I am SO OVER the rain. I am especially over the way it doesn’t stop the people next to the convent burning their rubbish. In fact, I think it probably creates more stinky chokey smoke that makes me feel sick and hence limits my ability to stuff my face. The cute little bridge I wrote about at the start of my time here, over the sewage-river, has long since been washed away along with the river bank. There but for the grace of God was I when that happened, sucked into a massive whirlpool of sludge and old crisp packets and never seen again. So now I have a slightly different route to school, which has the huge advantage of not having to climb down a muddy slope where the bridge was and then wobble up again the other side. Naturally I can barely do this even with my appallingly ugly but practical health sandals, and have to hold hands with strangers or coerce pupils to escort me, whereas the African women float up and down with eight tons of bananas on their heads, as if via rope and pulleys. Last week I fell over in the mud at the end of my friend Cynthia’s road. (Cynthia is in the Christmas photo with me wearing two Christmas hats as a bra.) It was a real comedy skid and splat. There was no way I could pretend that I’d done it on purpose or that it wasn’t a disaster to look like I’d just swum through a sewage pipe. I was probably the only mzungu in town that day washing herself off in a puddle at the side of the road. I looked like I was in an advert for bleedin’ Oxfam for people with no running water! Except that they don’t normally feature white women with iPods and BlackBerries. Here’s another nice rainbow, anyway, taken from my bedroom door. I am over these (ho ho) too but you might like it, judging by the number of photos of snow I’ve been sent this week.
And some rain washing out a school flowerbed
Homeward bound
However. Apart from the rain, it’s still totally rewarding to be here. And so I feel very challenged, as my nice Californian friend Tori would say, about this piece of news: ….I finally have a return date booked, for June 1st . Please get marinading and baking and laying down expensive wines. And perhaps, prepare some suitable responses to all my questions about “What will I do now for the rest of my life? waaaaah” etc. Lovely Stu promised that he was knitting a banner to wave at Heathrow, but as I doubt his commitment to this as much as I (correctly) doubted his commitment to not getting candle wax on my spare room carpet, I am looking forward more to an AMT paper napkin flapped about in a desultory way.
It’s very exciting and also unnerving to think about coming home. There are many things I am longing for, like my own house again, and seeing people, and knitted banners, and drinkable tap water and Radio 4 – but leaving Amina, and a country where I am so often favourably compared to the risen Lord will be agonising. And being here, I have the luxury of knowing that I am doing something good, and not feeling pointless. I went to my Ladies’ Coffee Morning this week and as I got there, the woman doing the name-tags at the door and taking the money said “Oh Lucy, we were just all saying how wonderful you were.” Extraordinary. I can’t count the times people said that to me when I was a management consultant, and that’s because there were precisely none.
Other news: there’s nun so queer as folk, and I am renouncing my vows and moving out of the convent! Cynthia has very generously (little does she know that I'll be thieving as much as I can) invited me to spend my last six weeks with her in her house. The design is fabulously ex-pat – most new developments here are - and has columns and turrets and things. More importantly, it has AC, a swimming pool, a housekeeper, a washing machine (no more pant-scrubbing), hot water, running water, water in the loo, a kettle, a generator, a living room NOT frequented by nuns watching badly-dubbed Filipino soaps at extraordinary volume and no curfew policy! I can stay out later than 10pm! Not that I really want to, mind; I do like being in bed especially as I have to wake up before 6am to get to school but it’s nice to have the choice. It will be so good to live with someone more like me than the nuns are.
Happy birthday to MEEEEEEE
Last week it was my birthday. So top marks to everyone who remembered, and sent things like Hermes perfume and lovely Ren shower gel and super jewellery and cards and texts and emails, excellent and rang up (Mum and Slag Sis and Honorary Fireman Tim Garrood: I am loving your work). I had a bloody marvellous day. Apart from waking up with a hangover after getting regrettably lammed on cheap white wine and cleansing, pure sashimi after cleansing, pure yoga with Cynthia, it was wonderful. I was a bit late to school because of nursing my poor head, and arrived to find all the children still waiting in the rain to do a special birthday assembly. Oops. My shame was great. They did the signs for Happy Birthday (miming giving birth and then waving hands in a celebratory way: I am NOT joking) and the teachers sang. I had a special presentation from some lucky pupils of a cake with my name on and flowers and cards. I noted that one of the cards was actually one of the “Thank you” cards that we get the children to make in a sweatshop-style situation and give to donors (many of you will have received one) rather than a proper birthday card but it was sweet nonetheless. Best of all, I didn’t have that dragging feeling I used to get of not really having done what I wanted to do in the past year and an unnerving sense that I was wasting my life in the office but not really getting anywhere. That, combined with weighing less than on my 37th birthday and the luxury cosmetic products mentioned above made it my Best Birthday Ever.
Here is a picture of the sampler the sewing class made me. Aaaaah. The little brown thing in the middle is an ear, I think – at first glance I thought it was an appropriately commemorative lump of poo, sensitively rendered in embroidery silks.
Ah, a life of contrasts
Sometimes my life here is properly Tanzanian: no water, walking through a village to get to work, wading through mud – and sometimes I find myself here, in a darling little coffee shop that’s just opened up in the wazungu area. I go there so often that the staff now know me and come up to tell me how much they like me. Which is just the kind of service I like. Californian Tori is in this photo with me. Also in the photo is the world’s biggest forehead, which I think someone grafted onto me when I wasn’t looking. No wonder people stare at me.
Just another note about the wildlife. My arse is covered with bites, which have a red centre inside a big pink circle. I think I might have fleas. And some other wadudu have got my knees, elbows and hands (anything that sticks out) and I should think I have altogether more than a hundred itchy red bumps. Bah. I think you deserve a photo of my knees (in my classy second hand skirt, bought here and originally from George at Asda) but even I realised that pictures of my bottom might be inappropriate.
So tomorrow is the Olympic Torch! I want to protest about whatever’s been happening in Tibet (bit hazy about the details, it being somewhere foreign and all that) but I am too scared of being the only mzungu in Tanzanian chokey. So I am going to demonstrate subtly, by refusing to smile nicely for the press coverage and instead raising one eyebrow quizzically. That’ll show ‘em. Incidentally, I've tried to put a little feed thingy on the front page of Puff and Papaya. (Mum, this is so that you get an alert if I add anything). But God knows how or if it works. If anyone can tell me, that would be great.
Next post: Pant Update and The St George's Society Ball...
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