Taxi, station.

A ride in a taxi.
Taxis in this village are a collection of Toyota Noah's. You'll have to look them up. They are about the size of a Citroen C3 Picasso, with a two litre petrol engine and a constant velocity automatic gearbox. They are all more than ten years old, and imported second hand from India and the surrounding countries of Asia.
They have seven seats, and a driver's seat.
The average speed over the 45km trek to Dodoma is around 30kph because the road is punctuated with heavy corrugations, water damaged gullies and oncoming traffic that makes passing difficult.
The taxis are smooth looking from a distance. Close up they bear scars, bumps, dents, scratches and years of heavy use. The engines seem to run well. One taxi had a howling gear train like the Thameslink trains in London. Two taxis did not have cracked windscreens. One taxi had a speedometer that worked, and another had a rev counter that worked. The air conditioning doesn't work. The radio does. The doors mostly have to be opened from the outside, unless the handles have fallen off. The rear windows are not openable, but are loose and mobile. The door cards are sometimes present, and safety belts too, but no opportunity to wear them. They rattle and judder and provide work and income for the drivers and the people who use them to get to work.
We have had four journeys and the prospect of more.
Fourteen people were crammed in the vehicles we travelled in this week. The car is a serious seven seater, but if you fold the back seats down so that the squabs form another seat, and make sure you don't slam the tailgate on the passengers' knees, that's three, even four extra places, and the two rows of legitimate seats can take four each, and the front passenger's seat can take two. It's a necessity, but not a happy one at all.
I worked out that fourteen humans with an estimated average weight of 70kg including luggage was slightly heavier than our little Peugeot 107 which weighs in at 860Kg. 980kg is almost a tonne. Being a Toyota it manages.
My thesis that we should supply a small car to put on the roof of each taxi is not a rational one, just an idea.

_____________________________________________________

The station.


Germany occupied Tanzania at the beginning of the 20th century, and had brought ships for the lakes, and railways and new buildings. In Dodoma there is a clear influence in the old buildings, some of which look as if they belong in the Alps.
Dodoma station is one, roofed in corrugated iron (rather like a well known sailing club on the river Thames). A model railway enthusiast might build one of these for their layout.

Orange. And a functional mud brick building.

The Dutch call them Chinese apples, and the French have adapted the word from Arabic, something like 'orenje' which became 'orange'. William of Orange named himself after a fruit, then, and also raided Chatham in 1667, rather successfully as accounts go. He followed that by becoming King of England after an invasion of Brixham.
Nothing to do with the fruit, actually. 
This is a local Tanzanian orange, green on the outside, juicy and delicious on the inside:




 Bananas also look unusual. They would fail the length, diameter, colour and blandness tests of the European Union. They have bruise marks all over the skins, but when they are peeled they are perfect.
Anyway, foodwise there is everything growing at the moment. The meat, for the meat eaters, is rough and tough.
_____________________________

Most mud brick buildings have corrugated iron roofing now, but here and there some traditional ones still exist. These can be washed away by the heavy rains, and the roofing is an ongoing maintenance job.
I think that this end of this building is a goat or chicken pen. No, they don't teach goats and chickens to write. They can already do that.

Snakes alive.

The centre of the village is where the taxis and the buses gather. And motorcycles, called budabuda. That's the noise they make, and they are taxis for short distances.
We took a taxi to Dodoma, Tz4000 each way, each passenger. The taxis are small Toyotas with eight seats. Coming back we had eleven people on board.

This is very similar in construction to the prep school
I went to - a boarding school, of course, with
metal roofs that rattled in the rain.

