Gills, Gills, Gills

So, after guffing on and on about how perfect my life was, emotionally fulfilled, blue skies, huge flowers, lovely children etc I was in a right old grump these past few days.

This is why.

1) It was pouring with rain and has been grey for ages. And when it rains a lot, there is a power cut at the nuns. They are too cheap to buy a generator or solar power: all the money goes on beer and fish-heads (see later). This means not only no light, of course, but no internet connection and no running water! I have to slum it with buckets which I have to fill from the stupid well even for the loo. Water is really heavy and I live upstairs, so this means reluctantly deciding sometimes not to flush. Bleuugh.

2) Last night’s dinner was really unbelievably horrible. It was literally fish-head stew. Tanzanians love sucking bones, but genuinely there was no flesh on these babies. I had to explain that I didn’t know where to start. There were great big gills on my plate and eyes too, and loads of nasty wet fish skin. Grumpy Nun (last seen swinging a stunned chicken by its neck before killing it. God knows where that went. I saw no chicken stew. She’s probably using it as part of a juju ritual somewhere.) then cut the bottom of the fish-head off for me, producing an entire forkful of meat. And for this I paid Tsh 3,500! About £1.40 and frankly daylight robbery. Matilda-who-loves-Jizzus doesn’t really like the nuns, because for years a particluarly ancient and mad one who’s meant to teach has just wandered along and collected her salary each month without actually doing anything. She occasionally mutters “those nuns. They are thieves” and last night I thought she was right. I went to bed hungry like the little match girl.

3) I hate the World Service a lot. It is really unbearably dull and worthy. I always thought it was aimed at lovely posh ex-pats like me, as a kind of Radio 4 replacement. But no. It is a public service sort of thingy for people in foreign countries. There is no The Archers! I can’t believe my tax pays for this rather than for couriering out a daily CD of that day’s R4 output. And it is really aimed at the lowest common denominator, with particular emphases on dreadful user-generated content (mainly texts from stupid people and, worse still, a daily proverb of quite extraordinary banality such as “if you blow out another man’s candle it doesn’t help you to read” and “the cow may be brown but the milk is white” and so on), terrible phone-ins (featuring more stupid people) and energy-sapping puns and jokes in programme titles trailed endlessly, endlessly. I give you:

“Stem cell or hard sell?”
“How hot is the world on climate change?”
“Lifting the veil on Islamic sex”
“Russian space science: the final frontier?”

4) My elbows are bitten by evil flying things, and last week I looked down at my feet, which had still-healing wounds on from when someone trod on me in the dala-dala. Each scab had its own fly nestled right in, feasting! Bleeeugh again. Next I’ll have them crawling all over my face without even realising, and I’ll look like a paler and fatter version of famine-struck children on the news. Luckily lovely Jane “postmistress” Fowler had sent a fbaulous Christmas box with some Germolene New Skin in it, so I painted it over every sore just to spite the flies.

5) I have a cold. I am snuffling and aching and sneezing. Eveyone here would insist that they had malaria with these symptoms, but I am tough. I will moan just as much, mind, but with correct terminology.

6) Things are not going well with Warm Boyfriend from Sierra Leone. He a) genuinely likes the stupid proverbs mentioned above and b) continued giving unwelcome and unlooked for feedback about how I could be a better and prettier person despite some gentle feedback from me explaining that it might be better to wait until we’d been together for more than about two minutes. Unfortunately for him, the last example was after I’d just knocked back that fatal fourth inhibition-reducing glass of nasty South African wine and after registering, processing and grading the insult with slightly narrowed eyes, I went into full and glorious auto-rant like Sharon in Bridget Jones. It lasted hours.

How did this change happen? How? I am sure I am remember him being fabulously complimentary just a short while ago, and virtually saying “Do go on, you enthral me” and “raconte, raconte” (cf Colonel Peron to Evita in Evita, Fabrice to Linda in the Pursuit of Love respectively) whenever I opened my mouth. Maybe he was just the type to be all perfect during the chase and then change into football-loving rude oaf afterwards. Or, or, horrible thought: Maybe I promise much and deliver little, and I am the real disappointment after a few weeks! Hmm. Perhaps I should give up and just find fulfilment from the little deafs. Truly, I keep looking longingly at the nuns’ outfits and wondering if they’d fit. Such a simple, happy life. Lovely singing. Huge comfy pants. Rosie said she saw them doing little dance routines together round a portable stereo one night. How much fun would that be? AND they like eating fish-heads, so they’d never stare into the fridge and gloomily have to contemplate nothingness. I could always find a meal out of some dustbin somewhere, like Top Cat.

