Leaving

At the beginning of March 2017, we began a shift towards the time we would leave Mvumi.
Our replacements would be with us on the 11th and we would spend nearly two weeks together, handing over the responsibilities.
When we left, we went to Dar Es Salaam on the bus, and stayed three nights by a swimming pool and a beach. We ate seafood, walked out at low tide, revelled in the air conditioning, and finally took the aeroplane from Dar to Amsterdam, and then to London.
England was dense and green, birds were everywhere, the weather was bright and clear, and the long evenings were beginning.
We made our way from Heathrow on public transport, dragging our luggage behind us, to where our car had been kept.
The city was crowded, there were motor cars everywhere, and the intense badges of rank: electric gates, powerful vehicles, mown lawns, and shop upon shop upon shop selling anything.
Our badges of rank at that time were a sailing boat that needed to be returned to the water, a cottage in Essex without central heating, a small red car and a London flat that was to be set up to rent out.
We came home quietly, our home showing only an overgrown hedge, and that the house spiders had been keeping the farmland flies in check.
Our memories of Mvumi began to consolidate into an overwhelming sense of well being: we had been out of our own zone, survived the mosquitoes and heat and flourished in ways we hadn't expected, and brought back with us some of the spirit of a very different culture that has a humanity that may aspire to the same materialism as we do in the North, but which is accustomed to the expectations of drought, rain, cash economy, poverty, and a sun that works like a clock.
We will miss much: but we are home now.

• The charm of yellow village dogs that lift their smiling chins and howl into the night that lies starlit from here to far away by the mango trees and empty river beds.
• The banana shrub in the rolling wind like salt sea on a shingle beach, shaking its tattered leaves.
• The sighing wind through the metal eaves, the thin dust.
• The crooked curtains, the dusty louvre glass, the tiny finches on the wire by their cactus nest.
• The swaying shower nozzle, the loos that won't flush, the creaking, leaning cupboard.
• The long, long road to Dar, the knifing sun, the driving wind, the red crowned trees and roadside stalls by the bougainvillea hedges.
• The ghostly nets around the beds, the water tank, the cooker gas.
• The raindrops that drone on the distant roofs as they come to hammer on ours, the mewling flight of soft mosquito wings, the acrid orange scent of a poisonous aerosol.
• The intense fruit: the green oranges, rich pineapples, mangoes, papaya, tomatoes - almost anything so long as there was water to swell them.
• And the smiling and greeting and hand shakes and daily laughter, the social bonds that we struggle with but which flourish with them, the lively village, the curiosity, the venture into Swahili.

It isn't enough to say 'thank you', but it must be said. Thank you Mvumi: School, village, people, place, the dust and rain, the low mountains and the eternally long flat arid plains between.
This blog has been about the fifteen months we spent at the school, in the village and learning about the surroundings: a safe, happy place, busy, unpretentious, ruled by sun and rain.

Alison Leonard and Hugh Morrison
2017.

Kites, insects and rain.

The video is of small kites feeding in flight as insects migrate from somewhere to somewhere now that rain has helped them feed and breed.

With the rain now begun, three months late, people are happier that they will have some crops to see them through the dry season later on. The price of food goes up when there are no crops, as now, and people eat less.

It is part of the pattern: a meal enough for one is enough for two is the saying.

We have soaking rain, the clouds gather heavy and flat, and the wind is light. Every few days there is a scorching day of humid heat, and the rain seems to recover and return. The wind is in the north west today, unusual and cool, and the nights need a light blanket.

The sound of rain on the roof is most welcome.

In a very few weeks time we will take the bus to the coast, and spend a day or two at the sea before a flight back. We will miss this place, but not more than we have missed our home.

There is a lot of wisdom here, and little money. At home there is a lot of money, and sometimes less wisdom. Perhaps our expert lives in the western world are beginning to fray at the edges.

Travelling travails

Leaving the country in December was an adventure. We arrived for the flight we had booked from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam to be told that it had been cancelled and we had been emailed, which we hadn’t. When I asked who he was talking to, the man didn’t know who I was. We got a flight, by sheer luck, with another company. The original company still owes us a refund, which they promised in December, but so far no good.

The replacement airline uses Cessna Caravans, a fourteen seater single engined fixed undercarriage turbo prop aircraft that looks a bit like a conventional Cessna only much bigger with a bit of a caravan built underneath it to take luggage and cargo. And we went on a bit of a round about flight down the valleys and across the mountains, just under the cloud layer at 11,000 feet, occasionally flying between the clouds.

The ground was red, yellow, brown and grey, and very dusty. We caught our flight via Emirates to Dubai where our baggage and selves were rechecked and a group of policemen confiscated my father’s Swiss army knife, suggesting that I could stab someone. There were four policemen. I argued back, insisted on seeing seniors, and eventually a New Zealand woman who was manager for Emirates came in and did some negotiating. After all that, we found that it would have been possible to have the knife rerouted through customs so that it arrived separately in a large plastic bag. All folded up the knife is not as long as an index finger.

