Home again.

It really does feel like home – almost. An eventful week is finishing in homely style with the pungent smell of chillies, onions and potatoes from the kitchen, the whirr of the fan and the noisy shouts and bangs from the basketball court. I say an eventful week, because we’ve slept in five different beds on consecutive nights, met dozens of people, new faces and old, been disappointed and elated in equal measure and, tonight, wonder of wonders, we had a brand new fridge delivered to our door- on the back of a moped.

We arrived on Tuesday to find an inch of vivid reddish dirt covering every surface in our house that we had left so impressively clean. Depressing at first until I noticed that there were no footprints, no paw prints, no rat prints anywhere to be seen. The dust left virginal evidence of an empty house. Mr Mkonga, of the scary holes in his ears, seems a lot less scary now. He set four boys to work within the hour to wash the house and by mid afternoon it was habitable. That evening we had no electricity, no water and no mosquito net. For the bursar, Mariki, it was a personal challenge to have the power re-connected. He returned just before dark with the missing connector.

The heat, the lack of water and the dirt has been challenging. Sarah and Andrew, our American friends, seem to understand without being told. They gave us a bed for the first night and the following evening in a heart-warming gesture of wholesome neighbourliness, delivered a warm tasty meal to our door.

“It’s what we do back home.”

We sped to Ndanda to say good-bye to one of our VSO colleagues. We raced through villages of mud and thatch houses, women lying listlessly under the shade of mango trees, children playing in dirt. We sped back to Mtwara the following morning as the sun was rising. The African dawn, here in southern Tanzania, is lush and eerie, so green you can taste it, with wisps of cloud wrapped round acacia trees and the low sun bringing shapes and colours into sharp relief.

Little has changed. The roads remain impassable after a heavy rain, policemen in crisp white uniforms still stop daladala arbitrarily to inspect papers, children still shout wazungu as we pass on our bicycles and we still laugh and slap hands in bonhomie as we are charged wazungu prices for a pancha repair. That sense of permanence, leaving aside the bigger question of development, is comforting. When Mohamed, my tailor, beamed the whitest smile at seeing I’d returned, I laughed out loud. Mrs Heman in the hardware shop asked where we’d been. And the man on the vegetable stall in the tiny ramshackle market, who insists we buy our provisions using only Kiswahili, greeted me like a long lost brother, offering his seat to Mama Caroline, scolding me for forgetting so much of the language, but pleased that his student had returned.

Some things have changed. Mama Ngonyani, my colleague in the English department, has had meetings to start the language project I have come to deliver. Of more immediate impact, having left saying I would plant seeds in the field outside my back door, I have returned to find she has planted the whole field with maize. She agrees that I have had two good ideas. Praise indeed!

The language project has been occupying a fair amount of Philbert’s time. He has secured agreement from head-teachers to pay a small amount for expenses to teachers attending the course. He does this work in his own time at his own expense and for no reward. Although his son, Simon, attends the best private school in Mtwara, Philbert travels by daladala as petrol prices are so high. A litre of petrol is roughly £1, but wages are roughly twenty times lower than UK. Simon greets us politely with a “Good evening sir. Good evening Mama.” Philbert has high hopes for him and Simon clearly has big ideas of his own. He has set his sights on passing the entrance exam for Ndanda Abbey School, opened by the Benedictines only five years ago and now the highest achieving school in the country.

The deep-set social strata in this society are all around. The best educated, best English speakers generally find secure well-paid jobs in the public sector. Ally Bashir on the other hand, speaks not a word of English, runs a dusty ramshackle electrical goods stall behind the bus station but has little difficulty in negotiating the best price. My lack of Kiswahili is embarrassing and does not help in bargaining. Still I was able to make myself understood. Deliver to my house at 7.00pm -  “Nyumbani – saa moja – leo – sawa?” And it worked. At just after seven o’clock a dim light made its lonely way up the college driveway, the source of the light, a rusty red moped, driven by a grinning Ally Bashir who greeted us warmly, relieved to have found the right place and even more relieved to shed his heavy load – our new fridge strapped precariously to the back of his bike.