The first inkling I had of the impending road construction were the painted codes that suddenly appeared on each house, the signal that these mud-brick buildings were soon to be bulldozed. Then last September surveyors appeared in each village. A temporary camp was erected in an empty field near the Bitale dispensary. Kumho bulldozers, graders, and dump trucks began moving dirt around. People were pretty entertained. "It's like an elephant--an elephant moving things with its trunk!” one guy chuckled at a bulldozer scooping up dirt. "And that grader over there, it's weaving back and forth just like a preying mantis."
Large machinery and piles of dirt meant that children multiplied by the side of the road. Where in previous weeks there had been two, suddenly there were twenty. They slid down dirt piles on palm-frond sleds, losing momentum barely feet in front of the Land Cruisers that swept past.
The Chinese supervisors and Tanzanian workers moved quickly through the lowlands, and began taking chunks out of the hills up north. Once they get rid of the makona (curves) in the old road and pave the whole thing, it will only take 45 minutes to get to Burundi--compared to the 2 hours it now takes in the dry season. And only God can say how long in the wet season.
We're nervous though. The road is nowhere near complete. Huge stretches of formerly OK dirt road have been churned into potential mud puddles of death. When the rains come, we hear the road will be totally impassable. And on top of everything, El Nino rains are coming this year--which means torrential downpours that make travel impossible anyway.
How are we supposed to get any work done?
Luckily the Chinese had the same question. Their answer--magic away the rain. Village gossip has it that the construction workers know a powerful witchcraft which prevents rain from falling. Clouds pass right over the villages and storm somewhere out on the lake. There were a few days of rain in September, but since then we've been watching the sky and waiting. People are pissed. Their coffee blossoms need water to turn into coffee beans. Their freshly planted corn and bean fields will wither without rain. But for now, if the Chinese are stopping the rain I'm not complaining. Maybe that means they'll finish the road on time.