After that, seats near the front of a gigantic Airbus, and very comfortable. I nearly fell asleep.

Then the delicious cold of England. And family, the car, the home, the boat.

And red wine.

But back at the shallow ridge on which Mvumi sits, the rain washes the sky and settles the dust and a clear sky sparkles at night.

On January 4th it rained for ten minutes. The first rain since April 2016. Then on the night of the 8th it rained for hours until about 11 in the morning. The trees will be pleased, and the mosquitoes can stop whining while they lay their eggs in the crooks and corners of puddles and branches. The spinach is standing upright again and the papaya leaves aren’t drooping. The bananas grow their leaves like rolled cigars, and then unroll them like blinds. As it grows hot and humid, it looks as if there may be more rain.

We have to mention South Africa

I wrote this some years ago: it is appropriate here, because this stay in an African country has brought to mind many of the issues that were part of life in South Africa.
The difference is that Tanzania has a certain stability, a sense of worth and a unity that isn’t visibly affected by colour or cultures. There are frustrations, and we have experienced some petty corruption. President Magifuli is much admired, although I suspect that there might be some that don’t like him. He has walked in to offices and sacked the people who weren’t at their desks. He has discovered the government's 10,000 ghost workers whose salaries were still being paid to others and demanded that their salaries be recovered. He has cancelled celebrations and made the people clean their cities instead. He has sacked the Dar es Salaam harbour leaders for the corruption there, the arbitrary and false taxation demanded by them, and for the disappearance of thousands of containers. He has cancelled imports of milk and sugar to impress on the nation that they must stop importing and grow it themselves. He is personal and popular.
South Africa now has leadership that is building itself the little fortresses, the palaces that sustain the coveted lifestyle of the wealthy.
South Africa has gone from bad to worse to good to amazing and now is subsiding slowly into empty discourse about land and possession and the rhetoric of the tragic drought stricken politics of some neighbouring countries.
Tanzania appears to have a unity unlike the richest nation in Africa. There are very few clashes between tribes and ethnic groups.
But it is still among the five poorest nations in global terms.
I asked a teacher to rate the average happiness of Tanzanian people, out of ten. He said six, or seven.
Better even than Brexit Britain, I would have thought, among the five wealthiest nations of the world.


From South Africa.

When I worked in the London Borough of Brent, I met another teacher from South Africa. He was dark skinned, and had black hair, and looked Asian. He was what the South African law classified as “coloured”. As a coloured person, he was not entitled to any of the privileges of the “European” or white person. He told me that he and his sister would go to the train station to catch a train into Cape Town. She would stand at one end of the platform and join the “Europeans”. This was because she was blonde and pale skinned, and had blue eyes. Within this one family were all the torments of Apartheid.

There were times when the authorities, usually the South African Police (renowned at the time for their intelligence and sensitivity), could not immediately make up their minds about the racial classification of a person. In their efforts to be totally fair, they used what is now an infamous South African test to decide whether a person was “European” or “non-European”: This was to slide a pencil through the hair of the person being tested. If it stayed in, they were classified as “non-European”. That the classification system existed is, with hindsight, beyond belief. It was abandoned twenty years ago.

Apartheid was part of the slum of European culture. But it is humanity that is to do with forgiveness and restitution.

In my childhood, I lived in a house that overlooked the sea that surged and roared night and day, that brought sultry storms and torrential warm rain.

With us there lived others. There were Henry, John and Trefina, and Hari who came occasionally to work in the garden. Hari’s tasks were clearing and maintaining the kikuyu grass in a garden full of frogs and lychees and passion fruit and paw-paw, hydrangeas and a thorny tree with small brilliant red flowers, and the most beautiful frangipani.

Trefina was the Zulu equivalent of a herbalist, what the western world called a witch doctor. She had yellowed teeth, and at least one missing. She used to sing. She was a nanny to me when I was very small, while my mother painted in oils and played golf.

John Shangane was a proud man who came from the Shangaan tribe, part of the Zulu nation. He was employed as a menial, directed to serve at table in a smart white uniform, and tend to the garden. He would wash the cars, clip the hedges, keep the dog clean, dust and clean and polish and vacuum.

Henry, who was quite old, cooked for us. Sometimes, joyously, he got drunk on a pink and wild smelling opaque beer called "tshwala". It was illegal for Zulu people to drink alcohol, under the laws of Apartheid. Henry was a Zulu induna, a person who presided over a village in the east midlands of what is now Kwazulu, a land once peopled only by the Zulu nation. He owed his allegiance to a Zulu prince, and to the then unrecognised king. Henry had three wives, and while we knew him, he put together the lobola for a fourth, a young woman dressed in the beautiful cultural style of her people and who was able to visit us once. He paid eleven cows for her. 

