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.