WOW!!!!!!!!

So after I left the wonderful hospitality of Haluna Gunterman, I headed south.  I cheated a little bit and took the public transit to the end of the line in Fremont.  From there I hoped on my hand trike and rolled onward.  I made terrible progress.  First, because I was fat and out of shape, secondly because this contraption is DIFFICULT!

My hands hurt so badly, not from calluses, but from grip. You get so much of your power from pulling on the cranks that after a while my hands were killing me.  I had to change position some how.  So I adjusted the distance between me and the crank making more space.  This allowed me to use my abdomen to help me push foreword and my back muscles to help me pull back, thus allowing my arms to pull up and push down on the cranks giving me nearly a constant torque.  Then end result:  now my whole body hurts!!!

After 25 hard miles of trudging along the city scene, I finally arrived at my destination.  The wonderful and efficient apartment of Mr. Chadwick Conway.  He stashed key for me so I could let me self in, I drank his beer, soaked in his tub and then he came home and made me pizza!!!  This is after I ate an entire hand of bananas I found on the counter with the jar of homemade peanut butter Dominick had given me.

I did laundry, chatted with Chadwick about his job at Tesla Motors and then passed out on his futon.  I was whipped.

Then  next day I woke at 7 as Chadwick headed for work.  I had left over pizza for breakfast and then hit the road myself.  My goal was Santa Cruz.  I had google map directions, trail mix (complements of Chadwick) and plenty of water.  I was set.  What I was not prepared for was the 1000+ foot climb to the top of a damn mountain.  I didn't even try cranking my way up, I got off and pulled the dang trike all three miles and 1000 feet of it.  It was long, hot and grueling.  Minus one wrong turn and some back tracking it did all go pretty well, though.

Once at the top of this ridiculous climb I though "goody! what goes up must come down!"  Well, I did come down, and fast.  So fast in fact that I could smell my breaks.  NOT GOOD.  I am hauling down this mountain on three wheels (which by the way, three wheels at low speeds are inherently more stable than two, the opposite is true at high speeds) on a very narrow road with lots of switch backs.  I nearly died, again.  So, after finally coming to a complete stop, I spat on my break drum and sure enough I hear the sizzle that means heat and see the steam.  I pour water on it and begin to think.  Then, I spy a stout piece of pine branch and get an idea.  It is just about the right length and with a little toying around I am able to lever it under the bike so that is drags constantly, and if I pull up on it, it drags a lot!  Excellent!  So down I go once more.  It is working pretty well, I use the wheel break to negotiate turns and the branch to keep me at a reasonable speed.  All is well, until I stop.  While slugging down some refreshing water I smell something, smoke.  I look around and see nothing, then the though occurs to me.  So I look at my pine branch and sure enough, it is smoldering.  Well, shoot.  So much for using that as a break, I keep this up and will soon be moving like my butt's on fire!

So I dowse that with some water and go looking again.  In the end I settle on what I think is a nice green piece of birch, about as big as my wrist.  For the rest of the cruise down the mountain I have no problems.  Until I reach the bottom of the mountain.  I inquire as to the address of the friend I am aiming to stay with and the man point to the top of the next mountain.  ABSOLUTELY NOT!  I didn't say it out loud but I thought it.  So I text and call Ms. Abby Chrystal and she agrees to come the 5 miles to rescue me in her Yaris.  Ohhh!  What a Godsend!

To be continued.

So after I left Vacaville, I headed straight to San Bruno where I meet up with a young man named Mike.  Mike was selling something I had been wanting for a couple years now.  I had actually planned on building one as soon as I had a couple of weeks to dedicate in my dad's shop.  Good old dad has all the tools and all the experience to make just about anything.  However, I am still several thousand miles away from Dad's shop, so when Mike showed interest in letting me have this contraption for such a low price, I got pretty excited.

 That's right ladies and gentlemen, I am going to cover 500 miles on a hand crank tricycle.