And we, the white nation,  asserted that they "needed the work" and that they should be "treated well" . My father could afford to pay their wages, which he did every week in a kind of suburban Friday ritual when they came, hands clasped, with their passbooks, and with mumblings of Baba, Inkosi, received money from the big man.

When we moved a few miles, only one of these people could come too. I didn't  understand, at eight years old, why, or that something was wrong. When we moved yet again, we left behind more people who I had grown with.

In a small, crowded industrial town, where the main street began among dusty gum trees and finished after the bank, the cinema and  three traffic lights among more gum trees, we took up residence.

Three miles away was the town of Sharpeville, notorious for the wanton panic killing by police of some of its citizens in 1960, the year before we moved there. Sheltered from the ‘black tide’, I knew nothing of it when we moved there, and it was later on that I began to understand what had happened.

Many people were connected with the company house we had moved to. They were a cook, a maid, a house "boy", a head gardener, three gardeners, a night watchman and a driver. In a small house on the same piece of land was a private secretary to my father.

I loved this house. It was large and had rambling outhouses and corners that even in the eight years I spent my school holidays there, I never got to finish exploring. There was a tall avenue of pine trees alongside an orchard, a swimming pool, and a clump of poplar trees that whispered in the dry and dusty wind. Close to the bottom of its long garden was a wide brown river, lined with willow and poplar trees, swimming with catfish.

This was a parochial, right wing highveld town, industrial and full of steelworks and coalmines. In the winters of sharp frost and bloody sunsets I became a teenager and raced the roads on bicycles. In the thin silken dust of summer I played in ragged old sports cars, and took the rowdy crowd of friends to the cinema in the fat-cat vehicle that was my father's workright as the boss of the steelworks.

I was fascinated by the steelworks. There were huge iron smelters the size of small swimming pools, heated electrically, full of molten iron and carbon and manganese and nickel which alloyed steel to make tubes. I watched it being poured into billets, being shaped by hydraulic hammers, being rammed through dies to make steel tubes. The noise and clatter and commotion were intense, with cranes overhead and people moving, concentrating, shouting, swearing.

I watched steel being galvanised, copper tubes being made, engine blocks being cast.

I explored this huge place that echoed with the forces of fire and iron.

I found the workers' dormitories.

Imagine a room as big as a bedroom. Imagine living in it, with all your belongings, with a photo of your girlfriend or wife hundreds of miles away in Lesotho or the Northern Transvaal, to whom you send your wages every week, except the little you need for entertainment and to save for your bus journey home. Now imagine that the room is whitewashed, and has a small window at one end, and a door at the other. Outside there is a concrete space which runs along the front of several other similar rooms, and at the edge of this concrete there is a gutter for waste water. There are some standpipes. Beyond these is a narrow tarmac'd road which separates the space from the tall and forbidding corrugated iron wall of the welded steel pipe plant, just a little way from the reek of caustic from the galvanising plant. There are no shrubs or trees, no colour, no sky.

Now imagine that there are six beds in that room, and five other people sharing it with you, and that your only table is a box, and your only light is a bulb in the ceiling. You are there for two months at a time, and then allowed four days off. You wash outside, and there are squat toilets at the end of the row.

Put this against the suits and leather seats, the clear cold beer and pleasures of parties and feasts, of privilege and space. This is the picture of Apartheid.

We left the town on my father's retirement, a caravan of cars and furniture lorries. None of the gentle people, who had cared for me, who I had supported and even rescued, came with us. If they had wanted to they wouldn't have been allowed to. I said goodbye, and felt something that is still in my heart, for the loss of people, for the loss of a life that had grown with others.

Months later I returned to this town to visit friends. I went back to the house. I wanted to sit in the corners and see the home that I had had, to hear the voices of these people, the barking of dogs, the whisper of trees, the comfort of knowing: but it was no longer the same place, I was no longer welcome, it was conquered by some other force of culture, and I was alone.

A few years later I worked in the theatre, and found that I, on the strength of a university degree, was in charge of a group of ten or twelve men who had no degrees, who earned a quarter of the salary given to me as a raw graduate, and who knew more about theatre  than I knew about the sum of everything in my tiny world.

I lived in a house made of corrugated iron, which was boiling hot in summer. My partner had a friend who came round with his Muslim wife to bathe in my bath and eat and talk. He was a red haired Professor of Politics at the University, and had married a Muslim woman by becoming a Muslim himself. The South African authorities were unable to work out how he had broken some law of Apartheid, as there were no laws about Muslims marrying each other. But, by the usual tests he was a ‘European’, and she was a ‘Non-European’, and under the laws then current, this was an illegal marriage. So they put him under house arrest and later, because he disagreed eloquently with the status quo, he was gunned down at point blank range at his front door.