Anyway, boo hoo, I am sad about this because of course I had got way ahead of myself and in my mind was already living in Sierra Leone running the government, being universally loved, except by the people whose evil schemes I had stopped (but they would be grudgingly respecking me), and also expertly managing a brood of delightful mixed-heritage children - or half-casties, as my taxi driver refers to them. Bah.

6) Finally in my list of moans, I had to have coffee last week with a British woman who’d been at a Rotary meeting with me. She told me, without a trace of irony, that “my nickname is Mike Tyson, because I am a fighter. A fighter against corruption” – you know, like everyone else just sees it as an unfortunate extra tax. Swiftly followed by “I am having trouble with my business plan because this kind of thing is just not me: I am a visionary and a big-picture thinker, although I do have a gift for administration too”. Actually, that was quite enjoyably amusing but there was no-one else there so I just had to nod and make agreeing noises.

But enough complaining, because there have been many marvellous or heart-lifting things recently.

1) Daines

Daines is 15 and a boarder here. She has no parents and is one of the five children I mentioned in the last post, being sponsored by my friend Tori. She is very thin and little because she has sickle-cell anaemia. I saw her crying yesterday morning and put my arm round her. She snuffled into me and tried to explain what was wrong and I felt so sad that there are 80 boarders here who get food, clothes and warmth but no cuddles. This is not because the ayahs are nasty: we just don’t have enough staff to do any more than the basics. Also, I might be being a bit of a ponce, because it’s just not a very cuddly culture here, despite all the man-to-man hand-holding. It turned out that someone else in the class said she’d stolen their chapati, but she hadn’t. I sent Matilda in and she sorted it all out.

2) My aunt and uncle coughed up vast amounts of cash to buy hearing aids for three children, and the final fitting was today. It was so lovely seeing them being able to hear suddenly and being so excited about it. They can almost say “Lucy is very pretty and so selfless to come out here for a year” – marvellous. It will only be a few days more of intensive work and I should have them nicely trained. You can see Joyce here absolutely bursting with excitement. She, like nearly all the children here, has her name embroidered on her shirt because she can’t say it.

And here are all three of them with the audiologist (L to R Yusufu, Amina, Joyce)

3) Obligatory section on Amina:



Last Tuesday, Matilda and I plus three of the cutest, heart-twisting, money-generating children went to make a little thank you speech at the Ladies’ Coffee Morning Group, who’d given us some money to buy carpentry tools. This is Amina and Violet (from the sewing class) after having tea and cakes.

The Ladies were so enchanted by the children that they kept pressing food on them. Matilda told me later that the children were amazed to be so full of nice food that they had to say “basi” (enough) and that this was a new thing for them, rather than being full of rice or horrid ugali. I was ashamed of how much of my life has been spent being completely stuffed or trying to eat fewer delicious things in an attempt to be thinner.

Lots of women offered to help the school after my little speech, and a lovely American woman rang me yesterday. Her patriotism was most impressive. George Bush is visiting Tanzania this weekend, and she has commissioned a large batch of wooden fish painted with the American flag from the Tinga Tinga centre to sell to Amricans here! Can you imagine anyone English being that bothered? Anyway, each one makes Tsh 1,000 profit (buys half a shirt) and she is going to give it all to the school because our little delegation was “compelling and compassionate”. That’s meeeee.

4) Finally, something this afternoon that cheered me up totally. It even made up for having to gaze gloomily at poo leaking from a broken waste pipe earlier today:

And yes, those brown bits underneath the pipe really are lumps of poo.

I was just in the office at school, doing some work, when suddenly two little goats came in! They had wandered in from the clearing outside with their mother. They wandered around the school a bit, doing wees, and then trotted off again. You can see them here just off on their journey after Matilda shooed them out of the office.

It was so nice to be reminded that I wasn’t in the office in London.