15 October

Today we’re preparing to cook our first meal. Starting with the vocabulary and the protocol for the market, we learn how to ask for onions, rice, limes, garlic, tomatoes and everything we’ll need for a spicy pilau rice with green peas. I have to go to the market and say: “ninaombe kununua malimau tatu na ndimu tanu?” That’s three lemons and five limes to non-kiswahili speakers. I’m going to ask the young lad who charged me 700 shillings for an old dry orange. I also have to find out the price for a kilo of green peas – that’s “ bei gani njegere kilo moja?”

We’ll be cooking the rice in coconut milk having creamed the coconut on an ingenious blade attached to a folding wooden stool. The creamed coconut is then strained by hand. No water is used, partly to enhance flavour, but also of course because the water is not clean. The rice is cooked on a charcoal stove or jiko. We’ll buy a stove for about 3000 shillings.

As aside on matters of language, students of Kiswahili soon become aware just what a melange of arabic, bantu and european words is the language of Tanzania. Some of us have taken to spotting the more humorous ones. You might need to know, for instance, that deep fried potatoes are called “chipsi” , or a driver is a “deriva” but the best one to date remains the Kiswahili for roundabout......the “kiplefti”!!

12 October 2010

Something about money and what it costs to live here. We are to live on a little more than a high school teacher’s salary. I’m told we will be relatively well off, with our accommodation costs already met and my salary intended to meet food and local transport costs only.

I’m still making the mistake of converting prices into sterling. This distorts my fuller understanding of what life is like for Tanzanians. A journey on a daladala is regulated by the government, every trip costing 250tsh, about 11p in sterling. 11p is approximately 1/1000th of a day’s wage in UK. It represents more than 1/20th of a good wage in Tanzania.5 big oranges cost 700 shillings, about 1/8th of a day’s wage or equivalent to more than £10 in Britain. These calculations might seem geeky but they help me start to understand what poverty means for 80% of the population here.

Some things are so expensive here, the ordinary shops don’t stock them. I can’t find shaving gel anywhere. Airtime for phones is on sale everywhere but actually quite expensive for Tanzanians. 20p for half an hour at an internet cafe might seem cheap to us but it’s nearly an hour’s wage here.