All Saints Day

All Saints Day and we attended Mass in All Saints Cathedral, a large white concrete building which is less than fifty years old and is crumbling around our heads. This is the Catholic Cathedral for the Diocese of Mtwara. It looks more like a municipal sports hall on a run down estate. It is packed with young and old. Very obviously, Africa is where the Church’s future lies, but its congregation seems oddly served. Great RSJs prop up the ceiling and the splashed paint over grey marble shows the general lack of craftsmanship that seems so depressingly evident across the country. The RSJs are held in place with irregular wedges of timber – quite unsettling, as we were underneath one.

There is certain to be a broader economic explanation for this. I suspect it has something to do with time being cheap, with skills being home learned, with craftsmanship going unrewarded and for technical education being under-funded. After all if we compared craftsmanship in UK with, say Italy or Germany, we’d be sadly lacking after so many years of diluted labour and the reduction of skilled apprenticeships. Whatever the reason, the country’s poverty is displayed partly through this ineptitude. There are widespread displays of industry and enterprise, however. You only need to look to the guys mending buses on the side of the road, or the men making concrete building blocks by hand, or the tailors making and mending on the pavement, to see the enthusiasm for work; but so much of it is undone by poor materials and tools. I thought at first that it might be the absence of quality tools that made for such poor quality furniture, and then I thought of Chippendale of Otley in the eighteenth century. What this country lacks is high quality training. The skills shortage is evident at every level.

Anyway back to Mass, the first Mass of the morning, on this the day when clocks go back to Greenwich Mean Time in UK. In Tanzania we are on Swahili time. The day starts with sunrise and time is measured in hours from sunrise. So 7.00am in wazungo time is 1.00 in Swahili time, midday in wazungo time is 6.00 and 6.00pm wazungo time is 12.00. There is no 24 hour clock and time is therefore described as being of the morning, afternoon or night. It’s sunrise every day of the year at 6.00am and sunset at 6.00pm so you can see the logic.

Having spent a delicious hour on the beach at Msema, we bumped into the lovely old Polish lady who runs a container unit for wazungos, selling everything from shower gel to tomato soup. We bought a bag of mince meat from her as she was about to freeze it and having discovered the tiniest market about 200 yards from our house, where we can buy fresh vegetables, fish and eggs we came home to eat rice and mince for lunch.