We stopped over at CAMS,an international school, and had food at the New Dodoma Hotel, which is very pleasant, and built in German style. The German nation used to control this part of Africa until they were removed by the League of Nations or some such, and Tanganyika was given over to Britain instead of the Norwegians as a protectorate.
We had a Chinese meal, and I consumed two bottles of beer. Alison had just one. Between us we have had five bottles of beer in two and a half months.
Dodoma is a thriving place: the centre streets are like a giant shopping mall, with hundreds of shops competing with the same kinds of goods. A lot is made in China.
Now: on to the exciting prospect of meeting snakes.
Maggie encountered a snake yesterday. It was slim and green with a white belly. This was most likely a green mamba. One of the fastest snakes around, and poisonous enough to disable you permanently.
In the days of Eden, the snakes and the mosquitoes and the hyenas shared the landscape. 
Now that we have discovered that the old and gracious European buildings of the last millenium aren’t the oldest things in the world, and that the pyramids are predated by it, Africa is the great adventure of the developed world.
We come to view the giraffes and the everlasting symbols of Eden that we have rediscovered here in the skulls and cave paintings and great burial chambers where we have lain buried for millions of year. In our countries, Great Eden has been trimmed and clipped by us into the suburbs of tumble driers and tennis courts in the old smoke of the empires and the fuss of Airmiles.
But this really is the great museum of Eden. Even stripped of its great forests there is enough left for us to sense our primitive selves living among the lions  and hippos and leopards and waterbuck and wildebeest.
The conflict of existence may be the tribes and thinned forests, our lawnmowers, their zebras and mambas, the shopping mall and the crocodiles, malaria, heat and their unlikely solace in our charity.
I'm sure there's more to say.
The picture is borrowed from the Wikipedia entry on green mambas. At the time of Maggie's encounter, she had turned and fled, but a tall young student had taken a large stone and thrown it at the snake, hitting it on the head. "Masai boy," was the comment.
Green mambas may be beautiful, but the venom will kill a human in half a day.

The chapel, which plays an important part in the life of the school, has a corrugated iron roof, except when you go inside its stone walls.
The stone walls are unusual because stone is hard to find around here. The corrugated iron roof is unusual too, because it is there to protect the old roof which is mud and clay on a heavy lath of rafters supported by wooden poles with crook'd tops (not crook-ed, tops that have crooks), chosen for their shape from the forest that was once much denser.
Not far from growing oak trees to provide the bits that make ships strong enough to sail the world looking for a bit of plunder, is it?
This lath is still covered in the mud and vegetation - often banana leaves - that once provided the weatherproofing, but protected by the metal cladding above. It has some history that dates back to the missionaries.
The chapel is used for assemblies and prayers in the mornings, except Wednesdays when there is a parade during which the national flag is raised during the singing of the national anthem, and the school flag is raised during the singing of the school song: and Fridays, which is cleaning day and the entire school, perhaps with the exception of one or two volunteer staff, sweep, tidy, and generally get the whole place looking sharp.
Whatever stereotype you have of people in Africa being able to sing is probably about right: song is part of culture unlike our culture where song is a hope of earning loads of dosh. Although the music industry is pretty vibrant here.
Going in to the chapel in the mornings is a warming experience because the entire school is singing, led by voices that prompt the melody, provide a counterpoint and cue the words. And it is true that at more or less any time a group of girls (in particular) or boys can sing in harmony with counterpoint, rarely in a minor key, but always with strength and a perfect sense of pitch.
At the moment it is hot and dry. The air is very dusty and the countryside is beginning to fade from the intense green that was evident when we first arrived. Rain is becoming a topic as people look to the north where the low mountains prevent the rain from slipping down towards us with thunder and lightning and an unloading of the tension that always comes before that kind of weather.

The whole place is intensely bright with sunshine: the mangoes are over, the pineapples hard to find. Instead it is watermelon, bananas and very soon paw-paw (or papaya). The water supply plays up, and I still haven't fixed the toilets properly so flushing with a bucket is often the way with those times when stubborn resistance has to be overcome.

More about the visually impaired students

Visiting the VI unit - Visually Impaired - is always a surprise because personality clears away the preconceptions about blind people.

This morning three of the girls, two who are partially sighted and who can identify some things very close to them with the help of touch, and who wear spectacles, and one blind, arrived in the office to have their permission slip checked before going to eye clinic.

To be patronising, a group of girls, regardless of their ability to see, should be collectively called a giggle of girls.

They collected their hospital cards, and went to the eye clinic to have their spectacles mended because the usual collection of screws had fallen out.

We suffer from this as well in the UK, even with frames that cost as much as a small car.

