Day Eight—Bukoba (5/28)
Today was supposed to be our day to really get things done in preparation for our time in Bukoba, but we’re all growing accustomed to African time and learning that things don’t always actually happen on the schedule we’d like! We had a meeting with Hussein, the president of the Bukoba Lions Club and a man that BWB had met in previous trips to Bukoba. We discussed our future plans for diabetes screenings with him. Some of us also got to go to the internet café today and get in touch with the USA. Other than that, some of us got to do laundry, which awesome, because most of us were starting to run out of clean clothes!
Around noon, our water shut off. We thought that maybe we had a water ration and were only allowed a certain amount of water per day, and that maybe we had already reached the limit for today. After talking to William, the man from whom we were renting the house and bandas, we learned that the entire city of Bukoba was having a water problem, and that nobody had water. He assured us the water problem would be fixed… but couldn’t tell us when that would be! We weren’t too worried at first, but the implications grew as we realized that no water meant no showers, no cooking, no drinking water, no washing dishes (which meant ants), no cleaning anything, no flushing the toilets, etc. We spent quite a bit of money buying bottled water, but it was more appetizing than the thought of filtering and boiling the water from Lake Victoria! We went to bed very dirty, but it was okay.