Why are German people here so serious and so badly dressed?

A small diversion from oohing and aahing over cute little brown children - to have a rant. Why oh why do the German people here offend my sensibilities so much? So far I have met five of them, one at the school and the others via the nuns’ gaff. I think the latter is because the nuns were originally from the German part of Switzerland and they have sinister Nazi links there (NB here the word for coconut is nazi, and they seem to like it a lot! That’s all I’m saying.)

Anyway the first one is Lisa, another volunteer at the school. She is only 23 and is very full of angst about:

The education system in Tanzania
Street kids in Tanzania
Provision for deaf adults in Tanzania
Orphanages in Tanzania

Of course, she is right – all these things are v worrying. But now I am old I approach them more eezee-style, slowly-slowly – this means I can properly assess the situation and then offer the right help in a sustainable way. Ahem. More importantly, it means I can come home from school, have a refreshing shower, a light nap, lie on my bed reading my book for a bit and generally doss around. As I languidly turn the pages of Brideshead Revisited, marvelling at the exquisitely economical prose, Lisa is running a play session for Dar es Salaam street kids before she heads off home to her squat, in which she CHOSE TO LIVE because then she could “be with real Tanzanians and save money”. Oh dear God. Can you imagine. No running water. No furniture and they eat from one plate! Not one each – although that is in itself a horrid thought, no clean plate for palate-cleansing sorbet – one between all of them. Anyway, I went there for dinner on Wednesday night and it was surprisingly deeelissious and the sharing one plate thing was actually quite nice, so it is very mean of me to mock, but there is more.

The Germans here wear remarkable clothes. It is no surprise to me that the only time Lisa has commented on anything I wear was the day I wore my most unflattering top. It is white and kind of full and billowing. I thought it would be cooling and stylish but it just makes me look as though I am going to a fancy dress party as Sydney Opera House. It was a bad buy, and I should have listened to Stu when he laughed and said it looked more like a baby’s christening robe than an adult’s shirt. Lisa saw it and cried out with joy about how nice I looked. I narrowed my eyes in case a gag along the lines of “did you get a nice silver rattle as a gift, and was it nasty when the mean vicar splashed water on your ickle face?” was coming but obvi not as 1) she is German, duh and 2) she was wearing a multi coloured t-shirt and similarly billowing purple cuffed trousers. Why would you pack an item requiring so much fabric, airline weight limits being what they are these days? How do you fold them? I bet one pair of my lovely slimline Jigsaw linen trews weighs half as much.

The next day I met more bloody Germans. One was fully Aryan looking but had let her hair grow into dreadlocks (bleeeeugh, there MUST be insects inside those nasty things) and was wearing reggae-themed clothes. Her friend had bleached yellow hair and was wearing a bright pink high-necked long t-shirt, saying in huge black letters “share peace love music” and worse still some three-quarter length black harem pants. They were the fullest harem pants I (and probably anyone) have ever seen. They went out about a metre each side. They could only have been worse if they had been stuffed with sawdust like a Tudor nobleman’s trousis. (Correct terminology? Doublet? Hose? Knickerbockers?). Gaaah.

Anyway, Lisa is very nice and really does care about the children and very politely ignores my puzzled face when she says things like “I am going to buy the street kids a plot of land and some beads so that they can start a little business”. I will probably die screaming and she will gracefully ascend to heaven. With big wings, wearing nasty white harem pants and several friendship bracelets.

But because I am really mean, here’s a snap of her wearing relatively restrained cuffed trousis. Not bootlegs! I hope she never reads this.