The starry nights are pretty spectacular, even with the amount of dust that is in the atmosphere, the nights are crisp. Down at the bottom left of this picture is the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, or the Giant Saucepan in the sky, and the left hand bit of it still points towards the Pole Star, or Polaris. You will notice that the Big Dipper is upside down by Northern Hemisphere standards, but it still points to the tail end of Ursa Minor where sits the Pole Star which isn't visible in the Southern Hemisphere. But there is the Southern Cross which provides a steady signpost for navigators: although one can be fooled by the False Cross which looks similar but points randomly elsewhere. Instead of aiming for the South Pole, you could end up in Brazil or Melbourne.
With some luck, this may be visible on this tiny computer screen after Blogspot has processed it somewhat.



The picture below is of the shamba. The papaya will be ripe while we are away. This is a pity, because they are good food, make good jam, and are very delicious with a little sprinkle of the coarse brown sugar and a big squeeze of lemon or lime.
We have about fifteen papaya trees in the shamba, which is the garden or allotment, and most of them are producing quantities of  paw-paw such that we wouldn't be able to eat it all. The building in the background is one of the dormitories. The school is a boarding school, with a very few students who live locally. There are about 650 students, not quite half are girls.
The school is linked to and more or less controlled by the Diocesan Church of Tanganyika, and although it is denominational, it takes students from all backgrounds. It has a good reputation.
Just up the road is the Mvumi Mission Hospital, also part of the Diocesan Church of Tanganyika, and a training centre for nurses and doctors. It is the local clinic as well.
The biggest diseases are malaria and HIV. Other infections such as typhoid, cholera and trachoma can all be dealt with, although cholera can sometimes develop too quickly for medical intervention to save the patient.

A video of sound effects

Yup. We be back on the 3rd June, another sleepy dusty delta day, I was out picking cotton and my brother was bailing hay…
Anyway, hot diggety. The above reference is to a song by Bobby Gentry about a young man and a young lady who got into a bit of trouble. Listen to the song, called Ode to Billy Joe, nothing to do with Mvumi.
The attached video is a video because blogspot doesn't like audio files, it seems, so I have to make a video. If you last all the way through it, well done, but it is a soundscape - and it omits some significant sounds, such as the Muezzin who can't sing in tune, the Church that blows out its bass reflex speakers, and the crows that haunt the rooftops and the phone towers. Haven't been able to capture the sound of mosquitoes landing for a snack, although I could get some effects of ourselves slapping ourselves. It is quite amazing how a tiny insect vanishes and reappears, and provokes action which bends spectacles, bruises one's arms and generally makes one feel inadequate.
Be patient with this soundscape. It is in stereo, and turn the volume up.

By the cafe where we sometimes have a soda and a chip omelette, there is a new pile of grit. The village blacksmiths have the tractor and trailer they built to collect sand from the river beds. At the back of the cafe the ground has been washed away by the rain.

I am going down to the shop that sells phones and recharges sim cards to recharge the one we use for internet connections. It costs about £10 for 10Gb and lasts a month. The shop takes your card, puts it in the shop phone, phones the other shop phone to get your number, then recharges your number with Tz35000 worth of credit. You go back to the office and check on line that you have been credited. You can also charge your phone with money. M-Pesa, it is called. You can send money to other people’s phones using M-Pesa, and then they can go to a phone shop and the phone shop will give you cash in exchange for your M-Pesa credit. It is like chip’n’pin as it’s called in Europe, only not a card, it’s a phone. In some places you can use it like a card, in payment for goods.

At the corner of the cafe a person lies on the ground sleeping, wrapped in a thin dark cloth. I can’t see the face. There were flies on the person’s feet, but the feet didn’t move. The shoemaker’s stall near the puddle wasn’t operating. The puddle was very large, and there were heavy tyre tracks in the surrounding mud. There were three major puddles in the heavy soil that most traffic tried to go around.

A lorry came down the road and I moved aside. Its engine whistled as it accelerated, not with a turbocharge, but more like emphysema. The gear change was slow and methodical, one gear finding another to spin with, carefully.

At the back of the cottages where we live workers were propping up platforms to work on the top of the walls of an empty building. Empty buildings are a way of saving: very few people have savings accounts. Instead they buy a piece of land with whatever cash they have. At some point they have cement bricks delivered, or they make them themselves. Very few people make bricks out of mud now. When there is more money, they will dig a foundation, fill them with cement. Then the bricks will go up to make a grey cement wall. The building may stand like this, untenanted, for some time - years, even - until there is enough to buy the timber for the roof, and the iron roofing. Then it is cement plastered, and if there is surplus money, it may be painted after the electricity is installed. This isn’t such a long process for the more affluent: the times between walls and roof is much shorter.

The lorry, Chinese, shook the ground as it stepped over the deep gully in the road, its springs almost inflexible.

At the mobile phone shop there was no one in. The door was open, but the counter locked up. I went down to another shop where I asked for a Vodacom top up, and with a huge welcoming smile I was offered a sim card replacement, some vouchers for the phone (like scratch cards), and finally an admission that they had no Vodacom.

I walked back up to the first shop. A skinny yellow bitch wandered across the road in front of a shiny motorcycle.

At the phone shop, the assistant was in. She sold me Tzs35000 worth of M-Pesa when I know I had asked her for ‘Data - internet’. I’ll cash it in and buy the right connection.

The skinny yellow bitch was in the big puddle, licking the surface which was growing algae around the dead flies.