This was Apartheid, the monochrome nation. The Rainbow State appeared stable, dignified, sociable and desirable. It attracted millions of pounds and dollars and Euros. It appears to be the most powerful nation in Africa, it has nuclear capability, and an arms industry that exports to the world. It holds the third largest stocks of gold in the world, more diamonds than anyone knows what to do with, supplies the nuclear industries of the USA, Britain and Europe with uranium. It exports timber, aluminium, sugar and wine in huge quantities. It has the two busiest seaports in Africa.

But what you see is not what you get.

South Africa still faces the legacy of colonialism and Apartheid: the shattering of the social structures by what was called the Group Areas Act has left a huge rural population in poverty. Nearly a third of its population is below the poverty line.  The exploitation of forced migrant labour divided families and promoted the promiscuity that contributed massively to the HIV epidemic. A fifth of its population is HIV positive. The United States has withdrawn some support for South Africa in the face of the difficulties in employment and production.

In spite of the domination of white culture, humanity is to do with forgiveness and restitution. The last twenty years of South African culture have seen the growth from one to the other through a humanity led by Nelson Mandela, himself once a terrorist in the eyes of the European establishment and an African who believed in humanity. 
Now the country has moved on, and to some it appears to be knocking at the door of the exclusive club of corruption and letting the high ideals of the post Mandela era slip back into land grab and discrimination.

And now we live in a small cottage near the cold North Sea, and it is comfortable and pleasing. Our politics can sleep the night through, and we can wait patiently for the days to pass.

It is like there is a code that needs to be broken, and the final story read, the secrets revealed. We won't know what the heritage is until others tell us, or time finds us ready.

But thank you Africa. For all this.

Roof, mountain, scrubland

We visited Daniel’s home. He had asked us for help with his roof.
The usual advice is to avoid providing funds on request, but he described the problem with his roof in a letter.
Much as he had described it, the trusses were infested with ‘du-du’ or ’mchwa’, termites that feed on the core of the softwood usually used for roofing here, unless it has been sprayed, or soaked or pressure treated.
I pushed a knife blade into the timbers up to the hilt. With the current wind and the coming rain it could be that Daniel and his wife wake up one morning with the roof at floor level. I think the roof was being held up by itself, with not much help from the timber.
Daniel’s home is three rooms, an outside ‘choo’ and some storage. The floors are hard mud, and the surroundings, at the moment, are dry dust. There is almost no furniture. Daniel is a farmer and he works the shamba at the Trust cottage to provide us with papaya, bananas, tomatoes, spinach, aubergine, carrots, beetroot, coriander, basil, potatoes, peppers, grapes, chillies. He works his own land for some maize and peanuts and millet. He has to store his food for the hard dry season.
We visited Morogoro. This sounds like a child’s story. Morogoro is a university town more or less half way between here and Dar es Salaam. It nestles itself in a valley between mountains, and even at this time of year has water and greenery. We walked a long climb to half way up one of the mountains. Its full height is 2100m above sea level, getting on for 7000 feet. Think of Ben Nevis on top of Ben Nevis.
We stayed in a lodge. It was exceptionally pleasant with a view of mountains and a dry river with a pool that had crocodiles that had eaten two dogs.
We drove there in a large Nissan 4x4.
We had a day out in Dodoma via the back roads: the back roads through the real scrub desert, hardly a bird or a goat in sight, short stumpy thorn bushes scattered across the dry, grainy sand, the road occasionally becoming just a broad space covered in cattle tracks, the bridges just concrete fords for the time when the rains will flood from the surrounding hills.
There is much to admire, a lot to call beautiful, and an existence that is close to having nothing but the willing people around.

Harvest moon and spring time.

Harvest moon. Yes, it is faked.
The harvest moon's grandeur was overrated
so this moon has been manipulated.

Tourist guides seem to suggest that tropical countries don't have seasons, but this part of Tanzania certainly does. The July temperatures went down to 15ºC at night and to 22º during the day.
Now the heat is coming on, and day temperatures are around 28º, night around 17º.
The most obvious thing, though is the gathering of birds, the greening up of the trees, and new flowers. There is new growth all around. There hasn't been any rain since May, the harvest moon has passed by, it's mid October, and the vegetation has roots deep enough to find the moisture that will bring it out in bloom.
The ginkgo has tiny florets, the frangipani is covered in flowers with hardly a leaf in sight, the flamboyants are beginning to show signs of buds, and the unnamed trees around the cottage are full of new shoots. It isn't the spectacular springtime of Europe where colour saturates the landscape. The plants here seem almost nervous. 
Preparation for planting begins.The roads are covered in fine dust, and every day since July the easterly wind has rolled it up in to the air and left the horizons grey as a winter sky. At night only a few stars can be seen beyond the dust. The rains may start this month, or next month. Or in December. A website explained that Tanzania and the other tropical countries are in the wind systems of the doldrums, and weather patterns over the land are destabilised by  the heating, the mountains and the terrain. Out in the oceans, there would be calms. As the earth's attitude to the sun changes through the year, so the doldrums move from one side of the equator to the other. At the moment the weather systems are moving away, and in their wake will come rain.
We have birds, buds, dust and digging.
We have asked a local tailor to make us clothing. We have four dresses and two shirts.

