Yesterday was yet another long day in the field. Thankfully it’s started a bit later—and by a bit I mean a bit—I got to sleep in until 6:30am! I got picked up after quickly stuffing some breakfast down, and we hit the road at 7:15.
We got to our first site for filming at 8:00am. The student were having their school parade and it reminded me a lot of my time back in Arusha. During a meeting with the school leaders, the video team said that we would be only two hours at the school. I had no faith in that statement I started laughing.
There were a lot of videos taken, a few interviews with students, and a bunch of something called B-roll(?). Somehow everything was still disorganized (on the third day) and moved very slowly. I’m very happy that I’m not more invested in the media team or else I would have been losing my mind.
We ended up leaving the school around 1:00pm.
We went to visit a water tower, not at all nearby the school, to take some drone shots. I’d say over the past 3 days going out to the field with the media team we have spent over 12 hours in the car. Nearly a third of our day is just spent traveling from site to site. And that’s not to complain, because I know we have to get there somewhere, it’s just to explain how remote the areas are and how rough the roads can be, requiring slow driving.
Our second site visit was to a brand new water pump. Apparently there’s a pipeline from lake Victoria that runs across this region that WFG taps into, but sometimes they need to build little helper stations along the way to get the water all the way to its intended destination. This is one of the pump/storage stations they have recently built. We spent a long time here interviewing the engineering team leader, and then some guests showed up to meet us here.
Among the people who came to meet us were the CEO and COO of WFG. They took some videos for the media team and did an “interview”. It was much quicker because they knew what to say for the media team and compared to the hour long interviews for 3 minutes of footage, the was a lot more efficient and enjoyable.
I thought the day was over after the interviews, but I was mistaken. We hopped in the cars and drove to an even newer water tank. This one is the largest storage tank WFG has built—in Shinyanga at least.
It’s situated up on a large hill and the site was very picturesque with the timing of the day. We spent maybe half an hour just taking pictures of the group and people got some good instagram content. By the time we finally took off from the field, it was about 6:30pm and I was excited to be getting home. Unfortunately the drive back was over an hour and I didn’t get to the hotel until near 8:00pm.
I ordered some chips and chicken at the hotel, not wanting nor having the energy to leave and go somewhere else. I got to bed quickly after that and fell right to sleep. I slept like a baby and don’t think I stirred even once throughout the night. I’m very grateful for that because today is supposed to be another full day with some sort of ceremony.