If you visit their classroom and offices, the place grows on you. Tanzanian classrooms in general are not the welcoming places that you see in the UK where education is very child centred. Some mzungu* complain about that along the lines of ‘what about adult centred?’ and also ‘it weren’t like this when I were young, were it?’

In a way this is like it was when ‘I were young’.

There are thirty or more wooden desks, made from local timber, and a similar number of chairs. This school is lucky because it has desks and chairs. There are schools in Tanzania where there are no desks or chairs, so students sit on the floor.

The classrooms here are mostly empty of any reflection of student work - no noticeboards, no displays, no reminders. The chalkboard is above a concrete dais, and the teacher’s desk stands on the dais. The student desks are arranged so that they face the front, but are fairly haphazard.

There is always sand on the floor, drawn in by shoes. It is rare to find carpeting anywhere as sand arrives without invitation, blown by the wind, dragged in by feet. The classrooms are swept each morning.

But the classrooms are quite bleak and monotone, and there is surely a missed opportunity for some passive education, recognition and praise that comes from posting student work. We are working on it.

Checking her work by reading it with her fingers.
The braille machines were funded by
the Chinese government:
they are made in the USA and cost
around £800 each. 

But in the VI unit, this kind of recognition is sometimes wasted: because a very few of the students who are visually impaired can see enough to make sense. Sight ranges from recovered - such as students who may have suffered from cataracts or from trachoma (a disease that makes the surface of the eyelid rather abrasive and this damages the eye surface, and is cured with antibiotics because it is a close relative of chlamydia) - through sight in one eye, poor sight in one eye, no sight and at the end of the scale, no eyes.

Just thinking about this is harsh.

The VI students have been prevented from taking lessons in science and maths - because they are blind. But when you watch a blind person cooking, you realise that they can handle a laboratory sensitively. Last week the government announced that VI students are to take science and maths as of this Monday, as of Form 1 (which is UK Year 8).

When you enter their working classroom, when for example they are using braille machines,the atmosphere is the same as any good classroom. Busy, and productive. When you enter during the breaks, the social business is on, and speaking to them in English - slowly, without convoluted syntax or words like convoluted or syntax - draws out the personalities, which are strong and engaging.

This stool was made by Visually
Impaired students.

Akili plays keyboard. He’s quite good at it and would like to go on getting better at it. But he was a bit naughty, let someone else borrow the keyboard, and in the process lost the mains adapter, which meant the end of keyboard. Until we bought another adaptor and read the riot act, as the expression goes.

Reading the riot act in English actually doesn’t achieve much. Tanzanians have a great deal of faith in God, and they thank God every day for allowing them another day, and remind God that their aspirations need to be fulfilled and they are expecting this to happen without fail.

So looking after a mains adaptor is actually God’s business.

Such is life. If you understand the sign in some pubs in the UK that says “Free beer tomorrow” you’ll understand the Tanzanian “tomorrow”. Frequently, and frequently enough for it to be statistically significant, things are promised for “tomorrow”. Ten phone calls, fifteen emails and some weeks later it will be done “tomorrow”.

And that’s perfectly logical. You wake up in the morning knowing that yesterday you promised to do something tomorrow. So you make sure that you have it scheduled for tomorrow, and each morning you repeat your commitment to doing it tomorrow.

Does that make sense?

It is a lesson that people in the UK should heed, and stop pretending. I could name some names. Tomorrow.

*mzungu - white people.

Hmm. Hottish, instant coffee, trucks.

34º but a lovely breeze and some fluffy clouds. Saw a vapour trail last week. Had a chip omelette for lunch yesterday, a chipnaya, probably.
Walked to the airfield today and the brightest things were as usual the sunflowers. Apart from the sun. The factor 50 goes on like glue and is a bit difficult to distribute. The sun goes straight in to your skin.
School results for form 4 have been very good, 6th in the area.
We will visit a game reserve in a couple of weeks time provided that we have our visas. The gentleman from the Diocese office who was dealing with this has finally admitted that he has retrieved the $1000 fee for the visas from his friend. He may have left it too late and we may have to take a journey out of the country and then back again.
Trying to buy a guitar. Would love to feel a frost. Had chocolate for the first time in two months, yesterday. We ate a whole bar between three of us in five minutes. It had melted on the way back from Dodoma, but revived in the fridge. Yes, we have a fridge.
Fridge isn't much use in a power cut which occurred yesterday for the entire day. Have entertained the need for instant coffee, but am looking forward to finding a source of ground coffee.
The cottage has been fumigated - for termites, 'mcha' in Swahili.

