Stuck-in-the-mud

Today I was literally stuck in the mud, which previously was merely a memory of a game played at junior school. I was taking a cunning "shorticut" away from the main road, feeling smug, and then squish I was calf-deep in mud. I was properly stuck. I had to shout for help and some lovely Tanzanian men came and pulled me out. Obviously I then looked as though I was wearing a pair of mud moonboots, and one of them was so concerned by my inept efforts to get clean that he helped me wash my legs in a puddle. They were genuinely sympathetic, much polesana-ing, and didn’t rob me – this is such a nice country.

New noos! Not only does Matilda love Jizzus, but she said yesterday that Jizzus loves us too. It was most soothing, especially as I was trying to set up a new accounting system for the school and was madly counting piles of ridiculously low-denomination notes. But I have taken a step away from Jizzus by leaving the convent. The nastiest nun cried. This is the one who has Bad Attitude and whom I once saw swinging a dead chicken by its neck. I have seen the cockroach in the fridge more than once since the last post, and I think it lives there, and I think it’s her pet. Anyway, she had a blub in the kitchen because I was going! Big girl’s blouse: upset because she’d run out animals to torture more like. But my last night was very touching. I literally had a throne: a special chair with balloons and a kanga cover.



There were presents (two mangoes wrapped up and a kitenga in absolutely awful colours):

I am glad to be somewhere posh now, though. I am now safely settled into my luxury penthouse suite at Cynthia’s for my last six weeks. It’s so nice to be near the shops and my friends, have more space, hot water and to be able to cook. It’s also slightly disconcerting to go from being properly local to living in a compound, where the houses are all the same design and have columns and balconies and other curly bits. But it’s easy to be nostalgic for gritty genuineness when you’re nice and comfy in a beautiful house with a lovely friend with a lovely cup of tea made with proper milk, not Nido powder. Here is my new room – I am most pleased to have a big bed and to not need a mosquito net. I can lie on it and thoughtfully ponder the final words from Grace, one of our house girls at the convent after I’d said I had strong legs because I walked a lot. She beamed happily and announced “yes, they are like elephant!”.

Here is a picture of Johanna, the other house girl. She is great because she did my washing and ironing for 17p a garment and kept on saying that she loved me.




One thing I am VERY happy to leave behind is the new Catholic satellite TV channel. The nuns have just got it and are excited about it. Now, I realise that at the beginning, I used to laugh at their special choir videos, showing Tanzanian choirs singing songs about Mungu (God) and doing endearingly energetic and cheesy dance routines. And that now I genuinely enjoy things like that and am even thinking of buying my own video to bring home with me: perhaps a few hours’ uninterrupted viewing will enable me to nail those last few tricky dance steps. So I admit it’s actually entirely likely that I would have got into the Catholic channel. But really, bleeugh. They had live coverage of the Pope visiting Washington DC and trundling along in his Popemobile down Pennsylvania Avenue. The presenters were stunningly sycophantic: “oh, what a fine head of hair he has” (hushed reverential tones) and I tried to explain to the nuns why I was looking appalled. Success was not mine. Looking back, perhaps trying to explain in Swahili to a bunch of very enthusiastic nuns why I found the Catholic channel insufficiently ironic was an endeavour best not started upon. But we live and learn.

Poor Violet. Violet is, as I think I’ve said before, one of my favourite pupils. She’s in the sewing class and is the one who sewed her own finger and broke the sewing machine needle off inside the nail. You can see a photo of her a few posts ago with a Shrek plaster.

