By the cafe where we sometimes have a soda and a chip omelette, there is a new pile of grit. The village blacksmiths have the tractor and trailer they built to collect sand from the river beds. At the back of the cafe the ground has been washed away by the rain.

I am going down to the shop that sells phones and recharges sim cards to recharge the one we use for internet connections. It costs about £10 for 10Gb and lasts a month. The shop takes your card, puts it in the shop phone, phones the other shop phone to get your number, then recharges your number with Tz35000 worth of credit. You go back to the office and check on line that you have been credited. You can also charge your phone with money. M-Pesa, it is called. You can send money to other people’s phones using M-Pesa, and then they can go to a phone shop and the phone shop will give you cash in exchange for your M-Pesa credit. It is like chip’n’pin as it’s called in Europe, only not a card, it’s a phone. In some places you can use it like a card, in payment for goods.

At the corner of the cafe a person lies on the ground sleeping, wrapped in a thin dark cloth. I can’t see the face. There were flies on the person’s feet, but the feet didn’t move. The shoemaker’s stall near the puddle wasn’t operating. The puddle was very large, and there were heavy tyre tracks in the surrounding mud. There were three major puddles in the heavy soil that most traffic tried to go around.

A lorry came down the road and I moved aside. Its engine whistled as it accelerated, not with a turbocharge, but more like emphysema. The gear change was slow and methodical, one gear finding another to spin with, carefully.

At the back of the cottages where we live workers were propping up platforms to work on the top of the walls of an empty building. Empty buildings are a way of saving: very few people have savings accounts. Instead they buy a piece of land with whatever cash they have. At some point they have cement bricks delivered, or they make them themselves. Very few people make bricks out of mud now. When there is more money, they will dig a foundation, fill them with cement. Then the bricks will go up to make a grey cement wall. The building may stand like this, untenanted, for some time - years, even - until there is enough to buy the timber for the roof, and the iron roofing. Then it is cement plastered, and if there is surplus money, it may be painted after the electricity is installed. This isn’t such a long process for the more affluent: the times between walls and roof is much shorter.

The lorry, Chinese, shook the ground as it stepped over the deep gully in the road, its springs almost inflexible.

At the mobile phone shop there was no one in. The door was open, but the counter locked up. I went down to another shop where I asked for a Vodacom top up, and with a huge welcoming smile I was offered a sim card replacement, some vouchers for the phone (like scratch cards), and finally an admission that they had no Vodacom.

I walked back up to the first shop. A skinny yellow bitch wandered across the road in front of a shiny motorcycle.

At the phone shop, the assistant was in. She sold me Tzs35000 worth of M-Pesa when I know I had asked her for ‘Data - internet’. I’ll cash it in and buy the right connection.

The skinny yellow bitch was in the big puddle, licking the surface which was growing algae around the dead flies.

At the cafe the sleeper lay, still, unmoved. I wondered if he or she was alive.

The cook at the cafe waved. I waved back.