Maggie Hunter takes
a step

Trucking

There are two cottages, mirror images, one for gap year students, one for us chickens that maintain the Mvumi Trust presence here. The toilets have very little ability when it comes to flushing. I will leave the rest to your imagination. They will be mended.
If you know any "gappies" who would like to volunteer, let us know, will you? Or if any of you would like to volunteer. Beans for lunch, food from the garden, enduring warmth and rain that hurts, although we haven't had any for about ten days. And mosquitoes, of course. No hippoes, lions, elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, leopards, cheetahs, impala, eland, sable or even snakes. Lots of small pale dogs and ridiculously skinny cats that yowl.
TV every night is from the collection of DVD's and films that reside here for the relief of such as us.
The third person is Maggie Hunter, who is a volunteer and working with the VI (visually impaired) unit. She comes from Derbyshire.

Home visit

From the main road the track lay between maize and sunflowers and the ground beneath was soft and sandy. Matthew stopped by a man and asked the way. The man pointed down the road, and indicated to turn right. He walked with us alongside the car. The right turn was a lane of soft sand. The 4x4 just fitted between the sunflowers and the mud brick buildings. We stopped and the man, who had walked with us, pointed down a path between tall stalks of maize, bright green after the rain. We walked down the path, and came to a small group of mud buildings arranged in an open square. The building on the left was small, the choo, toilet. The first building had no roof and the floor inside was slicked with dried mud. In the next room was fire wood, stacked against the back wall. The building on the other side had a door that showed where hands had pushed it to open it, and a lock. The building had no roof. The back of the building had collapsed and the mud bricks lay disordered where they had fallen. The rains had washed this wall away, broken the roof. The tops of the remaining wall brushed away under my hand. Round the back was a pig sty with a sow and a piglet, brown with the dirt of the floor of the sty. There was access for the pigs to a shelter.

The three buildings bounded an open living area. At the back of the living area there were some sheets of corrugated iron, a few mud bricks forming a barrier, and sleeping arrangements on the earth sheltered by the corrugated iron, arranged as a roof.

Three or four chickens wandered around, one with three guinea fowl chicks following her.

The shamba, garden, is a space two metres wide by about five metres long.

The mother is forty seven years old. She is HIV. She lives under the corrugated iron with her sister and her mother, some cloth curtains hung from the beam, made of a tree branch, to keep out the light.

The son is waiting to hear if this Trust will sponsor him. At this home there is no place to work, to store, to dream: the love of his mother wants him to be a boarder at this school and to escape this life.

Yellow flowers

REVISED LIST

fruit juice made from fruit

wine - one bottle

cool fresh showers

footpaths that criss cross the countryside

a landing strip with a windsock

paper napkins - plenty at the restaurants

cheese from New Zealand

mangoes

spinach

crunchy brown sugar

maize porridge

nylon line to grow the grape vine up

a whetstone

doors that shut after being planed

hours of torrential rain

no alcoholics, no cigarettes

problematic internet

mosquito screens without any holes

fish - in cans

charcoal fires

turbulent, stormy skies

big buckets for flushing

just one train, twice a week

sunset at 6.30, sunrise at 6.30

warmth and heat

orioles, weavers, pigeons, buzzards

ginger nuts

pawpaw

bananas

oranges

limes

instant coffee

no tobacco

spinach, tomato, onion, potato, carrot and leek ratatouille

Six weeks on

LIST
belgian beer
wine
hot showers

smooth roads
aeroplanes
paper napkins
yoghourt
plums
lettuce
creme caramel
muesli
rope
sharp knives
doors that shut
frost
alcoholics
patronising messages from the Post Office about internet services
double glazing
fish
fireplace
vapour trails
toilet cisterns that work
trains
sunset at 4.30
cold
seagulls
chocolate
ground coffee
cigarette smokers
salad nicoise

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.

