Froggy!

The wind remained gusty all week. Most days were mercifully a little cooler and we slept a little better. Still, we have intermittent water and power, there being no warning ahead of the short power cuts and the even shorter bouts when we actually have water. It comes as a huge irony, therefore, to be threatened with disconnection.

“What are you going to disconnect?” I asked the man from the water board. “There’s no water in the tap, so you’ll have to tell us when you reconnect it or we won’t know the difference. And are you offering a rebate for the dirty smelly water we have stored in our plastic buckets?”

Fortunately, perhaps, Francis came to the rescue again and directed the smiling man with the huge wrench to the Bursar’s office where arrangements for the bill could be agreed. We had the same issue with the electricity a few weeks ago, when Mr Mkongo stood firm and stopped them from removing the meter.

Mr Mkongo is the deputy Bursar, sometimes called the storekeeper, but never anything rude to his face. He has gaping holes in his ears, the result of an adolescent ritual in the Makonde tribe. It’s not his ears that make him so impressively fearsome, it’s the fact that he shouts at tutors for not punishing the students for not clearing the campus. When he met the two young men from Tanesco the other week, I knew they would not come back to disconnect us in a hurry.

What’s strange is, that in a country where maintaining constant supply is a challenge, they are very efficient at disconnections. Well, come to think of it, not that efficient, because on both occasions, Mr Mkongo and Francis have managed to see them off, on each occasion with the threat of Mama Eliwaja, the Principal, in their ears.

The week has been a frustrating one for me in college. On each of the four occasions I have had classes to teach, I have arrived to find hardly any students present. There is no accurate record of who is in college and of those in college many did not attend my lesson, either because they chose not to – understandable you might say – or because another tutor had given them punishment duty. Whichever was the case I taught groups of fewer than twenty students on a course on which I am told over eighty are registered. They have teaching practice in four weeks time and have never yet written a lesson plan.

I discussed this with Philbert the other night – that’s Mr Ngairo, the former Chief Inspector of Schools to those who don’t know him. We spent the evening sitting outside his shop, the Upendo Grocery, sipping beer and enjoying the best chipsy mayai in town. Philbert, you will recall, remembers nostalgically, the reforms of Julius Nyerere and sees the country in need of another educational shake-up. We reflected for instance on the difference between the state run teacher training colleges and the private Catholic university. We reflected also on the fact that whilst I haven’t started teaching yet, he was back in work in the private Seventh Day Adventist school – King David’s – on 4 January. It’s the school where Mama Eliwaja plans to send her daughter once she has graduated from the Montessori nursery. The details of schools run by Catholics or Mormons do not seem to worry the Principal.

Caroline and Charlie on the other hand continue to spend productive mornings together, and it would appear that although he is a bit old for kindergarten he finds the chance to be with other children a healthy part of growing up. It was a shock to see him placed on the back of a bicycle when his older brother came to collect him. His legs were placed around his brother’s waist and he was held on with one arm as they made their perilous way across the tracks to home. Usually, he is collected by his father on a motorcycle – much safer!

I finish today’s entry with joyous news that we’ve had running water nearly all morning. We’ve showered and washed all the laundry. Caroline is particularly thrilled because having finally got rid of Ratty, we seem to have been joined by Froggy, a tiny, slimy, browny green little frog who has made it up the waste outlet to take up residence in our bathroom. Each time we flush him down the pipe, he manfully struggles all the way up again.

Caroline is not amused. She’s off to buy a heavy drain cover.

“Do I look like a woman who would have a frog in my bathroom?”