed and they were adorable.  Finally we arrived in the village we were working.  The next day I was coordinating the moving of supplies when out of nowhere I heard my name screamed.  I turned to see Jackie, my friend from last year, sprinting towards me.  We hugged and she welcomed me into her house to introduce me to her family.  That greeting alone made the 36 plus hours of travel worth it.