Soon we will do the rounds of students who have applied for sponsorship at the school to see their homes and make our judgements. This is not a task that sits comfortably in one's conscience: it is hardly for us to decide who is needy, but it seems that we must. Charity, said George Bernard Shaw, is a crime. Most people assume that this means that humanity fails when people are put in the position of needing charity. Charity is the evidence of the failure.
Anyway, the Mvumi village is noisy, busy and full of people. Most things can be obtained here, and the power cuts are occasional. The water supply is improving, and one of the great things at the moment is that there is absolutely no Christmas wind up. Maybe next year we could do it again.

A tendency to write about the good things pushes aside the bad and they become a bit of a horrid reservoir.

Poverty: there are two kinds. One is the poverty of struggle and deprivation in spite of living in a city of wealth. It signifies itself in slums and dirt, in a river bed, dry except for a tiny trickle, covered edge to edge, from dwellings on one side to the dwellings on the other, with rubbish. Black plastic bags, boxes, broken electronics, cement bags, old bricks, pieces of corrugated iron too small to be any use elsewhere. The birds do not visit, but stay in the trees.

The taxi that we ride, air conditioned, is our wealth, even though in our country we are not wealthy.

The streets on the tight back roads to the airport are narrow and the street drains are surface gullies, storm water conduits that cross the streets are rounded concrete ditches that the vehicle must cross slowly to avoid damage. Power cables tangle above, and the support poles lean towards their guy wires. Pesa payments, using mobile phones to transfer money, are available everywhere. The traffic is dense. Traffic policeman complicate the flow, and drivers boldly cross against red lights.

We reach the airport where the other world begins at the door of a sleek Boeing or Embraer, where the drinks will be free and the altitude will let us look down on the great Kilimanjaro beneath the scattered cloud.

The central parts of Dar es Salaam are fringed by industry that lines the double carriageways full of buses and articulated lorries, budabuda and tuktuk. Budabuda are motorcycle taxis, sometimes carrying two passengers like a mother and child or men going to work. A tuktuk (bajaji) is a motor scooter with a pair of rear wheels and a shelter for two passengers, although sometimes they take four. Tuktuks were invented in Italy by Piaggio and have spread round the world in an attempt to promote heart attacks and violent death. These are a measure of poverty, but not poverty itself: it is a cheap vehicle that travels at nearly 30 miles per hour, far in excess of a safe speed in mixed traffic, frequently on the sidewalk and on the wrong side of the road. In these machines a whole world of poverty exists. It is good enough even when the lights don’t work, the clutch is inadequate and the nominal protection for the passengers remains nominal.

But the seashore is fringed with palm trees. Among them are the classic trees and shrubs of the tropical and subtropical paradise, all of which paint the picture of romance, the bronze-skinned models of holiday brochures and smiling faces, the happy children. Bougainvillea, frangipani, and long needled pine trees are among the acacia, bananas and hibiscus. Romance.

To the north east, the open water and archipelago of islands lie in the blue sea under the white clouds drenched in sunshine. And the smell from the river as we cross it.

The river spreads into this romance, black, slow, smelling of rotten flesh and sewage, unbreathable, radiating a poison so strong we hold our breath to calm our stomachs.

Later on, at the beach near where we stay, bordered by the costume of palm and hibiscus, the tide pool, black and smelling of foetid bathwater is a barrier between us and the sea.

At another place there is a similar tidal pool, and the beach is covered with seaweed and plastic litter. We have a beer and read our books. On the hard sand between the shore and the low surf, a film crew film a man in a white cotton suit posturing his way through a rap song because rap is now the lingua franca of the Tanzanian music business. The camera points across the bay to the Yacht Club and the residential high rises. In the distance a fleet of dinghies scurry to the headland, a larger yacht flies a spinnaker, and in the low surf four motorboats wait to take tourists to the islands. There is not a single seagull, only crows and sparrows and four swallows. A still photograph can’t carry an image of the breeze that blows over the dark stain of the tidal pool.

