April showers

It started raining earlier this week and apart from the odd hour or two it has rained continuously since. Last night we lay awake for hours, listening in wonder to perhaps the most violent storm in months, the bed trembling, as thunder cracked above our heads, rain so heavy on our tin roof that we needed to shout at each other to be heard. Every road around the campus has been transformed into a ruddy river and anything other than a four wheel drive struggles to make progress. I came home from teaching the other day, having made the mistake of taking Mr Mkungo’s forbidden shortcut and found myself ankle deep in thick cloying mud. People build houses with it and in the absence of cement, it makes a very durable and adhesive alternative. Try getting it out from your mudguards and chain! I traipsed into college in plastic 'crocs' and a poncho, dragging my bike with wheels which refused to turn. I was greeted with looks of bewilderment and many, many, “Pole sana”.

It’s annoying for us. It slows things down. It makes our sundowners less mystical. And we stay indoors reading more. But that’s it. We don’t have to work outdoors, we don’t cook our meals over a charcoal jiko outside a hut made of sticks and clay; our fruit stall is not awash with thick reddish sludge.

On many street corners you’ll find a group of men, fundis and labourers, working round a roughly made bench, using hand saws and chisels, no machinery in sight. Carpenters are numerous here, for wooden furniture abounds. I say furniture, but I really mean four household items – windows, doors, beds and coffins. Windows are wooden frames with steel bars inserted as protection against burglars, doors are plain and functional but rarely fitted well; beds are stylish, but there is generally only one style; whilst coffins are numerous and diverse in quantity and style. Wood is expensive, whilst labour is cheap; but, as a result, poor tools and untrained fundi work long hours to produce poor quality. In many of the properties I have visited, private as well as public, the quality of finish is very poor. Only the Sisters and the Fathers seem to have cracked that part of Tanzanian life and at the convent and the monastery, there is not an ill-fitted door or window to be found.

A good many students from college were taken to hospital last week after the strangest and most unusual of incidents. A football match between another College and the Saint Augustine University was played last Sunday afternoon. Crowds thronged around the touchline and the atmosphere was noisy with chanting and drumming most of the afternoon. As we walked past, however, we faced throngs of people running scared away from the pitch. Fighting had broken out between rival fans and the police were called. People were taken to hospital, not suffering from cuts or breaks, but from shock. They were scared at the sight of the violence and went to hospital for treatment. I hear frightful stories of the conditions at that hospital and yet people seek medical quite readily. I wonder sometimes if this is borne out of ignorance rather than wisdom.

Fighting on campus, bad weather nor the imminent examinations will deter Maskat, Deputy Principal, from imposing his will on the student and teaching body. You will remember that Maskat is the small, rotund chap who has an opinion on every aspect of college life. People don’t fear him, but they do as he says. For the past week, since Maskat’s return from Nerwala, where he had been sorting out a family matter, students have hardly attended class, but instead have been seen morning and afternoon, slashing, scraping, digging, sweeping and cleaning. When I asked him why students had been deployed with such vigour, he said,

“Yes, Mr Adrian. I had been away for only one week and tutors gave a bad report on the state of the college environment.”

Every blade of grass has been cut, every weed plucked and piece of litter picked. Much of it is piled in our waste pit.

As we made our way down those muddy lanes the other night, I realised that there is a comfort to be had from riding confidently, picking one’s way round the deep puddles, the muddy gorges and the slimy ravines. Caroline lacks some of that confidence and, as her bicycle slid from beneath her, she fell off. She was wet through and dirty. She later showed me the huge bruise on her leg, but stoically had waited until she had cycled all the way home before getting in the shower and crying like a baby.