 Some minor cosmetic damage on the chain guard.  Hand brake and shifter located in the center.

 All Shimano parts, 21 speeds and looking very new.

From the front you can see the foot rests.  It seems a lot longer from this angle.

 From the back.  Under the seat there I have since added a small window sill planter.  I added a few holes to drain water and to zip-tie it on to the frame.  It is mostly to hold my water, map and a few other things.  For the most part, my bags strap on to the seat pretty well.

Me before the trip.  As you can see I have a hard time walking past all the millions of Chinese restaurants without stopping in for a few dumplings.  Lest see how I look in a few weeks.

Tomorrow I will take the train down about 25 miles south to start my journey.  I'm not really keen on navigating San Francisco on my first day, nor am I interested in spending the next day so sore I can't breath.

So, that is the program.  Tomorrow I hope to be celebrating my first day with a cold beer at the house of my good friend Mr. Chadwick C. Conway's house, who has been kind enough to offer me a place to collapse and lick my wounds from the day's ride.

Anyone who is interested in joining me for a day or two of cycling, just let me know.  Also, anyone who would like to purchase this awesome tri-wheel upper body workout form of locamotion should contact me as soon as you can.  I am posting it on CraigsList today.

In anticipation, agony, and ambivilance
Dave

So this time I got really lazy aaaaaand China doesn't like blogspot so I haven't posted squat.  In other news;  I am now in Vacaville California with a good friend from high school, Dominick Severance.  We just enjoyed two very awesome cigars, Legends so the label says, and half a bottle of Black Label.  We have discussed politics, a lot of law, marriage, travels, economics, cigars, sex, more law, and a bit of theology.  Not a bad afternoon.  It is now 2:00 am and I am beat.  Tomorrow I go to purchase a bicycle and start and epic adventure down the coast of California.  If anyone is so inclined, you are welcome to join me.

More to come, but I need some sleep.

Well, I apparently got lazy, sorry for the delay.  After arriving at my new home I put a lot of work in trying to keep construction and maintenance in line, as seen by the pictures in my last post.  Things went well enough for a while, but then I started having trouble with the Head Master (principal).

Here is sorta kinda the short break down of how things went more or less.  Fr. Tony is the director of the school.  He is an American Jesuit, lives at the school, does nearly all the fundraising single handed, does his best to continue to interact with the students, tries to keep construction on track, makes plans for where the school is going and keeps a record of where it has been.  In short, Ocer is his vision and its life is his mission.  Without Fr. Tony at the helm, Ocer would never have become a reality and would surely crash upon the rocks should he leave.

Sailing along with my ship analogy, we have Fr. Jim, Fr. Tony's first mate so to say.  Fr. Jim is the technical man.  He reviews designs, plans infrastructure, orders materials, hires workers, and ultimately make most of the spending decisions.  Unfortunately he is not here all the time.  He has to divide his efforts between this building project and another one in Kenya.  So, I have become a fill in more or less for Fr. Jim when he isn't around.  I spend a lot of time trying to inspect the buildings (though I really have no idea what I'm doing and what real authority I have) and fighting fires.  I fix water mains, repair doors, fix engines, install solar panels, repair lights and other such odds and ends.  Endless work, but enjoyable for the most part.  Especially since Francis, a young local guy, is learning to do all this stuff as my apprentice.  He is sharp and hard working.

Now here is the major kicker.  While Fr. Tony and Fr. Jim are more or less the sail and rudder of the ship, they don't get to choose all of there crew.  The school administration is chosen by the provincial, head Jesuit of the region.  This is where we get a lot of trouble.  The provincial doesn't see any of the day to day activities and doesn't have any grasp of the awesome and amazing vision that Fr. Tony has for the school.  Nor does he see the fantastic potential of what Ocer could be.  He basis his decision for school administration on something else.  I can speculate as to what, but in the end it doesn't matter.

