FRONTAL LOBE!!!

Thanks for being a wonderful addition to our travel team, Kara!  You have the matured frontal lobe that we all lack.         

          An ongoing inside joke within our group is about that fact that we learned that the decision making part of the brain (the frontal lobe) is not developed completely until age 27.  This is evidenced by the fact that young people do not always make the best decisions, mainly because we do not think through everything as we make them. All of us are far below this 27 year old marker in life and thus our decision making ability is not up to par of that of our mentor, Kara.  Today we had yet another "frontal lobe" moment:

            Between taking water use surveys (which I will talk more about later) we had some time to kill so Salka, Stephanie, and I decided to play a little bit of frisbee in the field.  Unlike the soccer game last week, people decided not to join in our play, but instead to watch us play catch. As Stephanie was passing the frisbee to Salka, some crazy, wayward wind gust must have occurred because huge frisbee suddenly landed on the roof of a nearby building.  A gasp echoed through the crowd, with a few intermittent giggles as we eyed the frisbee atop the roof searching for a way to get it down.  As we rounded the back of the building we found a pile of stacked bricks, about 4ft x 4ft x 3ft. Salka immediately climbed up followed by Stephanie and I with a plan to lift help one of us on the roof. Before we could decide who would do the honor of climbing up, our shuffling around caused much if the pile of bricks to collapse.  This time the crowd watching all gasped while we stood flabbergasted at the mess we had made.  Then, like children, we starting to pick each block up and stack them up. You know how the worst part of Jenga is the construction of the tower before game play, well this was much worse.  Our shame made us work faster and finally we staggered from the back of the building, covered in brick dust, to find the kids and Swartz playing catch with the "lost" frisbee.  They had apparently gotten it down by jerry rigging some sticks together.  Now who are the engineers here? Anyway, clearly our frontal lobes are not fully developed, but it did make for a good story. 

Frisbee on the roof with the stick contraption to get the frisbee off...

The frisbee was down, but we are on the other side of this building, working on stacking some bricks.

Other than that mishap, the rest of the day went very smoothly.  It was Kara's last full day in country, so she helped us finish the water use surveys with two more Umudugudus (villages).  The surveys will become very helpful when it comes to finding out how much water every person uses so we can size the catchment units correctly.  It also gives us an idea of how the sanitation has been for them.  They also have served to let the community members know we are here and what we are doing.  It has been nice to walk around the villages to find familiar faces!

Finishing up with the water usage surveys.

We then met with the Community Vision Board again to explain to pros and cons of rainwater catchment vs a pipeline. After hearing these the community represenatives were definitely leaning toward the rainwater catchment systems, so that was definitely good for our travel team to hear.  

With things going smoothly, we decided to go on one last hurrah dinner for Kara along with Mezack, and Willy. We went to...of course, Alberto's Mambo Italiano.  Dinner was better than ever and our Rwandan associates definitely enjoyed the fresh Italian food.  It was our last day with Kara and we are going to miss her so so much! 

God Bless,

Ariana