March eh! Christ on a bike. Time’s going so fast. This week has been sooooo busy that I think would actually be quite relaxing to be back at PA doing my real job, although perhaps not as much fun.
Thrush about to be banished
First, I would like to say thank you to everyone who has been so generous and helpful about the thrush outbreak at the school. I am very moved by how kind people are to a school they will probably never see. I can reassure everyone that the money really is spent wisely and honestly. This will happen even when I’m gone. Matilda is so strict about this that when she once lost a bank statement she paid Tsh 10,000 of her own money to get another one printed. This is only £4.50, but she only gets paid £45 a month – so it was 10% of her salary. Anyway, the pants are pouring in: you have been storming Matalan and Primark to stock up on bargains. And my super friend Emily Cloney-nee-Dowler in Australia refused to be daunted by the prohibitive cost of posting them from so far away and instead got onto Bayer (big pharmacy company) and persuaded them to donate a whole box of 60 of those excellent little one-pill cures for thrush. Very impressive. Why didn’t I think of that? I am so uncreative. Emily, Sandra, Tania H-N, Jane, Aunty Lynn and Aunty Lynn’s friend Gwyn, the girls at Buguruni School for the Deaf will be thanking you with much love for their spanky new knickers and removal of unpleasant fungus infestations.
We are also planning an education session at the school to stop the girls wearing so many layers of nylon, and we are going to make a washing line just for knickers so that they can all get nice and dry. Plus on Tuesday I am going to make an appeal at the Ladies’ Coffee Morning - I can think of less embarrassing topics, but I don’t have much shame anyway so it won’t matter. I am going to steal examples of Horror-Pants from the girls’ dormitory and wave them around so that all the ladies are aghast and give me lots of money for nice cotton underwear.
Swanking around in the American ambassador’s house!
On Wednesday Matilda and I went to give a presentation at the Diplomatic Spouses’ Group. Note hilariously gender-neutral name although there are about 50 wives and two husbands. This was to say thank you for £600 they gave us to start two income generating projects: a keeping 100 hens and a vegetable garden. I thought this was going to be just the committee meeting, maybe ten people round a table….but it was the full turn-out. Fifty-odd diplomatic spouses, marquee in the garden, American ambassador giving the opening address, and then snacks inside his gaff! I made Matilda do half the speech as part of my skills-transfer-before-I-leave plan. She was very sweet and said “I have never met big people like you before”. Afterwards she said it had been one of the best days of her life because she’d been inside the American ambassador’s house and she never thought someone like her could do that. I find it very sad when she says things like this. The wives were lovely – they gave an extra £150 as a collection on the spot, which we’ll use for doctor’s bills and medicine at the school. The tucker wasn’t up to much, though: I was fully expecting to be able to stock up for the whole day but there were no decent sandwiches. They did have Jackson’s of Piccadilly teabags though, which went a little way towards restoring them to the Pantheon.
The nice thing about being here is that everything I do for the school seems to multiply. After we’d done our presentation, a woman I’d met at the Ladies’ Group came to say that “her husband’s nephew was coming to Tanzania in June and was planning to raise money from his church first to give to a worthy cause. Would I like it for the school, maybe? It might be a few thousand dollars.” I could barely speak and then I was so pleased that I couldn’t say anything sensible. I wish I wasn’t so gushy in just normal everyday conversation, because it means that it’s hard to convey my joy when something spectacular happens. Oh my God. We could mend the loos so that the children don’t have to go into the scary pit latrines. Or buy cows, to provide a monthly income for the school by selling the milk. Or mend the roofs so that the children stay dry in the big rains next year. Or put towards a fund for buying a school minibus, so that we can pick up the children who are too poor for bus fares in the morning, and then hire it out during the day.
