Getting over homesickness: my embarrassingly ex-pat life

So it’s been a while. And I’m sorry. But I've been really busy trying to cure homesickness. A few weeks ago, I started to feel homesick. It got worse and worse. I looked enviously at every plane flying over. I wrote a little countdown of weeks to go in my diary. (NB I would not recommend this to anyone as a cure for homesickness, unless they only have a few weeks left, as it just made me think Oh No That Many?) I began to resent everyone here for not being able to solve their own problems. And I felt really oppressed by how scaffy and inefficient everything is. For example, there is no photocopier in the school. The little photocopying shop near the school is just astonishingly useless. That week, I had to make three copies of an eight page document. Altogether, including grappling with the sulky Bitch-Keeper of the Printer in the internet café, this took an hour. The photocopier produces about one good copy in five attempts. I stand there waiting, trying to chat in Kiswahili, and I can actually feel drops of sweat going down my back. What is astonishing is that the owner just keeps on smiling indulgently, as if the copier is a amusingly naughty toddler and does not appear to think that it needs mending! Gah. They so need some process re-engineering.

For an impatient person, this is all very very painful. I suspect it’s good for me. I certainly will never, never moan again about PA photocopiers or my printer at home.

Apart from the school and the convent, the area round here is very poor and I also began to feel down about the fact that everywhere I went, there was so much filthy litter that you just have to walk in it, like paddling in the sea. The hotter it gets, the more it smells. And of course, everyone still shouts Mzungu at me all the time. I have started to wear a headscarf every day, partly to keep my hair clean in all the dust and partly to hide just one part of my appearance that is so different to people here. I realised today that my white one, rather than making me look glamorous and cheekbony, makes me look like a postulant nun or a comedy nurse during Rag Week. I have bravely put a photo here so that you can have a laugh.

So, homesickness. It all came to a head Monday before last. The day before, I’d travelled back from a nice little trip to Kisawasawa (the place in the last post, with the photo of one of the many children I’ve terrified). I say “little” but the journey was actually eight hours each way on an African bus. It was lovely there. It smelled like spicy apple pie and you could see baby mangoes growing. Mangoes grow on trees! Like bananas, who’d have thought? I ate sugar-cane for the first time and saw a star-fruit tree. Another fruit that I thought grew in a Waitrose Perfectly Ripe and Ready polystyrene pack. They are about 50p each in England I think? We just decorate gorgeous lovely Pavlovas with them etc. But here, enchanting little poppets shin up a tree and chuck down vast quantities for free. Super. Here are some snaps of huge bowls of sugar-cane and starfruit, and said enchanting poppets.

I also went to a double wedding there. I hardly know where to start with this. For a start, most women in Tanzania wear a great big syrup sometimes. It is nothing to do with having any hair problem: it is just a fashion accessory. I think that they look like they are going to a fancy dress party as “Person the Wig Shop Saw Coming” but there are limits to my change programme here so I haven’t bothered to mention this yet. There were two bridesmaids. They were young children, not screechy squawky old bird bridesmaids. They wore wigs! Why, why, why? One was wearing a mini wedding-dress and the other a kind of waitress outfit.

And the brides literally did not smile once during the whole ceremony. They looked absolutely boot-faced. And the whole way through, the couples’ best men and Matrons of Honour kept leaning over to wipe sweat off them with big flannels. There was dancing in the aisles and sweetest of all, in the collection tray, someone had left a hard-boiled egg because they didn’t have any money.

I am getting to why I was homesick. Softly softly catchee monkey. It started with the gruelling bus journey home. Now, Africans (or perhaps I should say Tanzanians) are great sharers. This is a truly lovely quality when it means I get given something I didn’t have to pay for or walk to the shops for. Hurrah! However, I thought that when I bought my bus ticket, it meant that I had a seat to myself. But in a country of sharing, the ticket means “You get whatever is left of an already narrow double seat when an enormous African bottom sits down on it”. Oh. My. God. At the beginning I was too polite to push back. Then the pain of compressing my hips for hours became too much and when the bus went round a corner in my favour, I cunningly used gravity to reclaim some lebensraum. Ha. This meant that Seat-Stealing Neighbour then asked me for more space and I explained that I couldn’t move any more (and really I couldn’t). She didn’t believe me and actually leaned over and moved all the things on my lap to check that there was no space between me and the side of the bus. Tsk! No concept of personal space here. This was all quite bad enough, especially as I had decided that dehydration was better than the possibility of actually wetting myself and my kanga on a loo-free eight hour journey and so I was very hot and tired at the end of the journey. But worse. Half-listening to lovely Andrew Marr reading A History of Modern Britain on my iPod, half-sleeping, I suddenly realised that everyone was shouting and racing off the bus. Apparently the bus was on fire. I was so dazed that I didn’t even hurry (and how much can you hurry off a bus full of people, anyway?), just grabbed my bags and shuffled off. There was indeed smoke coming out of the side of the bus, but no actual flames, so I think they were being a bit pathetic really and could have done with some British pluck. Anyway, a taxi driver came to grab me because I was clearly the person by far and away the most likely to have the £4 taxi fare home.

