Fiery heat, some fish and another fundi.

The heat is unrelenting, building up like a great oven of a day until the tiny space between earth and sky fills to bursting and the rain pours in to dampen the bad tempers, itchy bodies and dusty paths. You’d think it would be a release, but the rain brings mud; bicycles choked with thick red cake, roads impassable for all but the great, smug four by fours, whilst mothers with babies wrapped to their backs, spindly schoolchildren in shiny black shoes and young boys laden with charcoal, struggle. With sandals slipping and shoes spoiled, no-one is grateful for the break in the heat.

The young man, Mwakibe, who works for us each day, has helped us smarten the land round the house. A small garden is emerging, the grass is cut, the rubbish buried, and the yard swept each morning. Mwakibe is a tall eighteen year old with an infectious chuckle which gushes through his teeth, and turns into a snigger, too polite to tell me just how bad is my Swahili. He’s six feet tall but with wrists and ankles which seem ready to snap and hips that can’t hold his tatty trousers. He knocked on our door one day, having seen Caroline in the yard, and asked for tuition with his English. We decided to give him work and now he pays for his own tuition and is registered with a class that will coach him through to October next year, when he will re-sit his ‘O’ levels. He lives with his older brother, younger sister and his mother. His mum sells bananas on the roadside.

We eat together each lunch-time and slowly he has started to eat more. At first he would tell us he was full, unused to eating so much. Gradually we have introduced a balance of protein and carbohydrates and he is eating more, has more energy and more spirit. I’ve told him to be careful or he’ll be fat like me but he just chuckles through his teeth, slaps his thigh, shakes his head and says, “Oh sir!”

“Chance would be a fine thing”, we both think, but don’t say.

We talk some days of what he hopes to do.

“Open a bank account”, I urge.

“When should I do that sir?”

“When you have 20,000 shillings.”

“When will that be, sir?”

And I take the notebook out again and show him our plan.

“Five thousand to your mum, five thousand for the bank and five thousand for tuition leaves you .........” I feel I’m turning into his dad.

So we turn to our next challenge. Tiling. Mr Ally and me, after a faltering start in agreeing a sensible price, seem to be getting on fine. Mr Munga had tried to convince me that the normal labour charge would be 45% of the cost of the materials. I pointed out that Mr Ibrahimi would have been paid precisely nothing for two days painting had we used that method. So he and Caroline went off to buy the tiles and cement. Once we had paid for the wheelbarrow and loaded everything into the bedroom, Mr Ally smiled. He has an angelic smile.

“So Babu (he calls me grandad). Where is the sand?”

“Sand? You’re the fundi and you’ve just come back from the building suppliers.”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” said Caroline. “More like hardware from hell. And I’m not going back.”

Maskat came to the rescue. He seemed surprised that we would ask.

“Sand, Mr Adrian? Of course you must use the college supply.”
“Of course,” I said. “Why didn’t I think.?”

So college may not have a bull anymore - you might recall that it was stolen; it may not have many books, nor enough chairs in classrooms, nor enough money for teaching practice. But it has a limitless supply of broken chairs, from which Mr Munga will make my bookcase, and enough sand to supply all our building needs for years to come.

Tiling with Mr Ally is a messy business. It has to be. Sloppy mortar, no spacers and no cutter - just the wooden blocks left over from Mr Norla’s baraza to hold them in place. This morning, as I watched his truculent lad sitting, legs akimbo on the kitchen floor, surrounded with broken tiles, as he laboured with a rusty nail to score them, I realised that without my patronage, this mess would become a catastrophe.

“If I buy you a tile cutter, Mr Ally, you can pay for it week by week.”

“But I have no work, babu. How will I pay?”
“But with a tile cutter, you shall find work,”
And with that, we cycled to the market to buy the tile cutter. Once home he whistled, and kept turning to me with a grin, saying “Safi”, and then started phoning his mates. My kitchen is still a mess, but at least there are fewer broken tiles and the job is part finished. On Monday he starts on the bathroom. And when I say bathroom.........

Last night we were the guests of Mama Koka, a large woman of about forty-five who I had originally and rather embarrassingly taken for over fifty. She and her husband – a retired army officer – own a couple of bars and guest houses around the town. We were royally fed on goat, then boiled fish, the goat having been hit by a car earlier in the day and slaughtered by Baba Koka. I asked what will happen to the driver,

“He made off, but not without telling my boy that he knows me. So he will find me this week and it will be OK. Do you like the fish?”

The changu was a small delicately flavoured fish in a bowl of thin tasty soup.

“I bought thirty five of them for twenty thousand shillings.”

I had to share with them my experience at the fish market the week before, where I had misheard the price and thinking I was getting a bargain, bought a huge kolekole for twenty five thousand. But we cut at least ten large fillets from it and the massive head, with eyes like gob-stoppers, made a greasy soup which I shared with William next door.

The heat bakes everything. Yesterday, small lizards were scampering for shade, huge cartoon-sized snails had slid up the wall of our house after the rain, fooled into thinking that the damp will last, but the rain stopped and they were slowly baked in the sun, before falling off to become snaily dust in the sandy soil. 

Travelling around is as exciting as ever. Our journeys by bicycle are invariably a trail of “Mambos”, “Shikamoo” and “Ee wazungu”. Today’s was momentarily even more exciting, as Caroline ran over a snake as it slithered for cover. She squealed, her voice momentarily rising an octave, but she didn’t falter. We raced for the shade.