Turn Around... This is Namanga

This summer, we spent a couple weeks building a kitchen for a little school in a little town on the Tanzania/ Kenyan border. This school, Green Eden, was started by Emmanuel Hando, and was completed in 2011 with HELP’s Team. Green Eden has about 60 children, and every day at school they eat one meal. However, they had one problem. They didn’t have a kitchen to cook the food in, only one measly tarp nailed to some trees in a square, without a roof. So, as a team this year, under the direction of our fearless leader Ellen, trecked the two and a half hour bumpy bus ride through police cars and passport checks to reach Namanga to help. And we built a kitchen.

We learned lots of useful skills in Namanga, but unfortunately we will never be able to start our own building business. :) We are terrible. About the only thing we excelled at was hauling the seemingly hundreds of sand buckets. (Just so you feel our pain, one five gallon bucket must be hauled 1/8 of a mile to a dry stream bed, where you shovel sand into your bucket, pick it back up, crawl your way out of the ravine of a dry sand bed, walk the other 1/8 of a mile back to the site, dump it, and start over again.) The rest of the brick laying, and roof building was left up to the builder, seeing as we were completely lost.

Over all, we loved Namanga. It is a quaint little village that welcomed us with open arms and smiles every day. We fell in love with the scenery (which was near the area that, incidentally, inspired Disney’s The Lion King) and the people. There was even one lady, whom we dubbed the Samosa Lady, who sold us the BEST samosas in the whole world for only 200 TSH a piece. She loved us, and told us that “every day you come, I be here.” :)

A funny part about Namanga is that, somehow, Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclispe of the Heart” became our theme song. We even rewrote the chorus to express how much sand we actually had to haul.

We call it, Turn Around. And this is the chorus. Feel free to sing along with the melody. ;)

“And we need more sand right now!

And we need more sand than ever!

And if you hold the bucket too tight,

you’ll forget to look at the ground.

And we’ll trip on the vines on the way,

and we’ll probably want to cry.

Together we can take it to the end of the line!

The sand is like a mountain way up high in the sky!!!

The sand is getting used, and we’ll always in the sun!

But we’re here in Namanga and we’re still having fun!

(We need a shower tonight! We really need a shower tonight... a really hot shower tonight!)

Once upon a time I was stuck in Namanga, with people that I don’t even like. *

There’s nothing we can do, but get some more sand today.”

*That sentence was a funny quote from a volunteer, like I said, we really do like the people. :)