So the school ends up with a Head Master and Deputy Head Master who are Jesuit brothers, as well educated as East Africa can provide and have no idea the incredible potential they have in there hands.  They grew up in the East African education system, that is all they know and that is all they are willing to work with.  Ocer receives 5 or so volunteers each summer, college students who are on there way to teaching degrees, or we even get people who are professional teachers from the states willing to volunteer for a year or more and they are not allowed to teach any classes.  I would imagine this is because the HM doesn't understand their teaching style, but more importantly he doesn't control them directly.  So it is better to not have them teach.

The end result is this.  Eight million U.S. dollar and counting have been put towards Ocer Campion Jesuit College and as of the time I left, March 2012, the students were not receiving any better an education than the public schools 5 miles down the road.  While at Ocer I was still teaching at one of the public schools (Trinity College) and I can tell you that if you took the top 80 sophomores from Trinity and put them against the 80 sophomores from Ocer, it would be a wash.

How can this be?!?!  Ocer has more resources, they are private so they don't have to follow the inane Ugandan curriculum and they get to choose the best and the brightest students from all over the region and yet they can't even out perform Trinity, a mediocre public school?  Simple, the HM, the administration, the teachers aren't using the resources well.  They are simply meeting the status quo that they grew up with.  The Ugandan curriculum is still used, school funds are used to buy uniforms instead of books, "teaching" still means copying verbatim on the chalk board from the teachers notes (notes that he or she made when in high school), "learning" still means copying verbatim from the chalk board into the students notes.

If the East African education system is so good, I ponder to the HM, then why is it that the Jesuits are needed to come in and reform it?  Why is it no one comes to Africa for higher education?  Well, that was my mistake.  Challenging the African big man, just as I wound up doing in Padibe, got me nowhere.  All it got me was an enemy.  So after suffering through the misery of watching the HM and other school administrators take something beautiful and turn it into shit for a couple of months, I lost heart.  I couldn't do it.  Fr. Tony and Fr. Jim have a level of serenity and peace that I can't imagine.  It makes me cry sometimes to think how little vision the HM has and how that will so easily destroy the vision Fr. Tony and Fr. Jim have.

This came to a head when the HM told Francis, not asked but told him, to cut up a $200+ door in the dormitory so that the students could be served food from behind the door like prisoners.  "Why?" might you ask.  Well, because the students, as kids do, get to goofing around waiting to be served their beans and as it happens some of them got bumped into the pot and burned themselves.  Now, instead of reprimanding the students for horsing around and instead of assigning a teacher or other faculty to supervise, the HM would rather have $200+ of infrastructure altered so that our students could be fed like prisoners, from behind bars.  I lost it.  In no uncertain terms I told him he was foolish and that he has no authority over the infrastructure of the school. If he wants something changed then he must go through me.  He is not to order Francis around as Francis is under my payroll, not his.  Well, I just picked a fight that I couldn't win.  If for no other reason than because I was leaving soon and the HM was there to stay.  So I said enough is enough.  I spent the next week or so doing what I could to help Georg, a Jesuit volunteer from Germany, learn everything he would need to replace me.  I called it quits lest I find a stout ruler and give the HM a traditional Jesuit education.

The next week, I went to KLA to finish my close of service procedures then got on a plane for Thailand.  I was sad, but so relieved.  I wouldn't have to lay in bed at night fuming over how asinine people are and how little I could do about it.

Not the happiest post, but I got some more thoughts on my African life coming.

New Home

So after my a month and a half of touring around Uganda, I contacted the director of Ocer Campion Jesuit College (OCJC), a high school just outside of Gulu in northern Uganda.  You can check out all the work that is going on there at http://ocer.adventuredock.com/.  I had known of the school for a while and had even visited a few months before I had to leave the village.  The reason I wanted to come here is because they are building.  The school is far from finished, infrastructure wise, and that would give me ample opportunity to put some of my $180,000 education to work.