In the old centre of Dar es Salaam, the past colonists keep their embassies and other diplomatic offices. The grid layout of the area is lined with parking spaces and beautiful flamboyants which, in December, will roof the diplomatic quarter in red. The British High Commission is housed along with the German, Dutch and European Union offices in a modern metal clad building, rather like a well designed factory. I am not allowed to take my Swiss army knife into the building, but I can take my camera bag full of gadgets, although I may not take photographs. The whole building is clad in blast shutters, and while we are there the alarms for Fire and for Bomb are tested. The Deputy High Commissioner feels that the standard of English teaching in Tanzania is not helping the country to move forward. Kenya is way ahead, and so is its command of English. It copes better in international markets. We tend to agree.

One of our teachers at school wouldn’t agree, and he might even suggest that neo-colonialism is Tanzania’s biggest problem. Well - neo-colonialism is, most sincerely, old hat. Monetarism needs the English language to succeed not because it belongs to the neo-colonialists, but because it is the lingua franca of commerce, although some might say that “lingua franca” is a phrase that colonists invented. Tanzania may not need monetarism, but that’s unlikely. The “neo-colonialists” involved in Tanzania are India, China, Japan, the USA, all of Europe including the UK, Ireland, Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil and a lot of others. None of them want a new colony, but they would like to trade for Tanzania’s wealth. That may be similar to colonialism, but it doesn’t involve repopulating or governing the country. What it does do is retain Tanzania's debt to the developed world which has lent it money, and ensure the payment of interest on the debt. Which is a kind of trade, but which ties the country down to servicing its debt instead of building its structures. So trade makes profit, profit is money. The biggest and best game reserves in the world don’t produce enough money to sustain a nation, and taxes don't either: sixty percent of Tanzanians are unable to pay tax.

The government is moving from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma. Dar es Salaam (home of peace) is a real city, full of wealth and bitter poverty. Wikipedia suggests that it has the ninth fastest population growth in the world, and by 2100 will be the second largest city in the world. 

Dodoma (it has sunk) “is not a city,” said one of our teachers, “it’s just a town”. But the new parliament building is there and a newish and smart looking but already academically questioned university nestles in striking white buildings on the hillside overlooking the town. The airport runway is being extended, the narrow and interminable main road to Dar is being improved, and the railway, to Dar, is also in line for an upgrade. The links to Dar es Salaam are all being improved, suggesting that although government will relocate to Dodoma, Dar es Salaam will be the nerve centre and the spiritual capital where new cars abound and multistorey banks and hotels hover over the stained romance of the tropical seashore.

Here in Mvumi we are insulated by the rolling hills and peaks and winding rough road. The poverty here is a way of life, not wished for but endured, a subsistence on what the land provides: tomatoes, potatoes, chickens, okra, peppers, goats, cattle, spinach, mangoes and papaya. Please don't believe that that is the entire shopping list. There is much more, grapes in July, bananas and maize in April, rain in January, dust in September, the sun like a clock measuring out the twelve hours of light and twelve hours of dark under a sky of stars and a moon so close you can touch it.

Here there is community, space and a relief from the pressures of growing into the kind of world that others have decided Tanzania should be a part of. The people here, who sweep and clean the immaculate forecourts of their homes each day, may not want new cars or high rise buildings, but they would like to be less dependent on nature’s wilful ways, and more secure in food and shelter.

How this will happen is too long a journey to predict. It is happening. But sixty percent of the population live off the land and the land is vast. They pay no tax because they have nothing to pay it with. This village is in part a microcosm of life as we might have seen it a century or two ago in Europe, but with mobile phones and diesel engines, a fee paying secondary school, a large hospital that serves the whole area for miles around which is building new space for students and creating a new skyline, and at the other end an untended airfield where emergency flights can land.

The closed shop of Dar es Salaam is a like a foreign country. Nothing there equates with anything here in Mvumi where the palm trees follow the dry river bed among cactus and mango, where baobabs stand to mark the centuries, where each year the dust alternates with rain. There are no broad canopies of flamboyant or jacaranda, but on this hill there is the new protection of microwave transmission towers, and the lined up budabuda waiting for clients. Oxen pull carts, tractors are rare, and water can be found at the village square where it is pumped up from the chalk layers deep below the hill, or it can be dug from the river bed down on the flat valley floor. The bus departs at seven each morning, and returns at three, carrying its cargo of supplies for the village. At night the people listen, willingly or unwillingly, to the churches and bars that play hours of simplistic loud music through to the mornings - none of it reflecting the cultural music that you now have to search out in the music shops. There are at least twelve churches here, each preaching a slightly different point of view. There is one mosque. There are blacksmiths and carpenters, tailors and store-keepers, charcoal burners and electricians, mechanics and builders, teachers, doctors and nurses.