I asked her last week why she was deaf. Many of the pupils are deaf for preventable – but not prevented – reasons, and it’s always illuminating to know what went wrong. Sometimes it’s bad treatment of malaria in a pregnant mother, sometimes just an ordinary ear infection in childhood that goes untreated because there’s no money for a doctor. But I wasn’t expecting Violet to tell me that when she was five, her father was teaching her to count with fizzy drink bottle caps and she couldn’t do it very well. He was so angry that he hit her round the head again and again, really hard, and the next day she couldn’t hear. My heart hurts. She is such a lovely girl. She smiles and smiles, and works so hard, and she could have been at an ordinary secondary school, able to listen to teachers and to talk properly. Her father is dead now, (good) and her mother has so little money that when Violet sewed into her own finger, the £2 doctor fee had to come from the newly-created school medicine fund (currently standing at a grand total of £62). So I don’t see how she’ll be able to buy a sewing machine for herself, so that she can work as a seamstress when she finishes the sewing class. But we are planning to set up a café on the school grounds, to pick up the passing trade at the next-door Anglican church who apparently need fizzy drinks and coffee to be able to pray properly (Matilda who loves Jizzus says so, and she should bleedin’ well know). Part of the plan is that the older children work a few hours a week in the café, to learn skills and be employable, so maybe Violet can save up the £40 she’ll need and also learn to mix a decent Margarita.

On Saturday night it was the St George’s Society Ball. This was the English people's evening - more of a nice dinner with a little discotheque than a ball, but jolly good fun. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, especially dancing with a, short, aged Scottish man in a kilt who fancied himself as a bit of a saucepot. He kept doing complete 360 degree revolutions, kilt flaring, concentrating hard, old bones creaking a bit, and then looking up at me to see if I was impressed. I also did some flag-waving.

My favourite moment of the evening was suddenly recognising an old friend from university, Dan “unfortunate surname” Crapper, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years and who has just come to live in Dar. Small world, eh, although I wouldn’t like to hoover it.

Here is an exciting panorama view of all the fun.





This week has been supa-exciting all round. One of the Dar Rotary Clubs was so touched by the school – and possibly my repellently slimy sucking-up to them too – that they sorted out the lack of running water. So now our stinky lavs suddenly have flushing water and a basin and taps. Before, the children had to carry buckets of water from the one school tap, 300m away. And Rotary have also renovated six other loos, European ones not crouchy ones. The children are so unused to posh toilets (most of their villages have pit latrines) that each class has had to have a special lesson on Using The Loo. They have practised gently pulling imaginary flushes and then went to practise one by one. It was so cute, and they were so excited to see the running water. It had been broken for fifteen years, so some of them had never seen the loos flushing and they were jumping with surprise. Afterwards, Matilda came to talk to me looking very serious. Our discussion went like this : (capitals indicate syllable stress)

MWLJ: “Lucy, the teachers have a question.”
Me: “mmm?”
MWLJ: “With the new toilets, when the children make FISSees, how will they clean their butTOCKS? Will we put toilet paper in the cubicles?”
Me: “mmm, I don’t think we have enough money for toilet paper, do we? And also it’s not their culture. Maybe we can leave buckets of water in the cubicles?”
MWLJ: “yes, then they can wash their butTOCKS and they will be clean”

I will miss conversations like this when I am back at PA. When I am home, I will upload a video of them all standing in a row, undertaking said Loo Flushing Drill but for now this cute little snap will have to suffice:



And these are two of the little girls seeing water coming into the sink for the first time:

I’ve just realised that I haven’t provided an update on my striking a blow for democracy via the Olympic Torch. Hem hem I did this via the power of thought from my cell in the convent in the end. It was POURING and there was no information saying which roads would be closed off to prevent Chinese face-loss. I couldn’t face walking for an hour down a dual carriageway, only to be presented with a jobsworth polisi at the end brandishing a big stick and enjoying overturning years of colonialism (I do know Tanzania wasn’t actually a colony, yes) by making me turn round and slink off home again.

I leave you with one of the awful proverbs from the World Service East Africa morning programme “Wake Up Africa”. It announced that “When two giants fight, only the grass gets damaged”. Why? Why do I have to listen to this? I’ll never get that five seconds of my life back. But never mind. I have found a nice street-side mango seller where they are still only 13p each rather than the outrageous 26p in the supermarket, and I am happy.