Sneef

The theme this time is heart-warming and having a big sneef. I have spent the whole week having my faith in humanity strengthened.

But I’d like to start with another ridiculously excessive compliment from a Tanzanian to me. Unsurprisingly, it came from Matilda, my biggest fan. I told her that I’d been swimming the night before and had done about 50 lengths (only of a 25 metre pool). She breathed in sharply and shook her head in wonder. “Lucy! You are amazing! You should be World Champion. It should take THREE people to swim that far”. Aaah.

But more importantly, a Pant Update – promised week before last but not delivered. What can I say? I now have pants coming out of my ears. We even had a special delivery from Australia – two, in fact. A private parcel from Emily Cloney nee Dowler (who also got the big box of thrush medicine), and a huge box of 225 pairs she managed to screw out of Kmart. I picked them up from Customs and talked really loudly and lengthily about thrush, enormous nylon knickers and the poor little infected deafs to the Customs lady and she cut the duty right down to about £2, no doubt just to get rid of me. Heh heh. Especially heh heh as inside was also lovely expensive lip balm and Jurlique refreshing spray for meeeee. Pants and money have also arrived from Rosie and Sandra – bright pretty cotton ones with pink hearts and flowers, and enough cash to stock up for years ahead. It was extremely kind of all the ladies (and it was certainly the ladies, not the gents!).The girls have just been so excited to get not just new pants but attractive flowery cute pants from the UK and Australia! And you responded so generously that we now have a Knicker Fund and a separate medicine brown envelope to last for years.

Here is a picture of some of the girls and their new lingerie.

But, as the Cat in the Hat said, that is not all. Last time, I wrote about Violet, whose father hit her so hard that she lost her hearing. My mum and my friend Michelle BOTH emailed me, still weeping as they typed I think, to offer to pay for a sewing machine. Naturally I snapped up both offers and am finding a second girl who really needs help. I told Violet and she absolutely squawked with delight. She was so amazed that someone in the UK was bothered about her. Here she is looking happy just afterwards:

And that still is not all.

My glamorous cousin John, who lives in San Francisco and drinks mimosas all the time, and his equally glamorous partner Chuck have given enough money for a whole year group to have a school trip. They will go somewhere like the train station or the airport – this is the destination, not the starting point of the transport. They will stand the whole way or sit three to a double seat on a hired dalla dalla, have a picnic of water and sliced white bread and margarine when they get there, and it will be the most exciting day of the school year for them.

And my little sister has done something extraordinary. She was going to come and visit with her boyfriend, but we couldn’t find dates that were good for both of us. So she has ponied up a huge donation instead because “now I don’t have to find the money for the air fare”. Sneef. As we both go to the loo all the time, (drinking lots of water is healthy you know, and our dad always used to say go the loo when you can because you might get stuck in a lift later) I was going to use it to mend the school lavs so that I could amuse myself by putting up a big plaque to her right inside, but then the Rotary Club mended them instead. So now I will honour our second hobby ie sitting down and having a nice cup of tea (also a habit inculcated by our father) by using it to start the Buguruni School Café project described in my last post. All buildings and offices and restaurants etc open to the public here have a huge framed picture on the wall of Kikwete, the President, and I think it would be nice if this was next to one of Sue. A bigger one.

Also bringing much happiness this week is my collection of Disney and Mr Bump plasters, which you know were sent by Jane Fowler. I have had to institute a triaging system for cuts and grazes because so many children want one. Old cuts or pathetically small ones get sent away with a telling-off. Slightly less pathetically small ones get a wipe-over with TCP and cotton wool. Anything with more than a cm squared of bleeding skin gets a plaster. See how happy they look when they get through to the glorious prize.

I think it's a Shrek Donkey plaster on his knee. It might have been the Dragon. There is no KiSwahili deaf sign for dragon.

