Amanda and Ruaha University College

Another word about Riverside Camp - the manager there, who was in her final week of empolyment there, was a lovely woman named Amanda from Great Britain. By lovely I mean rough, abrasive and too direct. Yet utterly endearing. She always seemed to have a half-smoked cigarette in her hand, arms crossed over a braless torso and smiling through nicotine stained teeth.

Our first encounter with Amanda was when she stopped by to give us the 'Welcome to Riverside' chat. It featured guidelines and rules, all delivered with the features listed above but adding a 'dumb-ass' voice feature, where everything was said in a tone of voice that would be perfectly natural followed by that phrase. Another treat was her widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows while finishing a sentence. Let me try to explain it to you:

Amanda: "Parents - do not let your kids out of your sight for a minute. We are on a RIVER (raising eyebrows with feature voice) and they will fall in and drown if you are not watching them. OK (brow and voice feature)

"Feel free to explore the trails here. But we have SNAKES and some are POISONOUS. (brow and voice feature)"

"Are there any QUESTIONS? (features)"

There were no questions. Despite her harshness, she also seemed gentle and very caring, and any personal issues were quickly forgotten after we had our meals there, generous and delicious meals prepared by the African staff and directed by Miss Amanda. And the staff adored her. She told us funny stories about hiding her husband's prosthetic leg to make him slow down once in a while, and I felt sorry that she was leaving this job she seemed such a fit for.

Rolling out in the morning was bittersweet as I wanted to spend more time at the campground but was also eager to serve the teachers at the Young Life weekend in Iringa. We moved slowly up a steep hillside road in heavy traffic, passing interesting sights such as a large boulder painted brightly with the slogan, "Think Global, Buy Local." I wondered if they really had many global opportunities in this remote place. There was a large military-looking truck that had toppled over coming down the hill and Ruby had many questions about why it fell over and if the people in it were ok. It looked as if it had been there for some time. How do you move a truck that size off of the road without heavy equipment?

We arrived at Ruaha University College around noon and after we unloaded our things, set to work cleaning the dining hall that also served as a club room, cleaning the grounds and bathrooms where the teachers would be staying, and gathering supplies to do all of this.

Our contact there, George, was helpful but disappeared after sayng he was going to get straight pins for hanging a homemade curtain to separate the club room. After almost two hours, he still hadn't reappeared and we dispatched two more small groups of people to purchase cleaning supplies. The bathrooms and dorms were in pretty desperate need of some love. Josie, a teenager on the trip, immediately volunteered to help with bathrooms and I fell in love with her right then.

While we cleaned the dining hall bathrooms and then the dorm bathrooms, the YL Africa staff worked on turning one corner of the dining hall into a club room. They had a box of fabric scraps and some pipe cleaner-like twisty things, not a lot to work with. When we returned from the bathrooms, I was amazed in the transformation. The African staff had transformed that little space into a bright, festive space, piecing long curtains of fabric scraps together using safety pins they found somewhere, and using the other materials to decorate the walls in designs and welcoming messages. The committee had scrubbed and mopped the dining area until it looked and smelled like new, covering the tables with cloth and adding decor. In one corner of the room, some African college students were having way too much fun with a sound system, typical boys with loud speakers and their bass-heavy music.

We were constrained by the College that our welcoming of the teachers could not occur until exactly 4:30 in the afternoon due to an exam taking place on the campus that day. As we finished preparations of the space, we had little time to spare. The African wedding band had arrived to play as the buses drove through the campus. Alexis and Martin, two senior African staff, had disappeared to change into fun costumes to lead the procession into the campus, and we all lined the drive near the gate to rest for a few minutes and save up energy for the moment they arrived.