The director put me to work immediately on several projects.  Wiring up some security lights and street lights.  Adjusting and evaluating the solar systems.  Extending and correcting the plumbing.  Helping with the dam to create a big pond.  Most importantly, watching over the builders to make sure they aren't cutting corners and to keep them on schedule.  This is going to take a bit to explain so hold on tight.

First, the school is not using the traditional building method of burnt mud bricks.  The burnt mud bricks are cheap, but they are basically Styrofoam filler in an otherwise cement wall.  They use an inch or more of mortar on all sides of the bricks because they are not uniform at all.  Getting a level course is damn near impossible.  The bricks themselves can just about be broken with your bare hands.  Not only this, but it takes an enormous amount of fire wood to cook the bricks.  In the last ten years, Uganda has lost almost 40% of its forest.  Trees are on a serious decline.  Add this in with how expensive (both in dollars and environmental effects) cement is and the traditional building method is crap.  Plus the buildings fall down in a decade or two.

So OCJC is using interlocking stabilized soil blocks (issb).  These issb's are pretty sweet.  They use a hydraulic press to compress sandy soil with a little clay and cement mix.  The result can be seen here: http://www.hydraform.com/ImageGallery/Index.asp?IGImageCategory=Walls+and+Stables.  In the end, it is cheaper to use the issb system because you don't use any mortar between the issb's or cover the inside and outside with mortar like they do with traditional burnt bricks.  It ends up saving you about 30% of the over all cost.  So it looks like some engineers do get to play with Legos when they grow up.

But that brings to the builders.  Unfortunately the issb's have only recently been introduced to Uganda so not a lot of people know how to lay the blocks properly.  So the school hired a construction crew out of the capital city to come and do the work.  In my opinion they are gouging the school really bad.  For every person I see working, I see another literally sleeping on the job.  No shame, no effort to hide, just flat out on his back snoring.  It isn't really allowed, but no one does anything to stop it, except me.  Only, I don't really have the power to dock wages or fire anyone so I end up being all bark and no bite.  I'm working on that though.

We just finished, for the most part, putting up the classrooms and are now working on the boys dormitory.  In Uganda, it is quite common for secondary schools to be boarding.  The girls dorm was already finished when I arrived.  At the moment, we have only the freshmen and sophomores because the school just opened three years ago and we are taking in one class at a time.  Most of the girls dormitory is empty so I get to have one of the prefect's rooms.  It is convenient and the layout of the dorm keeps me pretty separate from the girls.  I moved in all my bamboo shelves, the bed was already there and the door has a lock.  So now I'm all set.  Oh, and living on campus means I get to eat with the students.  My diet isn't all that varied, but I don't care so long as I don't have to cook.  Mostly beans and cornmeal with rice on some days and meat usually once a week.  Compared to other schools, we are living pretty high on the hog.

Well, there is a lot more to explain but we just had two rain showers back to back in the middle of the dry season.  It is both a relief and a curse.  Relief because the heat and dust were killing us and we were running out of water.  Curse because right now the mosquitoes are eating me alive.  Time to crawl under my mosquito net and read "Lies Across America."  Excellent book by the way, but if you are interested in it then I would suggest "Lies My Teacher Told Me" first.

While I've been writing all this, I've also been letting some pictures load.  I hope this helps to shape my descriptions into something comprehensible.

Dude putting together the re-bar for the wall beam of the boys dorm

That giant hole will be an underground cistern for rainwater.  Roughly 20' across and 15' deep.  It ought to hold about 15,000 gallons.  However, 300 students will still make short work of that during the dry season.

George, a volunteer with the Jesuits from Germany, and the construction bosses

Finishing up the classrooms.  It is a square with a round hut (soon to be thatched with grass) and under the hut is the rain cistern, just like the dorms only smaller

Just outside the classrooms

The boys dorm will have a urinal, latrine, bathing area, and washing area separate from the sleeping areas.  These are the foundations of such.  The owner of the construction company is Lawrence in the kaki shirt, his right hand man Moses is in the blue jumper, and George.

