Ingenious

Some of us appreciate the labour that goes into reinventing things: the thought and effort that makes something out of very little.
So this bit of engineering is outstanding: it might be a competitor in Scrapheap Challenge, but this is designed to do a job of work and go on doing it. The engine is Chinese. The chassis is made up by the smithy across the road, and the drive train, which is driven by a large alternator belt, is made up of parts from a car. It has little in the way of suspension: just a tractor front end with an articulated beam for the wheels. It is, in a world where very little goes to waste, impressive.

Disability is not inability

The VI Unit

Braille paper took two and a half months to arrive here. It came by air freight from the UK. The hold up was in customs clearance. It is, after all, only paper. The freight company waived the charges.
Visual impairment is often absolutely dependent on braille. The mural in the background helps us to see what they could be doing, but the VI students aren't all able to see it.
A partially sighted student helps to unpack the new batch of braille paper.

About five per cent of the students at Mvumi Secondary School are visually impaired. That means that they have difficulty seeing. 

The doctor went through the list of five in Form 1 (year 8 in the UK) who have just joined the school.

“She can see with one eye - well enough with glasses.”

“He needs dark glasses. He had his eyes removed a few years ago and has conjunctivitis. He must continue to learn braille.”

“She must continue learning braille - her eyesight is deteriorating and there isn’t anything that can be done.”

In their classroom they bump into things: us, for example. We are standing where they expect a space.

These students want music and aural things. They want maps and bones shapes that they can touch. They want simple maths but they aren't taught it.

They are always at the end of a list: sometimes they are taught with blackboards they can’t see, and with books they can’t read so they have to rely on someone to read for them so that they can take notes with a braille machine, have the notes printed on braille paper and then read them themselves.
So they do badly in exams.

They are, by and large, at the end of the money list.

About the weather and loads of rain

It rained this afternoon (30th January) in huge bucketfuls and the ground outside was like a lake. 24ºC, but it felt a little cool.
Tanzania lies not far from the equator, and well inside the Tropic of Cancer. The sun is never far from overhead, and summer and winter don't really apply. It does get cooler in September, and during the rainy season the temperatures fluctuate between about 27º and 35º during the day.
If you compare Dodoma, our nearest city, with Gravesend in the UK which has scored both the hottest and the coolest days from time to time, there is one thing that always stands out - just how regular, like a heartbeat, the diurnal temperature and pressure is. It goes up during the day, and down during the night, regular as clockwork.
These are from Wunderground, from 28th January 2016.

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