Shikamoo, Mzungu!

An interesting greeting, this one, delivered yesterday as I marched to school. Shikamoo is the respectful greeting for an older person and we all know what Mzungu means – it isn’t usually respectful. I was laughing too much to give my customary lesson about how my name is Lucy, not Whitey.

Last weekend I went to Bagamoyo to go to a music festival and to the beach. I know this isn’t very much like me, but my new French friends invited me and I thought it would be a laugh. As indeed it was. We stayed in a lovely beach lodge and I got up early and went to read the first of the Barchester Chronicles under a palm tree by the sea, thinking how far I was from the office. Cue glorious gag from Stu: “Trollope on the beach: what I did on my holidays, by Lucy Carter”. The music was extraordinary: super-energetic, played by people in matching outfits and accompanied by very bottom-focused dancers. It is a great thing here to have a large, well-rounded and highly mobile bottom. I am missing this vital component, having now a thinner and also fairly static arse. Interesting to see a complete inversion of what I thought was the ideal before. This re-thinking is happening a lot: the nuns asked me the other day if it was really true that people had surgery to try to look younger, and as I was explaining it, their expressions of utter incomprehension made me realise that I’d just come to accept it as something some people did in the West rather than total lunacy. Then they asked me if it was true that people changed from men to women in England, and that was even harder to describe. It was like the English conversation lesson for teachers when we talked about different family structures, and I explained that old people lived on their own, often, or were in homes. They were beyond horrified, and gasped and shook their heads and muttered “mbaya, mbaya” (bad) over and over. Before, it seemed very logical to make sure one’s aged parents weren’t cluttering up your nice Victorian terrace but I suddenly found it very hard to justify.

Here’s a picture of my dear mother, well on her way to Shady Pines, pretending to be a cow. I like this photo because she is the Cow That Walked By Herself – note none of the children are joining in or looking impressed. Chortle. I am being very mean actually, because a few seconds before, they’d all been madly charging around with their fingers being horns, but I didn’t take a photo.

And here’s some photos of the beach at Bagamoyo. Look! I have a friend now. Not the guy holding those spiny things, the girl standing next to me. I was never really into beaches before, but here they are so different. The water is so clean you can see the bottom even when it’s quite deep. It’s warm. Warm sea water! Extraordinary. And there’s always a breeze, so you don’t overheat. But then you do get sunburned, if you are a complete spanner that is, because you forget that the sun is strong (doh). People are carrying out artisanal crafts all around without a Visitor Centre or Heritage Project in sight, and little children come and scamper round in the water without lifeguards or parents or risk assessments.

It’s getting hotter and hotter. My diary forces me to believe that it’s Halloween and fireworks time in England, but I picked some frangipani today for my room and ate a huge, ripe mango that came from one of the school trees. I love telling people how much they cost in England, because of the highly enjoyable pantomime of horror that inevitably follows. This week I have also enjoyed experiencing and remembering instances of Tanzanian frankness. I told you in the blog entry about Christmas decorations how Matilda had described one of the students as the “quite fat brown one”. This is absolutely typical and is a combination of translation difficulties and a genuinely different way of talking. The head told me very proudly that the school “doesn’t accept mental cases”; Matilda took great delight in telling me about someone she knows who is “disabled from head to toe” and recently Sister Dorothy called me aside to whisper that our dinner companions at the nunnery were “akili kidogo” – “little-brains”. I believe she meant that they had mild learning difficulties. And the sign for milk is honestly, truly, putting your hand to your right breast and making a squeezing motion.

The deaf people here universally refer to themselves as “deafs” and I am beginning to do this too, without realising it. I fear this attitude does not augur well for my return to working on civil service projects. The children give each other signs at school, by which they are known for the rest of their lives. These are ruthlessly based on looks, especially anything unusual – so Hammerhead Shark Girl’s is, of course, making the shape of a bumpy skull. Poor Aziza, who came to the school very ill, has the sign of a person shaking because that’s what she used to do. Calvin’s sign is cheeks blown out to indicate chubbiness.

I also thought you might like this photo of my English class, so you can see how big the pupils are. It is only a primary school, but children sometimes miss out years here, because there isn’t enough money in the family that year. And our children take longer because, bless them, they have to learn the Kiswahili, the sign, the lip-reading and an attempt at pronunciation for every word. So the boy who is 6’ 2” and nineteen years old is one of my favourites. He is called Steven Mapugilo and he is a prefect, and in the school band with a huge drum. He still has to wear shorts and he chortles and makes squawky noises all the time. His sign is marking a dimple in his face. I apologise for my “let out of the orphanage for the day to take in washing” outfit: God knows what I was thinking that morning. But look at the girls’ cute socks (socksi) pulled up nice and high, bless.

I learned something about Africa today. It never, never hurts to state the obvious. I was having some mending done and I forgot to request that the mending was done in the same colour as the clothes. Would you? Anyway, they mended something white with dark blue thread. I then I felt I had to pay again (a whole 20p) for the re-mending, rather than cause bad feeling. Tsk. Still – I have high hopes of my new skirt, coming soon. I need a black one for the Christmas choir concert – Jingle Bell Rock While Streaming With Sweat, which will be marvellous ex-pat fun at the Russian Cultural Centre. Even my Muslim taxi-driver, Ahmad, is coming! I love him and he loves me. He sends me texts about collecting me that end with “I love your lusi” and I am going to have dinner with him, his wife and their daughter soon.

Next entry: a sewage update, Remembrance Sunday here, and maybe even a description of what I am meant to be doing at the school. Before then, a quick thank you to so many people who have ordered Christmas decorations. I was very pleasantly surprised – I’d tried to be realistic and pessimistic when planning how many we’d sell, but you’ve delighted everyone by asking for loads more. I’ve stepped up the production line and we even had to have an emergency planning meeting about it, in which I was worn down into agreeing to pay for milk for the workers because sewing is apparently so dusty (!). Hence learning the bosom-squeezing sign. The total of orders is now over £300, so thank you very very much. And there’s still plenty of time, for those who haven’t ordered….