Every weekend the girls at Olania have visitors, who usually roll in through the big metal gates in large Hiace vans that will, after a few more years, several more miles, and a bit more body damage, end up recycled as daladalas plying the streets of Dar es Salaam.

This past weekend the “delegation” visiting us was “very special”, according to the school’s accountant, Christina. She confided this to me while bobbing along on the dirt road from Mpigi Magohe to Olania, each of us guarding two, huge, just-purchased rolls of mosquito netting and wire mesh from the other daladala passengers. I did not receive her news, I fear, with the appropriate excitement: I was involved in an ongoing battle to keep the fingers of three 15-year old girls out of my hair, whose texture was apparently an overwhelming temptation.

I was also less than enthusiastic because it had been quite a feat to get Christina to participate in my purchasing venture in the first place. Indeed, I had to lay ambush to her in the midst of the school’s garden patch where, wearing an Illinois basketball T-Shirt and battered sneakers, she was leaping over sisal plants, hurdling dirt mounds in a single bound, and shouting orders at the top of her lungs while gesticulating madly in several directions at once. I had to steadily steer her up the hillside like a shepherd collie—always staying just below, pushing her upwards one line of latitude at a time, until she found herself out the gate and at the street, bouncing from one foot to the other as we waited for the daladala to arrive.

Further, I personally believed that the preparations for this delegation—the activities that Christina’s aerobics were designed to encourage—were ridiculous. The hoes—taller than some of the girls—were out in full force, and they were being sturdily and repeatedly applied to each tiny blade of grass that had managed to sprout up out of the sandy hillside. Those girls without hoes were wandering with plastic maize sacks and a knotted bundle of sisal stalks, which they used for sweeping stray palm fronds or pieces of grass into little heaps, and then, with their hands, scooping the piles into the empty sacks. I was not wild about the (desolate) results: without any roots to hold it, the quantity of dirt washed away in each afternoon rain shower is something to marvel at, and the mounds and humps where the dirt accumulates afterwards leaves the landscape weirdly undulated and dangerous to navigate.

I’m surprised, actually, that Christina interrupted her enthusiastic overseeing to visit Mpigi Magohe or even to listen to my opinions on terracing (resurrected lectures, courtesy of my Minnesota-farmer father), as the delegation was, indeed, quite special—a true blue (or should I say purple?) cardinal of East Africa arrived Saturday along with a horde of women and men, swathed in blue and white printed vitenge and T-shirts advertising a society of a sacred child, a society which none of our girls could tell me much about—all that came across was that its founding had involved Pope John Paul II, which did not exactly narrow down the possibilities.

I wish I felt that all the environmental terrorism I witnessed on Friday—all the bags filled with tiny shreds or grass, all the uprootings here and there, all the stacks of chairs the girls balanced, seemingly unconcernedly, on their heads as they strutted across the just-cleared, brown-swirled moonscape of our hill—had been worthwhile, but I must admit I found the whole visit a great bore: Sarah and I were entrusted with someone’s baby until it began to cry noisily and without pause; the printed schedule was overly ambitious to the tune of three hours, and sitting through a mass in Kiswahili that involves six priests and one bishop is no more exciting—although much longer—than a normal service featuring only one pastor.

All the fuss for the bishop did pay off, in one respect, however: there were special supplies bought for his lunch—which he hardly touched—and thus everyone has been eating quite well these last few days: specialties such as honey, hard-boiled eggs, and cookies have been popping up at meals quite unexpectedly. Maybe the bishop’s prayers will come to something, too—one of the few invocations I understood mentioned preserving our school in good condition. As I trek back and forth from the school rooms to the dorms—inspecting screening and teaching English classes—I find myself surreptitiously evaluating foundations and superstructures. I wouldn’t want my bedroom to be the next thing to wash up down on the playing field.