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.

GRAVESEND:

and DODOMA:

Are you in the moo'd?

Are you in the

moo'd?

An installation.

        Can you see the shapes sitting on the sofa?                    

The great event some days is the rain, which comes down rather vertically and with little or no breeze. It just pours. So far it has poured for twelve hours, and then last night for about five hours. The noise is almost frightening because there is so much of it on the tin roofs around the village. It can fill a bucket in about five minutes, but the ground just soaks it up. 
Walking down to the bridges a day or two after shows the rivers still full, but unless it rains again they will become dry and the intensely coloured water will be gone.
The goats eat fearlessly - these thorns (a bit fuzzy at this magnification) will stab you and make you bleed. They have evolved to keep everything away from them, including goats, who somehow evolved a bit more thoughtfully and can strip the leaves off without damaging themselves.
Further down is an old style mud building. The bricks are made from mud and sun dried, and then mortared together using more mud. The roof is made by laying straight timbers - branches - across the front and back walls, and then laying straw or banana leaves, and then mud. Plants grow in the mud.
When mangoes are picked, it isn't by a specially designed mango harvester. The lads climb the trees, which are huge, spreading and the same shape as oak trees, and they pick the mangoes. From there they go to the market. If you look at the picture there is a lad in the left hand tree calling out "Mzugu!
The river is not in full flood, but the water is loaded with silt. This will settle to replace the silt that has been washed further down by the rain. The colour of the water is like paint.

Cats, dogs and guinea fowl.

The cats here roam day and night, eating insect and lizards and tiny rodents. They are skinny and swaybacked and have nothing of the complacent indifference of a domesticated cat.

They have a dim light of survival in their eyes that are too dark to reflect the beautiful stars.

At night they meet and fight among themselves, their thin bones scraping at each other with claws and ugly yells and howls and teeth.

The guinea fowl wander all day. They make a noise like a rusty jack lifting a bus, harsh and metallic. The people take their eggs and give them to the hens to hatch. They have heads like turkeys. Guinea fowl are black and white like hounds’ tooth cloth.

The dogs are black or tan, their tails curl a little over their backs. They seem all to be of the same mould apart from the colour, and are lean and fit except for the ones who have mange or distemper. Sometimes they lie in the shade while the fleas are quiet, or they flicker along the roads and paths with a sense of purpose, or prowl the market place near the meat stall looking for scraps.

On the dry sandy road with the deep puddle opposite the school, a small hen with four chicks stops at the side of the road. She waits. When the road is clear she runs, and the chicks follow, all five running across to the shelter of the fence on the other side.

A motorcycle comes by.

Three mango sellers sit by the roadside, talking. They have picked green mangoes. All fruit ripens here.

The oranges are green like wild oranges, with patches of orange. The bananas grow deep green and ripen on the bush. A banana doesn’t grow on a tree, because it isn’t  member of the family of trees. Who cares? It looks like a tree, you can make a waterproof roof with the leaves, and if it isn’t a tree, what on earth is a paw-paw? A long, emaciated stalk with a bad haircut at the top, and little nodules of wonderful fruits underneath.

The roosters, not regulated by an electronic signal from Rugby or Frankfurt, begin crowing at around 4.30am, before the muezzin’s first call of the day. Sunrise is usually around 6am. The sun rises very quickly. It hangs around heating up the ground until about 6pm, when it sets very quickly.

The village is busy from 5am or earlier.

On the sandy street in the square are the buses, the budda-budda bikes, the water seller, the charcoal seller, and the little shops that sell everything, make all the clothes, make the livings.

The water seller has a tricycle with the back platform loaded with ten litre plastic bottles of water; frayed and worn plastic, discoloured by use and ultra violet. A man loads long timbers onto his motorbike. There is music already.

The scene is simple, the gritted street drying in slight breeze and the new sun. There are butterflies everywhere.