A personal afternoon at the matches

A personal afternoon: Friday afternoon Alison and I were invited to be the special guests at a sports afternoon. Girls football, netball, volleyball, and a fairly emotional boy's football.
Football has been a minority interest in my life. I have always been aware of the emotional outpourings of fans cheated of 'their' win, but haven't ever been able to share it. I'd rather tie knots and sniff the poisons of antifouling.

However, the speed and enthusiasm on an afternoon when rain threatened to pour on us but never did led to a very satisfactory performance by the blue team, even though I was sure the red team had won, even though it was obvious that the blue team had the speed and sheer dominance to get the goals. Quite some speed, too.
The goal and penalty lines were drawn in the hard earth of the pitch, and the sides were up to the referee to judge. In the whole game there were no bones broken, but skin agains harsh sand is not pleasant, and once or twice there were words, shouts, gestures and fists exchanged in relation to tackling and off side rules.
The girls netball was fast, and furious. I remembered some of the rules. It isn't basketball, but the ball flew from one end to the other rapidly, and the red team won. At one point a volunteer shinned up the pole to straighten the net.
This is filled with enthusiasm and huge amounts of screaming, whistling and shouting. Pretty much the same the world over.
At the end, there was a girls' tug-of-war and a boys' tug-of-war. Both of them won although the rules I clearly remember  weren't quite clear. In my rotund youth I was anchor for the winning team most of the time.


If only a physics teacher would tell them about trajectories and relative pressures, and a biology teacher explain what happens to bones when you stress them. That's for the UK, not for Tanzania.
At the end a number of medals were shared out, and retrieved to share out among the next winning team. Cups were awarded to the football teams, and team chants followed, and we all went back home for supper before the sun dropped below the horizon.
Brilliant afternoon.
Shaking hands with the prizewinners was our task: I felt like the Duke of Edinburgh until I realised that he would have something imperially witty to say about the competition and the competitors.

Visiting in the rain: talking about the weather again.

We have to visit homes to do a kind of means test.

We visited a mother with children in a house plastered in cement and with a metal roof. The door was metal. The windows were small, to keep the heat out. The ground was the reddish brown mud and grainy quartz mix. There were chickens, and a cow in a shed. The yard was clean and swept, and she was happy and smiling because we had visited to see if she could be given some support. The children were shy and curious. Mzungu are not commonplace.

There was a mud hut in the traditional style, and some poles with ‘crook’ tops that could take a cross beam. These are ‘grown’, the crook being part of the pole, not a nailed on appendage. The cross beams, like rafters, would have been rested on these, and then lighter beams, like purlins laid across these with a mud and grass layer over this. Further south banana leaves are used to make up sheds, instead of mud. There is virtually no pitch to the roof other than that caused by a bit of misalignment. There are virtually no straight lines, as most of this work is done by eye and by sketching foundations out on the earth. For this building, the mud blocks would have been made on site and allowed to dry for a couple of weeks.

This kind of building is virtually redundant now, as blocks, a bit bigger than the ash blocks we use and quite a lot heavier, are brought in from one of the local factories.

The home was surrounded by maize, and with the rain that has been falling recently, it was big and green and starting to look like a good crop. She lived close by her relatives: parents and siblings, an extended family.

She may get some support this year, but next year she should be able to fend for herself.

When we had visited, we talked about it and rushed off, Tanzanian style, in Matthew’s Mitsubishi 4x4 that rattled and thumped back across the valley to Mvumi Makulu (in England that would be Greater Mvumi). The rain was hanging over the mountains, and we needed to hurry. The river bed made of rock and stone at Mvumi Makulu was dry.

It began to rain.

There are no street addresses, and the Ghanaian system of using phones and satellite fixing for homes hasn’t reached here yet.

Most people have a fair idea where most other people live. We stopped and we picked up a passenger who would be our address book. We drove under a tree and along a road which became a track and then became a path. We knew the rain was going to be heavy because everyone was running to find shelter. The rain increased in strength. Our passenger got out to enquire at a house. When he returned, he was soaked right through, and we had the wrong address.

We had been watching the flow of water down the track, and it was rising at about an inch a minute. We turned and drove back up the track that was becoming a river to the village centre with rain pouring through the leaks in the windscreen, and sheets of spray either side of the car. We dropped our soaked passenger outside a cafe. When we crossed the bridge, there was a lot of water, but not enough to deter people exploring the sand and rocks.

We drove on, and in twenty minutes were on a dry road. We didn’t get to see the mother who is a 47 year old widow with HIV and four children. It takes some getting used to.