Dar es Salaam is a hot, heavy tumble of high pressure life, and seems to set a standard for Tanzanians to aspire to. It isn’t far off the model that seems to be demanded by the monetarist world. Mvumi is a sleepy village, still waiting for a paved road. They are further apart in spirit than the distance in kilometres, but are both of Tanzania.

Dust, bus, football, making a friend.

Dust is a now the one thing more important than mosquito repellent as it gets in to everything and has to be dealt with. So in a dusty week, Paul, Nya, Lottie and Wesleigh arrived from the UK for a short visit to the school, a short tour of Tanzania and a few days near the ocean during a stay in Zanzibar.
We walked to the airfield and the wind blew hard from the east and kicked up a fog of dust.

On the football field the students chased through dust.

On a more peaceful day I made friends with some chickens while the others attracted a huge and slightly worrying entourage of primary school students who followed us through the village. Being observed as a kind of curiosity is something of a novelty and it has some lessons that can be learned.

Today we visited Dodoma, on the bus, changed some shoes, shopped for fruit, bought some wine, had a swim and lunch, and in the bus on the way back Paul made a friend.


Paul has been informally elected as an ambassador to small people in Tanzania. The child has the most wonderful smile, and enjoyed the process of making friends.

Green and dusty

It has changed quite dramatically.
February 2016


August 2016. A well respected geography teacher has explained that the area is 'semi arid', which is more or less synonymous with 'semi-desert'.

There is an oasis in the valley.

Cockroach

This is a personal anecdote that ends with a death. I killed a cockroach.

In my last months in Durban, South Africa, before I finally left there for the UK, I lived in what was known as a ‘wood and iron’ in Overport Drive.

One night we were woken by a rustling noise. It was unusual. I went to the light switch by the door, and switched on the light. The floor of the next room was covered in a seething wall to wall carpet of cockroaches that vanished in less than a minute. Where to, I don’t know.

We laid out plenty of chemical cockroach repellent the next day, and the problem didn’t repeat itself.

On Friday night this week, a single cockroach, about 5cm long, invaded our space. Jeremy Giraffe killed it with some spray.

"I'll fix it for you," says Jeremy Giraffe.

They are extraordinary animals, cockroaches, perhaps the most unattractive beasts ever, carrying a reputation of invincibility in the face of the coming nuclear holocaust.

Oops. Sorry. That was the science fiction bit.

If cockroaches interest you, this is a nice long article on Wikiwand: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cockroach.

This is published on a need-to-know basis.

A day in the office

A day starts at around 5.30am when the Muezzin calls all to prayer. His voice swoops and slides, and the effect is not tranquil, but more like an old gramophone with a wayward driving spring.

There is still snooze time before 6.30 when we must get up. Then there is coffee and a shower, even though the air temperature is not conducive.

Maybe a banana to prop the day up.

A short walk through the gate in the fencing, then past the dormitories and choo (that’s a toilet) to the classroom block. The ground underfoot changes from the hard quartz sand to the cement walkways past the new but incomplete science classrooms, and then to the admin block - down the passage to the chunky Chinese lock that secures the door. Two turns of the lock: no ceiling fan because it is cool enough. We put down our computers and camera and walk to the staffroom at the other end of the building.

The headmaster arrives, cutting short the signing of the staff attendance register. He begins with ‘Good morning staff’ and the staff reply in kind. Then he offers a prayer, almost inaudibly. The staff hang on for the final amen, and join in. Sometimes the senior ‘Auntie’ or the chaplain or one of the committed Christian staff take the prayer.

The meeting is in English. Issues of curriculum, staffing and students arise. The water supply is often discussed at the morning sessions as the pump is worn and at times totally ineffectual.

On Mondays Tuesdays and Thursday there is whole school assembly in the chapel, with singing, a talk by students, or an address, and a final prayer.

Outside the sun is bright and the day warming up. In the rainy season, the ground may be slippery where the running water leaves a fine silt.

Our day is in the office. We tackle costs and procedures, demands from the UK for exam results and the progress of sponsored students. We ponder how to support a student who is in need but does not qualify by any of the rules laid down by the Trust. We find ways of paying for replacement beds in the lodging house, and for medication at the hospital. Some students come in with headaches and stomach complaints. Quite a few are visually impaired - from blind to partially sighted, and eye infections are commonplace. One students awaits a decision on an operation that may restore a little sight, but which may be risky.

There is a database to fettle and get functioning, and for this there are routers and a dedicated computer. Some way up the valley, the national electricity supply company switch off the power. They have to replace all the transmission poles before the termites finally destroy them.

The Uninterruptible Power Supply beeps the warning that it is about to interrupt the power supply. Our laptops carry on, except for the Sony which has a faulty battery, and within five minutes its screen goes blank in the middle of its shutdown.

At this point two students and a carpenter arrive, all needing items that have to be printed. There is no longer any power for this, and it stays off for the whole working day, and comes back on at 5.30pm.

