I am the walrus; I am the Egg Man

At 7.20am, when I leave the nunnery, it is invariably sunny and warm. After the English weather before I left, and then being in the Australian winter, I am still surprised by how reliably blue and clear the sky is in the mornings. It is most cheering.

Here is the first part of my walk, a few metres from the convent.

I walk past a tree with huge pods hanging from the branches. They have started to fall, and I picked one up today. It is filled with something very soft and fluffy that protects the seeds inside. It is so lovely to touch, like fur – I could sit and stroke it for ages, although actually I might get sick of explaining what I was doing. I think it might be kapok? One of the nuns says it’s used for stuffing mattresses. My aunt will know.

I am always in a good mood when I leave. Getting up is very painless. Apart from the slight shock of a cool shower, and having to remove small but perfectly-formed ants from my toothbrush, I am set up by my delissious breakfast, which is:

Fruit – papaya, banana, mango, passion fruit. Sometimes a pancake too. There is always a hot food option but frankly, it is things I do not consider morning goods, like fried cassava or boiled plaintain. Yuck! I also have coffee, which is a mix of not-so-good instant powder (Tanzania grows real coffee but exports it) and lovely hot full-fat milk straight from the nunnery cows about 0.01 food miles away.

The journey to school is filled with many, many greetings. Everyone recognises me because I am the only Mzungu the whole way. Some people are very friendly. A few look like they would like me to get malaria and go home to White Girl World, but I normally spite them by cheerily saying “habari!”. This is a universal friendly greeting, which means “what’s your news?” and said in a way that indicates that you hope it’s very, very good. Absolutely everyone says this all the time, and so the sulky ones cannot undo years and years of habit and stop themselves responding politely. Ha! I go against the traffic of many, many schoolchildren in identical Tz school uniforms (white shirt and blue bottoms for everyone except pre-school, who wear green). So there are a lot of “good mornings” and “shikamoos” to get through. Some villagers still shout “Mzungu!”. Last week I was so frustrated by this that I said to a group of them “Nina jina! Si Mzungu! Ni Looss!” – “I have a name! it’s not Mzungu! It’s Looss!”. People here can’t really pronounce Lucy, so I have had to revert to a Swahili version. I thought perhaps I’d gone too far, but in the afternoon, when I was walking back, they all saw me and shouted out “Hello Looss!” together with big grins. I was quite touched.

Apart from the chickens and gorgeous little chicks scampering around, my favourite thing to see is the Egg Men. Everyone here keeps chickens. And fortuitously, everyone loves eating hardboiled eggs, or omelette with chips (chipsy) fried in with the egg. And most people don’t go to supermarkets. So the Egg Men collect eggs from people selling them in the morning, then stack them in huge egg boxes on the back of their bikes, then precariously cycle into town to sell them on. I look upon them in wonderment. I can barely stay on my bike in London, and they cycle with about a hundred eggs without breaking them! Here’s proof, taken just outside the village. The village streets are just narrow sandy paths, but what you can see here is a better road.

I try to buy things from the shops in the village, so that they see I am bringing money and hence like me more. At my favourite shop (populated by an unnerving number of flies) where I buy a coconut, drink the milk then and there and also get passion fruit for later, the shop keeper and I take it in turns to speak our native language, as we both want to practise the other’s. The last time I saw him was not good for my self esteem. He began: “Do you have a baby?” Me: “no”. Shopkeeper: look of great astonishment. This is all wrong, surely? “Are you married?”. Me: “no”. Shopkeeper’s astonishment turns to consternation. But everyone is married! How can this be? “Why not?” I know there is no accurate way out of this conversation that will take less than half an hour. So I say “Because I am young still”. Shopkeeper: are ears deceiving him? Obviously, the language lesson is going wrong, because I have said something apparently totally contrary to the truth, but why would the nice Mzungu lady lie? Perhaps he has misunderstood the English but no, he is now growing in confidence. The only solution is that I have made a terrible mistake and he must put me right, with much delighted laughter. “Ha! You are not young! You are….OLDY! yes, OLDY! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”. I realise I am defeated, acknowledge my impossibly great age and pay about 40p for a coconut and six passion fruit.

The final part of the fifteen minute walk is treacherous. I think readers will know I am fairly clumsy, walk into door frames, and can fall over from a perfectly stable standing position. So imagine how I feel about this little bridge, which crosses a rank, rubbish-filled stream.

I am surprised I haven’t fallen in yet. But when the rains come, and it is slippery, it is surely inevitable. And the water will be higher and faster. The Mzungu will be covered with scum and wet through with stinky water. Africans absolutely love comedy banana-skin misfortune of this kind, and for it to happen to me in particular will be about a year’s worth of joy in one morning. And how will I explain the laptop damage to PA?

But lo, it is 7.35am. I am now at the school gates, ready to receive adulation from children and exchange yet more habaris with adults. And in a mere 2.5 hours, it is snack time: more bananas, a school-hen egg, and coffee with milk from the school cows. I love snacks.