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.