About the job and a panorama

Habari asubuhi means good morning, although you may still be asleep.
The job is much of the same every day at the moment. We inherited 350gigabytes of Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, all doing a lot of doubling up of information.

Dry river bed: two lads and the plough on a wheel.
The oxen drag the plough home.

My jobs at the moment are developing a database for the Trust, which I hope will make some sense for the school - using Moodle, which a lot of schools and universities use. And it's free: so today it is searching for templates to do what is basically a pastoral database - what clothes are issued, who is their Class Dean (that would be Tutor in UK), have they special needs, what were their exam results, and have they paid their fees. Special needs is interesting - it's not so much about dyslexia and ADHD, it's about being orphaned (mostly through HIV-Aids), blind, or very poor. If anyone reading this is familiar with Moodle and its setup, I need all the help I can get.
Alison is running the finances, and reporting to the Board - the group who would be governors in the UK. Getting the tiny bits of money to balance out is sometimes tricky, but in the month or so we have been here, most of the detail is getting placed, and getting the information needed - that's the two main things, pastoral and finance - is on its way.
But we have been very busy as the amount of searching, balancing and head work is quite intense. The previous reps were very good and thorough balancing the books. The student records are very difficult to handle because they are pretty much all in a filing cabinet, with very little cross referencing, and a database doesn't exist: just one major spreadsheet in Excel, a programme that is definitely the boss spreadsheet, but is second only to PowerPoint for being irritating. A database will resolve a lot of this, but needs to be carefully thought out.

Subsistence farming

Very poor means that you eat what you grow on your farm, which is usually less than an acre. They are classified as peasants - that's how the Swahili word translates. If the rains are bad, they suffer a lot. If the rains are good, they survive. The naming of children is interesting, too, a lot of biblical and Empire names, and a lot of local names. Students are as often known and registered by their first names as by their last names, and spellings vary according to pronunciation - 'Jackline' for one. That's 'Jacqueline'. Swahili doesn't have a very clear 'L' sound, and some Tanzanians say 'R' instead of 'L', like the Japanese do, but it depends on their home language. Swahili ends the majority of words with a vowel, like Italian. There are three languages here: their tribal or home language which is a choice of 22 languages, Kiswahili (that's its proper name)which is the lingua franca of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi, and English. All secondary teaching is in English, which is frustrating because primary students are taught in Swahili and arrive in secondary not very skilled in English.
The area is pretty rich in what it can grow, subject to the rains. Almost anything. Further south there is a huge belt of sugar cane, which requires huge amounts of water, supplied by a rain forest. A little north of here are grapes, vineyards, and even olives. Coffee, tea, chocolate, etcetera. It is crying out for support, and a few countries are investing, most noticeably China who are building infrastructure. Chinese motorbikes, looking very much like Honda 125cc bikes, are everywhere, and suit local roads very well as taxis, often with three people on them, even one with three adults and a baby. The buses are a mixture of Indian and Chinese, and some of the older ones have designs that seem to reflect Chinese culture in the 'face' that most vehicles have at the front. There are even a couple of very heavy duty tipper trucks around boasting '310hp' that carry sand and gravel to building sites and sound as if they are powered by ex military tank engines. The three wheeled taxis are Indian - basically a scooter front with a two wheeled back and space for three slim passengers.
Great walk yesterday: got back before the rain - the rain is stupendous here: it hurts because it comes down like firehoses. Then it stops, just like that. No mizzle, drizzle or pizzle. A brief introduction on the metal roof, and then slam, down it comes. There is no guttering, and not a lot of rain catching in barrels and things, mostly because there is a deep borehole with what seem to be endless amounts of water in the rock beneath us. But the water sellers travel to the outskirts to deliver large containers of drinking water. All water is boiled and filtered here. There's been one case of typhoid - not a huge problem as it goes away with treatment.
Picture below - in the distance there is a shallow lump just left of centre with six microwave towers on it. That's Mvumi, about three kilometres away. Below is another school, and this is right on the edge of the spread of the village. You can see a river bed in the middle distance, maybe, that is more or less a conduit for fallen rain: it's dry most of the time. The trees are mostly baobab, mango and a few palm trees. The mountains get up to around 3000 feet, up to nearly 6000 for the distant ones in the picture. Mvumi itself is about 1500 feet above sea level. And Tanzania has nearly 1000 miles of fresh water coastline, almost as much as its Indian Ocean coastline.
Tanzania is a fine place, but there's no sea for miles and miles - apart from this fantastic plain being bedded on chalk, which obviously means it used to be sea. The water here is hard as nails.