6.7.10 or “To kalinzi.”

The Coffee Stove Group headed to Kalinzi today. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, Kalinzi is a village north of Kigoma and inland from Mwamgongo. It is another of the villages that the Jane Goodall Institute has a large presence in . There is a Field Station there that we stay at while we are here. We filled up the land cruiser pretty good with all of our supplies (putting the giant bags of charcoal on top was fun) and headed off. The new barabara is amazing. More than 50% of the way to Kalinzi is now paved, and what isn’t is nice and flat and looks practically ready to pave. It took no time at all to get there. When Louis was here last spring, it took them a long time because it was all mud, and even last year in the dry season there was obvious construction work, however the road consisted of a single lane serpentine track that weaved along the smoothest parts of a very freshly widened road. It looks like the Chinese company in charge is actually succeeding in getting things done. Aaron tells me that there is also evidence of a road that has been recently cut down to mwamgongo (although he says it looks impossibly steep for a car to reasonably drive on). I still will doubt it until I see it.

We arrived in Kalinzi to absolutely zero fanfare, a welcome change from last summer in Mwamgongo. It was a market day (Tuesday) so the town center was bustling. We also decided that one of the best places for us to start doing our stove testing was with Tuma and the field station stove. In order to test out the particulate monitor, we set it up in the kitchen and got some data on the meals that she cooked us. Once we get a few more supplies we will grab charcoal efficiency numbers using our stove. It is very nice to finally be in the village so that we can start dictating our own schedule (to some extent) and get to work on the work that we came here to do.

We made sure to scope out a place to watch the World Cup game during the day, although it would not have been hard to find it at night since the sounds of Vuvuzelas was blasting throughout the village on loudspeakers from the places with TVs. We headed off to one of the two places in Kalinzi to watch the first semi-final world cup match. The building was set up almost as a church of TV with a center aisle and about 15 rows of simple wooden benches and 100 or so Tanzanians. A pretty equal number of people rooting for the Netherlands and Uraguay (we were rooting for the Dutch).