Back to Nyamaguku

Monday morning we got in the car just after 8:00 to head to the village. We head out of Musoma, drive east then north. Over the Mara River on a small suspension bridge then we take a left off of the paved roads. We start out far too fast because one bump sends Peter and me, sitting on the padded benches attached to the sides in back of the Land Cruiser, to the ceiling, hitting our heads. From that point we slow down to a more reasonable speed for the dirt road.
We turn off the road onto a bike path and over what, some parts of the year, would be used as a field to grow something. The house we come to has electric lines going to it: one of only two in the village – this is Chacha’s house. We get out of the car and greet him. His children – or maybe grandchildren – are curious but slightly frightened of us and they keep their distance. Chacha gets in the front seat with my mom and Justin and we head off.
At the first house we visit, the owner, a teacher, and his wife greet us and show us around. My mom starts out by asking questions, through Justin who serves as the translator, about the system. He likes it but he needs more lights, he says. I try to take pictures of the meeting as I had been instructed but the close quarters of the living room make it difficult. We follow the owner into a hallway where, up on the rafters, is the controller and battery. I take some more pictures as Peter checks the voltage of the battery and solar panel.
All of the visits followed more or less this same pattern. We drive to the house or walk there from the last one and greet the owner. We ask them questions while Peter does all of the voltage checking. All the while I am taking pictures. I take pictures as we approach the house, as we walk between houses, as Peter checks the voltage, as my mom and Justin ask the usual array of questions. When I first heard that my mom was going to go back out to the village, I didn’t expect to be going along; after all I am not really part of her non-profit here. But my mother needs pictures for the website and whatever else the company would have for promotion. And for that she needs a photographer. That’s me.
I am not really much of a photographer. I have never used a nice camera of either the digital or film varieties. So what am I doing with my mom’s brand-new-for-the-trip Cannon Rebel T1i? I had spent the day before familiarizing myself with the thing so at least I won’t waste time with that, but I still am lost when it comes to exposure and aperture settings. Luckily I can let the camera deal with that and I leave it on “creative auto” setting.
The day becomes very repetitive. The first few houses are actually in a neighboring village to nyamaguku but everywhere they tell the same story. They need more lights. The lights aren’t bright enough. The battery is losing capacity. They want a phone charger. They want a TV. All of these are fixable in the near future, except maybe the last one, which would require a much larger system than the 10-watt, 4 light ones installed here. We drive off of the normal dirt road onto bicycle/foot paths that were never meant for cars to visit all of the houses with the solar light systems installed. Luckily the Toyota Land Cruiser is made for that kind of terrain and takes it in stride. We see a lot of houses and ask a lot of questions (and get a few answers many times). Around lunchtime, one of the customers is a bar and we stop for a soda.
Most of the customers are just normal families, though. Many times, just the woman is home, and the kids who stay away from us for the most part. There are animals at many of the houses, too. Mostly they’re chickens around – or even in – the house, or a dog or cat but there are even a group of cows gathered in the shade of one house. One of our customers has little pigeon houses set up under the eaves of his house. The last house we visit (I remember being told last year that he was the richest in the village) has many goats and cows penned up next to the house, which weren’t there when we visited last year – gone grazing or getting water.
After visiting 19 houses and taking over 300 pictures, we drop Chacha back at his house and start heading back to Musoma, stopping at a couple more houses along the way. By the time we get to the last house, it was 4:30 and I was ready to get back to Musoma. I wasn’t feeling well and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Besides, I knew the last house that we would go to and I distinctly remember finding the man’s manner rude and dismissive when we were there last year. I keep my objections to myself and we turn off the road. This is the worst path yet. Maybe it seemed longer because I was so ready to be done, but there definitely weren’t plants scraping against the side of the car on any of the other paths, and I don’t think that they were this bumpy.
The last meeting is like the others for the most part: same complaints but maybe with a bit less of the niceness. Although at first I thought I had gotten a bad impression of him last year, it doesn’t take me long to remember why I found him disagreeable. Luckily, the meeting is over soon enough and we head back to Musoma. I took 345 pictures throughout the day but there is no proof that I was actually there at all.