Water, water everywhere...

Managing clean water occupies quite a lot of our time. Basically we have three grades of water:

·         dirty water straight from the tap. This comes out of the tap brown and scummy; it is stored in large plastic vats in the kitchen and transferred to smaller buckets for use in the toilet, shower and wash basin

·         clean mineral water bought from the shops in plastic bottles and costing 350tsh a litre; only used for drinking and rinsing

·         filtered water, which is dirty water filtered through our chalk filtration system. This is cleanish, but needs boiling for 3 minutes before consumption.

Added to this is the complication that all bottle tops are being collected for eventual use as counters in some school or kindergarten. Bottles are cut down for use as toothbrush holders, pots for pan scrubbers, organic waste etc etc. It’s best to keep your wits about you, which I should have done last night, when I swigged from the one bottle in the kitchen with a plastic top – not water, sadly, but Milton cleaning fluid. Caroline had labelled it with permanent marker but I failed to notice and this, and a surfeit of beans for tea, played havoc with me all night.

This morning we were entertained by fifteen three-year-olds dancing and singing their welcome. They had been rehearsing for the kindergarten graduation ceremony later this month. We were visiting the Montessori kindergarten and training school. Fifteen years ago the Sisters of the Holy Redeemer established the nursery and since then the network of training colleges and kindergartens has been growing across Tanzania. Sister Tadea responded warmly to the suggestion that Caroline might want to help by organising at about three minutes notice, a tour, a reception, a small breakfast and transport. And this is supposed to be a country that can’t organise anything!

On a school-related matter, is the issue of punishment.  I referred the other day to the respect and deference paid by young people to their elders. Pupils stand without instruction when I enter the room, the blackboard is wiped clean before I ask, and when the lesson is over, I simply tell them that the lesson is over and I leave. The class in unison stands and says, “Good-bye sir.” This idyll sits uncomfortably, then, with the other scene played out yesterday in the staffroom. One young girl was made to kneel as she was caned across her hands, whilst another boy was made to hold his body weight prone on one arm whilst his buttocks were caned; this latter caning delivered by a woman teacher and I suspect intended to maximise the humiliation for the teen-age boy. Challenging, to say the least!

After a risky, but ultimately, reasonably successful drama lesson with Form III, I began to feel at home here. First, pupils from Shangani school, then trainee teachers from the college greeted me with, “Good afternoon, sir”, as I wound my way along the path marked by three huge baobao trees, to my house.

We end the day with a leisurely stroll to the beach, a couple of cold beers on the terrace at the Southern Cross and then home .