I got back feeling absolutely wiped out and the next day woke up and cried. The sight of some lovely Red Cross care packages sent by super friends (thank you so much Mum, Jane, Rosie, Emily, Steve and Tania) stemmed the flow somewhat, but not for long. What to do? My first reaction was just to sit and snivel for six months, but then I remembered that one of the reasons I came here was to be brave and do something different. And so it wasn’t that strange that it might be hard. I resolved to cheer myself up.

I had been very lazy about making Western friends. The first six weeks, I had been so busy and tired just coping with school, learning Swahili, learning sign etc that I didn’t feel the need to go out in the evenings and do different things. My dear godmother, who has lived abroad for a long time, had been gently prodding me about it. I’d been secretly very sanctimonious, thinking “I don’t need to meet Westerners! I am here to be saintly and read War and Peace in the evenings! I scorn the ex-pat life and all who sail in her.” Then on Homesick Monday I suddenly thought waaaahh, I really want to talk to people without speaking slowly and carefully, with no metaphors. I want to talk to people who read books and do not call me Mzungu. So I went to the internet café and emailed all the contacts I’d been given, and texted too, just to be sure that they knew they had a stalker.

And I have to say, I wish I hadn’t been so scornful of ex-pats. Because people have been amazingly kind. Since Black Monday, I have been to:

A Scottish dancing evening
A musical evening
A Japanese meal out and a party!
Dinner with teachers at the International School
A coffee morning for women newcomers (the shame)
The Hash running club – where they have cringey and bizarre comedy names for each other like “Nasty Pasty”
The Dar es Salaam Choral Society

Crucially, all these events were in the posh bit of Dar (the Msasani Peninsular and Upanga regions) where the houses are huge and beautiful, the roads are clean and full of flowers, and no-one shouts at me. Which makes the local dirt much more bearable, as I get a break from it. And every single event led to making a new friend, and suddenly I am too busy to be homesick. I love being busy. And more seriously, every time I’ve met people, I’ve asked if they can help my school, and I’ve lucked out without exception. (If lucked out means be lucky, that is. I don’t use complex English very much any more, and I am forgetting things.)
The coffee morning was so nice that I am going to bunk off school once a fortnight and go again. At the Hash, I had to run 7k and I was the only woman. In the tropical heat, you know. I am very tough. I fell over, obviously, and so now my knees are in their normal revoltingly scabbed state. As you can see:

The boys were so nice to me and insisted that it was because of running in the dark on a dirt track. However, I know that I can fall over from a perfectly stable standing position so I have to take some responsibility for the inelegant arse-in-air tumble. And at choir, I was invited to join the Chamber Choir. Being here is so good for me. There are so many things where in England I’d just lazily let someone else lead, but suddenly I’m in charge of developing a fundraising programme at the school, and pushing the head to implement a school improvement plan. People follow me in choir rather than me listening to someone else to get the right note. And already I know more Swahili than many of the other Westerners.

This evening I am going to a quiz night, where I am quietly confident of wiping the floor with everyone, and this morning a cancelled-choir tragedy turned into triumph when I and the other person who didn’t know it was cancelled went for coffee and made friends. She’s French, which is great as now I can practise useful phrases before my Christmas trip to Rwanda to see gorillas.

My family (mother, godparents, godparents’ daughter) arrive tomorrow morning for a lovely holiday, and I’ve gone from being excited that it was only thirteen days away, and counting down, to thinking I won’t get everything done by the time they come and being too busy to remember how many days are left. We are going on safari to cuddle baby elephants and hippos and to Zanzibar too. I am taking most of the next two weeks off work and don’t even feel guilty. Have a look at www.hoopoe.com for an indication of how different my life will be for a few days. I’m going from stringy meat at the nuns’ to wine and top quality tucker served by uniformed flunkeys and I CAN’T WAIT.

So please forgive me if I am a bad correspondent for two weeks. I shall try to be good, like Queen Victoria. And thanks so much to everyone who has emailed to cheer me up during Homesick Time. I really appreciate it and shall be providing big kisses to say thank you when I get back. Plus maybe an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, depending on how close we get on safari.