Chai is at 10.40. We have coffee and chapati. Teachers pour sweetened tea into their mugs, and some add a couple of tablespoons of sugar, and even a small teaspoonful of instant coffee.

The day goes on, watching the battery capacity on the laptops, and using a dongle for access to email and internet. A student comes in to ask about shoes. A teacher comes in to complain that he hasn’t been paid his University grant.

Lunch, beans and rice with a Tanzanian ratatouille, is at 2.30pm. We have managed to pass through the sleepy hour of 12.30 to 1.30 without actually falling asleep. Many jobs that require network access or printing aren’t done. The outlook for tomorrow is more power cuts as the poles are gradually replaced along the line.

In the middle of the cemetery, the reinforced concrete foundations for another communications tower are being laid. That will be the seventh tower in the village. We are surrounded by microwaves, and all these towers have automatic generators. The village doesn’t get any benefit from them.

Agnes does the washing, cleaning
and cooking.

At 3.30 we go home and make some tea and have a biscuit each. Agnes has made us a loaf of bread and her version of a pizza. Very tasty.

Three carpenters have a bid for eighteen new ‘double decker’ bunk beds. We discuss whether we could have each carpenter make six beds each. It is very complex, and involves protocols, pragmatic considerations, some local politics and a whole bunch of things that we don’t often consider in the UK.

We can’t make up our minds but will have to do so by the morning.

The evening draws in and power is returned. The sun goes headlong for the horizon and the calm day that started with the dew running off the corrugated iron in a row of small puddles has become boisterously windy. The banana leaves in the shamba make a noise like tumbling water, and the curtains fly about. The louvre windows don’t stop the breeze.

The sky is orange with dust.

Daniels minds the shamba.

We will have the pizza, with fruit juice and papaya, and a little green capsule of anti-malaria medication when the sun is set and the solar lighting is on. Daniel has successfully harvested some beetroot, grapes and paw-paw. There is always spinach, and peppers of all kinds are fattening up. We have a water tank buried in the ground for an emergency supply, and it also waters the shamba.

We will have some entertainment, maybe an episode of the Danish Noir, 1864, or Doctor Blake, or House (the grunting Englishman who played Bertie Wooster?), or a movie.

Tomorrow we have to decide on the beds, and yes, write to the House of Lords. There will be ugali and beef for lunch.

Now that the power is on, the workshops work on into the dark, welding, bending, sawing. Simple music pours in to the village square. The Muezzin calls to prayer.

Feeling cold? Want some water? With a fish?

Dear England. And everywhere else.
Today it is three degrees centigrade colder than London, and the wind has blown all day long from the east with a thin layer of cloud.  There is much dust in the air, williwaws* of dust over the road surface, and no hope of rain until October or November. We have socks on, long trousers and pullovers. Hugh is reading 'Sailing Alone Around the World' by Joshua Slocum for the second time. He somehow started browsing it and found it compulsive.

Water is short. The village pump, an electric one for some reason, was installed by government agency, and has ceased to operate: the sluice where clothes may be washed is dry, and the tap pointless. The government may send a team to repair it. There is quite a lot of water below ground. The school has a borehole with a tired old pump that breaks down frequently. The hospital is similarly equipped, but with slightly less chance of running out of water as they have an arrangement with the phone networks that allows them power from the generator when there is a power cut.
In the mean time, people go down to the bone dry river beds to dig for water. Further up the valley, power transmission poles are being replaced, and to do this, the electricity is cut off. We have power today but have had something of a blackout for the last two days. Our cottage has solar lighting, and a gas stove (propane) so only the fridge suffers in the cuts.
Two days this week we have had visitors from New Zealand who have come to see the school: both have been teachers, and one still is. Jane teaches maths, mostly, and David manages aspects of IT including providing web ready training programmes.
Samaki: Swahili for fish. Lake Victoria provides at least three species of fish, and we have eaten at least one of them. Not the entire species, of course. It is difficult to get fish, because the nearest fish live around 250 miles away. On the food front, we have weakened sufficiently to buy a carton of Weetabix. It is quite a surprise that there is no wholefood muesli with spelt and cranberries.
Fish delicious, with a coconut and banana dish, spinach, and rice.
And a footnote about the fish: the lake is landlocked, and these fish evolved quite separately from ocean fish. They are seemingly more cartilaginous and have a great deal of gelatinous juices. The species in Lake Victoria, and Lake Tanganyika, are millions of years old.
Added to that, Lake Tanganyika is 1500 metres deep in the middle, the second deepest lake in the world. And the tallest mountain in Africa is Kilimanjaro, around 19,000 feet. You can walk to the top if you want to.
This is a very ancient and handsome land.

*Williwaw. Windy thing like a mini tornado.