Yesterday was excellent but very tiring. I woke up too early in the morning, my alarm still had 30 minutes before it was supposed to go off, but I couldn’t get back to sleep and was a bit antsy.
I used my extra time to go out into the town of Bensa and walk around a bit before it was fully bright. It was cool to see the town wake up as if it were a living entity. As the sun rose and the sky got brighter and brighter, more people came out to greet the new day. At first only a few motorcycles were roaming the streets, the shops closed and barren. When the sky lit up a full orange-blue, the streets came alive with the public transport, vendors setting up for the day, and a lively honking and chatter.
When I got back to the hotel we were ready to get the day started. It was more site visiting. First up was this protected, capped spring source. This one spring, along with the developed infrastructure, serves 6 villages and about 1,500 people, including a school.
We then went on to investigate the actual homes and communities using this water. This is one of the “healthy homes”. It’s very fun going through the communities, all the children are very excited to see foreigners. Funny enough, whenever they see me and my manager they scream out “China,” because the most common foreigners are contracted Chinese to build the roads around the area.
We spent three hours out at the project site before heading back to town to get some lunch. The diets here are a lot of meat. Vegetables aren’t much of a staple and seeing how much fruit is grown here, I’m surprised by the lack of it in the diet.
We went to visit a coffee processing plant after lunch. One of the guys at WFG has relatives in the coffee industry and was kind enough to take us to this place. It wasn’t too exciting for me, I’m not much of a coffee fanatic, but everyone else really enjoyed it. I didn’t know this, but coffee beans are actually a green, seed-like bean and it’s only once you roast it over heat that it turns the characteristic brown.
After all the exploring and site seeing we spent a bit of time at the office doing some work. Unfortunately the town goes through rolling black outs (there hasn’t been electricity since we’ve arrived) so we didn’t have power for WiFi. Thankfully some places, like our hotel and a few banks and restaurants, use a generator during certain hours of the day, but it’s still dependent on fuel which is expensive and scarce.
After about two hours of work we found our way back to the hotel to rest before dinner. I found some time to watch a bit of a movie which was nice. Dinner was some injera and bosena shiro which is like a curry paste with meat bits in it—absolutely delicious! Today we’re traveling to another town to see some different sites. It’s a lot of driving, but it should be nice to see more of the countryside. I’m a little nervous because I woke up with a slight touch of IBS—hopefully it doesn’t persist throughout the day.