At the cafe the sleeper lay, still, unmoved. I wondered if he or she was alive.

The cook at the cafe waved. I waved back.

Mikumi and back.

Mikumi is the second largest game reserve in Tanzania. It is the size of a small country.

It rained like Noah's flood the night we were to leave. We got up at 5am. It was still pouring with rain.

Twenty kilometres from the start along the dirt road to the junction with the main road to Dar es Salaam it was clear that there were sounds from the Toyota’s drive train that suggested some mechanical discomfort. The big Landcruiser was literally limping and at the junction with the tarred road, the duty policeman told us without saying a word that one wheel was splayed outwards: he raised both hands, one straight up and the other at an angle.

Hammad, the driver, took us across the road, made some inquiries and stopped in flat bit of the bus stop on the tarred road, then jacked the car up.

It took four hours to dismantle and reassemble the left front axle: wheel, end caps, retaining rings, hub and then the stub shaft, which was broken and shattered looking. The call for a replacement went to the Toyota dealer in Dodoma, about fifteen kilometres away. The boss’s phone, in Morogoro, paid by M-Pesa for the part. A contact in Dodoma went to fetch the part, but Toyota insisted on seeing the original. A motorbike (a budda-budda, the universal short distance taxi) was dispatched with the broken part, and finally the replacement arrived with oil seals, grease, new bearings and everything.

Five people had appeared from nowhere, and a small, almost invisible cafe had supplied food for all of us. Chapati, boiled eggs, bites. The cost was for the part. The labour was because Tanzanians work for each other as much as for themselves. 

We drove off, late, and had late supper at our hotel.

Later the Toyota Landcruiser broke its oil cooler and flooded the engine with cooling water, so we had a ride home in one of those taxis I had a moan about: very different, because this was a private car in very good condition. Really quiet, like a limo. Air conditioning, electric windows, three rows of seats. Not punchy performance wise, because average speeds in Tanzania are very low. There may be a few turbochargers in the cities, on the cars that stay on the tar.

Mikumi is a huge flat savannah with river beds and swamps, surrounded by low mountains. The main road from Dar es Salaam to Zambia and countries south west runs through the middle of the reserve. Speed is very restricted. We met elephants on the road the first morning we were out. It is like a huge sigh of relief, but don’t breath too deeply or you’ll swallow a mosquito.

We saw most things worth seeing. Lions, elephants, bishop birds, storks, vultures, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, hippos, impala, duiker, starlings, sunbirds, owls, eagle owls, butterflies, weaver birds, jackal, monitor lizard, soldier ants, colobus monkeys, hornbills, black mamba, house snake, warthog, also saw trees in huge variety, some for timber, some for medicine, some not to be touched because they make you sick, and we heard a massive chorus of frogs. The frogs had had a good night and were singing out.

We climbed a bit of a mountain: 750m only, but the whole climb was like a slalom up the side of the rain forest. That is quite a special thing for us townies - real, old, like this for thousands of years, peopled by monkeys on a steep escarpment face, exploited by humans since they could exploit, and really part of the Garden of Eden. We so much fancy our Stonehenge and ancient cathedrals - they are nothing compared to the oldness of the forest. Except the soldier ants. "Mind the soldier ants" said the guide, and an hour later we were still beating ourselves where an ant had found its way up our trousers to get revenge on our mere presence in their domain. One of them took revenge on a particular part of my domain as well.

The black mamba was a baby. They can kill you even when they are just hatched. Only about eight people have ever survived a black mamba bite.

Stayed in local hotels. One was OK, the next was seriously neglected, the next was good and had air conditioning that was quiet so we slept with a thin blanket for the first time.

The mountains here are beautiful - not very tall, but the plains meet mountains behind which are more mountains, and then plains. The part we have just been to is lush by comparison with Mvumi.

The rocking man

The man usually sits on the ground, talking and rocking. A waitress comes out of the cafe behind the green wall and brings him a white chair. Sometimes he sits on the ground against the chain link fence by the cafe at the south end of the school. Yesterday he sat on a kerbstone, by the school gate. He has ragged trousers with the calf torn. He has broken sandals and the remains of a jacket. He has a stick. He talks to himself. He has no other.

The village looks after him.

Today he sits at the back of the Double J cafe where a stainless steel platter of food can be had for six thousand shillings. Rice, beans, stir fried spinach, fish or beef, sauces, and a soda. There is a pale lime green perimeter wall against which some gentlemen visitors to the cafe relieve themselves, their essential selves invisible to the patrons of the cafe.

There is a pit into which the rubbish is thrown and which is burned from time to time.

Two dogs forage in the pit even though it is filled with smoke. One dog hauls out a carcass and chews at it.

The man is brought a little food in a black plastic bag. He talks  to the world inside himself.

Two women dressed in the clothes of the kitchen bring out a large bowl, carried between them, and dump it in the pit.

The dogs rush forward, noses twitching. One descends into the pit. The dogs are confident yellow dogs, white tail tips and white boots. One is a little darker and slightly brindled. They salvage remains from the soup. Smoke curls from the pit.

The village looks after the man who talks, and the dogs. The dogs and the man belong to the village.

The man sits and the invisible forces that carry his spirit talk back to him.

A motorbike buzzes by. The trees sway in the wind. Chickens parade the road and verge. The sun emerges from morning cloud. Tiny brown birds build nests in the cacti.

Western music plays: what goes up must come down. It's blood, sweat and tears.

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.