21 January - A comfortable routine

Well, it started really well. We had had water yesterday afternoon and yet we woke to the sound of the cistern filling. That meant running water for the second day in succession and this time it would be clean water, as the dirt in the system had been washed through yesterday. A shower, clean clothes and full buckets before breakfast is a great start.

We had received notification, finally, yesterday that our application for the certificate giving us right to reside in Tanzania was ready, and I had an email to show the Immigration Officer. Everyone we told had laughed when I’d said that, as of Thursday, we would be illegal aliens and that we were presenting ourselves to the authorities on Friday morning, for them to do with us as they would. Everyone here thought it hilarious.  I hope for their sakes that they never come into contact with British or French immigration officers in similar circumstances.

As it was, I had met the Regional Immigration Officer, Mr Mpota, last week. I knew he was a charming professional man who saw it has his job to stick to the procedure but to help us through it. When we asked what would we do if Caroline had any need to travel before the certificate had been issued, he said that he could extend our visas, something which we had been told was definitely not possible. Clearly, a man worth knowing.

At school, there was to be a whole school assembly or barasa, in which the entire student body sits in the shade of the great baobob tree in the yard and listens to the school’s plans for the year ahead. It is an occasion when a vision for students is set out, when expectations are raised and where students are encouraged to feel part of this new community.

In College, things are moving at a much slower pace. Of the one hundred students I should be teaching, only thirty-four have so far returned from their summer holiday. Everyone tells me they will be come “in the coming weeks.” This morning’s staff meeting was concerned with illegal roads that have appeared in the grounds around the college and the college’s plans to dig trenches and place tree trunks in their way to stop through traffic. No mention yet of the examination papers I spent two weeks marking last November.

At the Montessori nursery, a strong healthy routine of play and porridge has been established. Charlie, the young boy who was paralysed at birth, has befriended Caroline and through gestures, tugging and half-mouthed words, he tells her what he wants and when he can do something for himself. He’s still teaching her numbers in kiswahili.

We have a routine of sorts now. Ten hours or more of teaching in college, ten hours or more of teaching in school, after school classes and each morning spent in nursery and each afternoon spent preparing classes, we have barely enough time to cycle across for our bia baridi on the terrace at the big hotel. At high or low tide, the last hour of daylight is always spent looking over the ocean.

In the staff meeting this morning, I could tell Francis was not paying attention. He had been telling me how the girl he wanted to marry had got away and was now promised to another. I only realised at the end of the meeting that the woman he was referring to was Beatrice, sitting right next to me.

We will turn our attention shortly, to activities for the week-end. My colleague, John, and I discussed hiring a daladala to take a group of us to the beach. Now I know that Francis is looking for a wife, a day trip on a charabang becomes all the more convenient.