Kitere

It was still dark and I was up before the dogs had stopped howling, with a Land Rover at the door to take me to Kitere. My hastily arranged visit with Sister Brigita was to see first-hand the large tract of land below the Makonde plateau which the Sisters are cultivating and to take photographs, in readiness for some wider publicity.

The road to Mikindani at that time of the morning is an eerie place. Figures loom suddenly from the darkness – women in head scarves with large buckets, bowls or baskets on their heads; young boys or older men on heavy iron bicycles, heading towards Mtwara laden with four great rice sacks of charcoal. As we rounded the bend to drop down the hill into Mikindani we saw the tell-tale sign of broken branches lain in the road. A hundred yards further and in the shadow of a bend, a great red truck lay on its side, surrounded by broken glass and spilt oil, the windscreen shattered with bright gashes of fresh metal glinting in the headlights, a lone man, like a marooned survivor, perched on the driver’s door.

Dawn was breaking. One minute, startled faces with bright eyes and teeth were glaring from the dark, and the next minute the roads had come alive with truculent schoolchildren, women and babies and white shirted policemen. A dirt road with deep ravines and potholes had become a busy thoroughfare and as we sped through the scruffy hamlet of Kitere, another working day had begun in Tanzania. Boys with broken bicycles, women sweeping their yards, old men rubbing their boney heads – all stopped and stared at us, in our bold white car, high and mighty, ahead of a great swirling train of dust.

We were six. Two nuns - Sisters Brigita and Toma, two women, Halima and Mama Augustina and Morris, our aptly named driver and me. Before I had removed my sandals the women began laughing. They seemed to consider it unnecessary to attempt to talk; to stare incredulously and then giggle was sufficient. I grinned, pretended I was enjoying it and laughed back. The more I laughed, the more they giggled. We began our trek to the farmland above Kitere and the tiny hamlet of Kidule, an hour and half’s walk, mostly barefoot, through mud, knee-high at times, and at others, wading through thigh-high flood water. Bright orange birds, tiny aqua blue birds, great black heron-like birds – all swooped and swirled around us in the moist, early morning air. We passed mud huts, with straw roofs drooping to the floor, a thin wisp of smoke and some foul smells escaping from one and as we passed, we heard

“Jambo?”

And the exchange of greetings, now reassuringly universal and repetitive ensued,

“Salama. Shikamoo.”
“Marahaba. Salama mama. Habari?”
“Nzuri. Na wewe?” and so it went on. We were returning travellers, unremarkable, but warmly welcomed.

The village came out to help the Sisters with their work. There were young men, muscles shimmering with sweat through torn tee-shirts, panga slung casually, toothless women, straight-backed, great backsides horizontal, shin deep in a rice field, deftly cutting and plucking, never raising an eye, never mind their heads and a gaggle of children sitting on a makeshift bank of weeds and grasses, laughing uproariously, as I slipped and slid and adjusted my hat and mopped the rivulets of sweat. They were so comfortable, so happy. Even though I could not be more out of place, they made me feel at home.

The children do not attend school. There is no clinic within three hours walk and the only water before the Sisters drilled their well was taken from a natural spring, two hours walk away. They live on the maize and rice they grow and a few chickens and goats they keep. We tried to speak but they could not understand my strange accent. We joked about my hat, the colour of my feet and the pictures on my camera. Kidule comprises a thin string of mud houses with old and weathered straw roofs. As Sister Brigita and I wound our way up the gentle slope though the village, we greeted elders respectfully. An old woman, lay prone on the baked mud outside her door, her grey and balding head cradled in the crook of a bony arm, her knees bent and as she craned her neck to speak, she smiled and croaked  a toothless “salama” to our greeting as we passed. Hens pecked, some small children played with sticks in the dried mud and two younger women paused as they swept, to stare and then smile at their visitors. There was nothing to see, the village existed, that’s all. It isn’t developing. Its children don’t attend school; its mothers rarely make it to the nearest clinic three hours walk away. Its men and women farm the land in exactly the same way that their great-grandparents did. Sister Brigita sighed and suggested we turn round and and take lunch at their house, a newly built house, built for the Sisters to develop their farm. A newly sunk deep well needs a pump and then the whole of this area will have good clean water and many hectares of land irrigated.

After a lunch of maize with pumpkin, we made an incongruous looking party making the return trip to the car – an old man with leathery feet carried a basket with twelve huge pumpkins; another, the toothless bwana from the shamba, carried a branch of bananas; a wiry young man with a clipped moustache and a great iron bicycle, had two squawking hens strapped to the rear and then the six of us. In the heat of the day the muddy paths had, in parts, been baked into sharp ridges and lumps. My soft mzungu feet were cut and sliced and the women laughed louder each time I winced. Eventually I hung back, pretending to wash my sandals, but in truth, avoiding their mockery. And so for the last mile or two I cut a solitary figure, with a florid kikuu draped over my head, picking my way barefoot, alongside ditches where boys fresh from school, sat, hopefully, with short sticks on the edge of the wetland, waiting for a bite. The chuckles from the mud huts as I passed, were predictable and sometimes tiresome, but an old woman still ran to fetch me a chair as I arrived at the car.

Home today in Mtwara and it all feels very comfortable and modern. Caroline prepares the house for visitors, I have to go to ‘Modern Cutz’ for another haircut and we have meetings in restaurants over the week-end. Kitere is classified as ‘Mtwara-Rural’ - its schools used for teaching practice by the College here. It’s two hours away by car if you know the way, but it feels like another century.