Tuesday 9 November

football training, Mtwara-style

Caroline has started helping at the Montessori nursery attached to the local Catholic Church. Singing, dancing, eating porridge and washing up the plastic beakers is the order of the day; but all routine is secondary to the number one priority at the moment, of rehearsing for the older children’s ‘graduation ceremony’, to be held later this month. This involves a series of intricate singing and dancing routines, of which we had a sneak preview when we went to visit last week.

There is a Montessori training centre further up the road where students can enrol at 17 to train as Montessori teachers. They are apprenticed in the theory and practice of the Montessori methodology of learning through sensory perception. It costs Tsh1m (about £400) per annum and for that, each student receives full board and lodgings as well as training costs. To put that into context, a teacher here earns about Tsh4m, so it’s not chicken feed. But students get what seems to be high quality training in relatively small classes.

The beach close to our home in Shangani is beautiful. It has clean white sand and the sea is at times blue, green or turquoise, depending on the tide, the sun and the time of day. The beach is littered with shells, small crabs, sea urchins and tiny jelly fish, along with sea-weed and what we think are broken sections of coral. The only blot on the beachscape is the ubiquitous plastic bottle. In a region, a country, where virtually none of the water is freely drinkable, bottled water is the simplest, if not the cheapest way, of drinking water. The drawback is that the plastic bottles are everywhere.

On the beach we had noticed that young boys can often be seen collecting the numerous plastic bottles that form part of the flotsam. We couldn’t work out why they would do this until we noticed some of them binding them together to form a makeshift float. About ten of them tied together form a girdle or buoyancy skirt that will help keep you afloat. They need this because as we watched groups of boys playing in the sea more closely last night, we realised that very few of them can actually swim. You need to be taught to swim – it’s not like dancing or singing. It explains the fascination that some boys had shown when I was swimming the other day. I thought they were curious to see an old, fat, white man in the sea. I think now that they might have been impressed by my swimming.

Swimming, or rather playing in the sea, seems to be something for young people. Tanzania is full of young people. It has a population of 40 million with an average mortality age of 52. That makes me and Caroline revered elders. We are old and still walk like Europeans; that is, briskly. Francis, the legend, reported to me yesterday that he and colleagues had been impressed with this.

“You need not worry about the robbery which occurred just behind our house. When the robber sees how energetically you walk, he will run away.” 

I don’t think I’ll test that theory out.