The Container!!

Since January of this year, we've been expecting a container from the US of new and donated items for the school. There have been many delays due to Tanzania changing some regulations, causing the paperwork to have to be redone, and various shipping issues.  We then thought it would come in March, and then July...well, here it is, August 26th, and IT'S HERE! 

All the way from Nashville, Tennessee, trucked to the coast (not sure which port, New Orleans, maybe?), across the ocean on a freight ship, a nice long wait at the port of Dar es Salaam, and then trucked across Tanzania to Monduli!  Everyone was excited and curious to open it. 

Below, Oscar realized that I was taking photos and hammed it up.

There was equipment both for the school and for the clinic inside. One of the major things for the school was a large set of matching chairs.  A church in the US was redecorating and donated their used chairs that were still in good condition.  Our dining hall is one huge room with tables and benches to eat at at one end, and the other end is our auditorium.  Up until now, the students had to move all the benches and chairs from the dining end to the auditorium end anytime we had an activity, and then back again.  Now we can set up auditorium chairs permanently and stop wasting time moving chairs around all the time.  I'm also hoping that now that we have more chairs, people will stop taking chairs out of the library and forgetting to return them!

There's quite a pile of boxes and things to be sorted out, temporarily in the dining hall.  One whole pallet of boxes is books for the library!  We've been really looking forwards to it; currently, the library has about six hundred books, but there are supposed to be about 3000 books in the shipment, which will really change our library!  We have new shelves, just built, ready to be filled.  It's going to be a lot of work over the next few weeks (months?) to get all of them sorted, stamped and labeled and ready to go on the shelf.  

We also received a new iron bell for the school.  This thing weighs a ton--possibly literally!  Currently, our school "bell" is a piece of scrap metal and a chopped off piece of metal rebar--it works pretty well, but is rather inelegant.  It'll be a while before we startle the neighborhood with the peals of this new bell, though; first, a sturdy bell tower has to be constructed. 

We're all excited it's finally here!