But the biggest news this week was that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund for the whole world, not just Tanzania, visited the school on Friday to have a poke around and to cough up five thousand dollars. What an extraordinary piece of luck: the Tanzania director’s wife saw the presentation Matilda and the children and I made at the Women’s Coffee Morning a few weeks ago just as he was looking for a good charity for a donation from the IMF Civic Fund. Amina is in the photo of the visit on the IMF website (easily spotted: the only one in a green dress) http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2008/car022908a.htm
Many To Do lists were required, plus three planning meetings. And a visit from Spencer the Bodyguard, who came to break my hand with his manly handshake, and spec out anywhere Strauss-Kahn might go, even the revolting school loo. I was very nervous about it all and managed to get drunk by mistake the night before, which meant trying to manage everything on five hours’ pissed-up sleep and a hangover. I felt rough as a badger’s arse and had to have four doughnuts when it was all over. pleasantly surprised by how well the school performed. We had super decorations, the teachers all scrubbed up really nicely, and the school dancers did a combination of a Zulu dance and a Cumberland reel; this last taught to them by some ex-pats who did a volunteer visit last week.
The police closed all the roads and there was a motorbike outrider who zoomed into school, sadly resisting the temptation to do a big wheelie.
Meanwhile, I had also made an effort to look glamorous and was wearing a very sweaty dress. I was most amused by a conversation with the audiologist, which went like this:
“you look nice today, Lucy” (but with slightly insulting surprise and emphasis on nice)
“don’t I look nice all the time, Mr Kowenecka?” (arch, arch)
“well…..sometimes you look nice” (no irony or teasing whatsoever)
I suspect my normal aid-worker sludge-coloured clothes – which match my eyes, you know - aren’t really cutting it here in the land of fluorescent yellow and purple suits.
The sewing class
The money we raised from the Christmas decorations has come through from the UK charity (I sent it to them and they did a bank transfer for me) and thank you! It was LOADS. The sewing class is now totally kitted out. You can see them here. The big metal bowl is for making horrible batik. Me, I think batik is vile and tasteless but I must abide by majority opinion and indeed the evidence of my own eyes: Africans love it and the children must learn to make it. But the horror! Grown men and women, professionals, walk round in outfits with a pattern of huge batik elephants, tigers, giraffes etc, seemingly unaware that this is a quite ludicrous way for adults to behave and should be stopped instantly. I don’t turn up to PA in a suit with a British bulldog embroidered all over it, although once I did have to wear my pyjama top under my suit when I’d been working away and forgot to pack a proper top. It was with the greatest reluctance that I handed over the cash for the batik trip. What I really wanted was for them to learn to embroider subtle, barely-there motifs in delicate shades of beige.
You can see one of my other favourites, here, Violet. She is second from left at the back. She is marvellous: she grins all the time and wears knee length socks pulled up really tight. On Thursday she sewed her own finger with the sewing machine (by mistake) and the needle broke off inside her finger – just a tiny bit, so I couldn’t get a grip on it with anything. It was horrible. Luckily Matilda came back just as I was wondering what would be worse out of a public hospital or my efforts, and whisked her off to the doctor next door, whose existence had been a secret to me until then. It only cost Tsh 5,000 (about £2.10) but her parents have no money, so the school has to pay. This is the kind of thing we have to fundraise for: the government doesn’t give us money for medical trips and if there’s no money Matilda pays herself. And this is a woman who only makes pilau rice three times a year because the spices are too expensive.
As always, I try to leave you with something jolly. One of my favourite activities here is laughing at the little deafs, for example when they march out of assembly but one of them stops and they all fall over each other. We are renovating the playground and I took this photo of children playing in an idyllic and photogenic way. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise that it’s so long since they’ve had swings that they don’t realise that they have to be careful when they’re walking in front, and about two seconds later one of them went flying and then landed nose down in the gravel after being booted in the head by a swinging child who’d built up a particularly good rhythm. I like having a little go myself, and get the workmen to push me so that I don’t have to put any effort into it. As soon as it’s ready, I shall also sit on the roundabout and eat grapes while the children run round.
And finally, Tanzanian greeting cards. Most shops display Hate cards. I am not joking. You can choose from a variety of reasons for the hate and there is no irony at all. And I saw one last week saying "I'm sorry about the split with your family". These people are crazy.
Next week I shall be featuring New Favourite Pupils, my awful yoga trousers and further Pantometer Progress. Goodbye goodbye until then.
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