November 16: Bloodied but unbowed

I meant to keep this diary to show a typical week, but as there have been two days with no school because of exams, and one day with no school because of meetings, it isn’t really representative. I normally do more work than I am describing, I promise.

I am writing this on Friday because I got home too late and bleeding too much last night to do it then. Yesterday, I woke up in a terrible temper. I’ve been getting more and more tired, and was catching up with work emails until late on Wednesday night, and then didn’t sleep very well. I think I may have to crave people’s indulgence and ask for forgiveness if I am a slightly worse correspondent from now on. I really love hearing from people, so please please don’t stop writing - but with lots of emails for school business too now, I am spending too much time in a very hot and killer-moskweet infested little internet room. I need to spend more time lying on my bed trying to read War and Peace but giving up and re-reading (so many rewarding little subtleties to pick up the second time round, hem hem) the Da Vinci Code.

There was no school again. I woke up late and bless the lovely sisters, they left me a special breakfast place setting rather than clearing it all up, as they knew I was really tired. Then I tidied my room and the piles of paperwork I’ve been accumulating. So far, so SE5. I was still tired and getting tireder through not really doing anything, so I set out for the day.

I took two daladalas to the Peninsula, dropped off a map of how to get to Umivita to a friend who has an adult deaf working for her, and then walked to what I thought would be a nice beach. My plan was just to sit and stare and the ocean, finish Pride and Prejudice, fantasise about Colin Firth a bit, and recover my good temper. But the beach was filthy! The only not-perfect beach I’ve seen in Dar so far. So I gave in and took another daladala to Sea Cliff, a mzungu hangout, where I had lovely coffee, staring at the ocean, and then a lobster salad. I hasten to add I also brought my Swahili book and tried to get to grips with relative pronouns, and made a list of Christmas presents to buy people. And there are so many! God only knows (literally) how many nuns there are, as they all look so similar. And there are 30 teachers. Luckily, things here are very cheap and people are easily pleased, so the nuns are getting Christmas crackers and the teachers all get a Chinese mass-produced petrol-station style mug each for their morning chai (about 40p).

The fourth daladala of the day was to my new running club, which is infinitely preferable to the rugby club atmosphere of the Hash. We did 5k, which I am ashamed to say took me 28m 50 sec, but it was sooooo hot. Proof of sweatiness and redness here:

And after that I had a shower at my friend Jeremy’s fabulously vast flat and then we went out for dinner at the restaurant all the posh people in Dar love (which my mother couldn’t be bothered to go to when she came, I might point out) – it’s Ethiopian and called Addis in Dar. The food comes on one big plate for everyone together, on top of a kind of pancake, and you eat it with little bits of pancake. As you can see:

Three of Jeremy’s friends came too: one of them is American, married to a Tanzanian, and not working at the moment (very pregnant, not lazy or sacked). I am trying to persuade her to be a volunteer at the school when I go, so that there is still a bossy person to write down action points from meetings and then hound people until they are done. I had three whole glasses of wine (not even big ones) which was enough to give me a hangover today. So, to the blood! Lovely Jeremy gave me a lift home, even though it was in exactly the opposite direction to where he lives, and we had a delightful conversation about the misuse of reflexive pronouns. I was a bit late (11.04pm and my special late pass was only until 11pm!), so when he dropped me off at the Msimbazi Centre, I ran up the little lane to the nunnery because I felt guilty. Looking back, I accept that this was unwise in total darkness, wearing flipflops, carrying two bags and on an unmade road. But as I said, I’d had three whole glasses of Ethiopian wine. One moment I was puffing along hoping that the ferocious dog I could hear was tied up and the next sprawled horribly, luckily not in one of the mega-puddles, and feeling very sorry for myself. I limped home, bleeding, and the lovely nuns clucked over me and dressed my wounds with inordinately large quantities of bandages and gauze.

Here you can see the sad injury (same knee as before, only just healed from last time) and Sister Teddy bandaging it all up.

Pole sana!