I feel very strange about coming home. I am writing this sitting in Cynthia’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon. Four weeks tomorrow I’ll be on a plane coming home. I need to start my real life again, and it will be wonderful to see everyone and eat lots of cake with buttercream icing, but there is so much that will really hurt to leave behind. It’s a combination of improving things like:

• feeling I’ve had an adventure




• doing something useful for once




• regularly using three languages




• coping with being stuck in the mud

and selfish things like

• eating outside in the evenings with a warm breeze




• looking at trees with huge seedpods and extravagant flowers




• swanking around at diplomatic receptions




• Bargains! I have just had a fabulous dress made for me for £13, including the material




• and Cynthia’s housekeeper cleaning my shoes and ironing my pants.
  

I did tell her that the latter wasn’t necessary (good of me eh – I’m so nice to the staff) but she explained at great length that it would kill things that might lay eggs in the gusset or something, and after while it was easier to let her do it than try to explain that I had managed nine months here with unironed knickers without too many infestations. Anyway, it’s very nice having everything pressed into exactly the same shape and size as it helps my OCD-like filing system in my bedroom drawers.

I will also miss seeing exciting and different things all the time. One of my favourite things to see here is men shaving each other’s heads. It looks enticingly dangerous. One of them sits down on the ground with his head bent (by the road, by the Post Office, etc etc) and the other just scrapes away with a bare razor blade. No handle, no water, no shaving foam. After a bit there’s a forlorn-looking ex-Afro on the ground in all the rubbish, like a discarded wig. And I particularly love seeing a herd of cows or goats wander across the road in a posh white area and all the four-by-fours having to wait for Nature.

But one of the nicest things is how trusting and trustworthy people here are. I sometimes see one of the miniature deafs going through the Msimbazi Centre on the way to school in the mornings, and I always take him off his escorting big brother and we make the rest of the way to school together. The first time this happened, I just said “Hello, I work at James’s school – do you want me to take him the rest of the way?” The brother just looked at me, decided that I wasn’t a child stealer, and handed him over. James (pronounced Yamesi, like soksi, skirti and sixi) held up his little paw and we set off. His soksi are too big for him so he had to keep stopping to fold them over and tuck them into themselves. And this week I had a front seat going on the dalla dalla to school one morning. About half an hour into the journey, it was absolutely rammed: people bent double and hanging out of the door. At one of the bus-stops, a father handed me his little boy and asked me to take him on my knee because there was no room in the back. It was so cute! He just sat there being very good and well-behaved on a scary strange mzungu lap and then bellowed at the conductor when it was his stop and got off all by himself. It was also good to know that if we’d crashed, it would have been his little face that got all the broken windscreen glass, not mine.

Here is Yamesi and here is Amina too, for no reason except that’s been a little while since I’ve featured her.

I also find people very honest here. I think there’s more risk of theft in the ex-pat areas, where the pickings are richer, but I still spend a lot of my time being local and I have always felt safer (personally and my things) than in London. Last week I left my camera in a taxi and the next day, before I’d even noticed that it wasn’t in my bag any more, Ahmad the Lovely Driver gave it back to me. It would be worth at least a month’s wages to him and I was really impressed.

And finally…it was Workers’ Day this Thursday, and here I am in a restaurant helping the waiting staff enjoy a reminder that they weren’t getting a holiday but that it would have been really nice and relaxing if they had. I look as though I am gazing moodily out towards the eternal sea but actually I was wondering where the loos were.

But just to show that I don’t ponce around in restaurants and Embassies all the time, here’s a photo of the Buguruni School Percussion Band playing at the International School recital evening on Wednesday night. This featured IST pupils scraping away sulkily on various expensive instruments before going home to ask for a third pony or their very own black rhino or something. But my kids did a guest spot and absolutely kicked ass with their two best numbers “School Assembly Inspection Music” and “Going to Lessons Now, Hurry up” and everyone loved them. I was very close to blubbing and had to eat close to my own weight in cashew nuts to distract myself.



Here they are. And as Janethy the Band Leader would “say”….One, Two, Three, CLOSE.