Finishing up the walls.  The blocks stack together so easily.  As long as you keep things level, one man can lay 1000+ blocks in a day.  Well, that also assumes you can keep him awake and working.

Cistern getting deeper

Common work practice: everything stops to say good morning, ask about work, ask about home, ask about kids, ask about crops, ask about the weather, and ask about extended family.  Its actually a very nice practice and helps to keep the community strong, but it sure can get frustrating when you want to get stuff done.

I like working with the women the most.  They are usually more dedicated, hard working, and willing to learn than the men.  Part of that is because they are accustomed to taking direction much more than men in African society.

Hut (soon to be thatched) and water tank for the girls dorm.  The cistern is also under the hut just like the boys dorm.  The boys and girls dorms will be just about identical.  You can see a small water pump for getting the water out of the cistern.

Just outside of the girls dorm.  When we have freshmen through seniors living here, all the rooms will be full of girls.  I will not be living here at that time, praise the Lord.

Just outside the classrooms

Fire in the distance and a storm coming to put it out.

This is the scene 3 - 5 days a week at 4:00 pm during the rainy season.  Amazing!

More blocks.  I love Legos!

This shows how the blocks lock together, both vertically and horizontally.

Got to cover the blocks as they cure so they don't dry too fast.  Too fast and they crumble.

This is the shop, the place I call home during day light hours.

This is Ojok Francis, the carpenter whom I work with nearly everyday.  One of the few men I've meet who is nearly as concerned with learning new skill as he is with getting paid.  He's quick and hard working.  I would say he is my apprentice, but he has taught me far more than I have taught him.

Just outside the shop

Tool room on the right, office in the middle, loft up above where we keep all the big stuff, pvc pipe, sewage line, lumber and such.

I climbed up the water tower we have and snapped a lot of pictures.  Right below is the solar array that runs the pump that fills the water tower.  The solar array tracks the sun, its a really nice set up.

Far left is the temporary shower room for the boys while we finish their dorm, middle is the toilet, and the far right is the corner of the shop.

Shop, the four tanks on the corners each hold about 3,500 gallons which then feed the buildings down hill with running water for everything but drinking.  The water tower gets ground water from 100' down.  We get it tested every year and it's what we drink.

Far right is the roof of the boys temporary dorm.  It will become classrooms when the dorm is finished.

Down the hill towards the left are the classrooms, on the right is part of the boys toilets

Far down the hill on the right is the girls dorm, just up from that is the Jesuit's house.  That is where the priests and brothers live.  The nuns live in an apartment that is part of the girls dorm.

Far center is the construction of the boys dorm.

Neighbor's house and cows.  They are pretty well off, that is how they were able to afford donating the land that the school is being built on.  Their cows are even part Holstein, that is a major sign of wealth.

Neighbors

Top of boys temporary dorm

Road headed to the nearest trading center (group of shops and houses) called Unyama.  It'a about 2 miles away.

Other neighbors, they are all related though.  Cousin brother's wife's sister's mother-in-law's aunt.

Nice house, very cool during the dry season.  It costs about $40 to build a house like this, and that is if you hire someone to help you.  Usually you just get family and neighbors to help out, then when they go to build a house you return the favor.

Eucalyptus trees grow straight and fast, sell for good lumber or telephone poles and repel mosquitoes.  The downside is that they soak up water like it's their job and will quickly dry up your soil.  It is best to plant them in swamps that you want to dry up, or in dry areas where other trees won't grow and you can't farm anyway.

Storm blew itself out before it got to us.  Good thing too, cause half way up this water tower was a small wasp nest, so I wasn't going to make it down the ladder until some one gave me a pole to knock down their nest.

And that's all for now.  I'll add words soon.  I don't have any more pictures.