Night life

All week, each day, many times a day and most nights they pass, slowly, stoically, unsmiling; carrying their coloured buckets on their heads – a truculent, multi-coloured parade – bearing water from the well to their homes, or rather to their employers’ homes. The fortunate ones share a heavy steel pushcart on bicycle wheels. For two weeks this has continued. There was respite briefly yesterday for a few hours, when water flowed through our taps and filled our buckets, then a return to the slow, rainbow caravan. When I received our water bill this morning, it was unsurprisingly small, a few pennies for the small amount we received and no apology, not even a wry smile for the bold irony of a ‘Service Charge’. Lucia reminded me that I had promised ‘a much improved supply’ when I returned in July. It was no good blaming Francis, the devout, whispering water engineer from Ndanda. He would only blame his Chinese contractors. Lucia blamed no-one. She just found it funny that I was wrong.

We have returned to the comfort of home. Like an old shoe, it fits. It feels very comfortable. It feels like it belongs. Even the return of Ratty – or rather a great nephew of the beast himself – only spurred Caroline to fit a screen door. This simple frame with wire mesh was made with chisel, plane and, yes, screws. It even fits the door frame and hens that formerly marched in here at breakfast, looking startled when they were shooed out, now squark resentfully on our porch. We open it respectfully, though, for Tigger, the sleek, indolent ginger tom that has laid claim to the sofa next to me.

We did not need to rush back from England as it happens. We could have stayed for a few days longer in Lushoto in the north if we’d known. When I asked why so few teachers appeared for my class for the first week, one headteacher explained

“Adrian. This is the first week. Better start next week.”

“But that will mean that next week will be the first week?”

“Exactly.”

I was concerned that the water pump out at Kitere had still not been completed. I phoned Deogratius trying to express just the right amount of impatience in my voice.

“I have had some problems, Adrian. I will come on Friday.”

“That will mean he will come on Monday,” said Sister Tadea, gently.

A code of courtesy exists here, the rules for which I was still learning.

“Africans say they will come on Friday as a polite way of saying they expect to start on Monday”, explained Philibert, tactfully.

The delays in starting teaching have given me chance however to establish a friendly working rapport with a number of artists – carvers, mainly, producing intricately beautiful figures in ebony;  and, crucially, the Chairman of the small group of streets and alleys called an ‘mtaa’. Mr Abdulmajid is a quietly spoken, reflective, former engineer, now retired. He Chairs the small committee which meets regularly to discuss local issues affecting the street – a new culvert was recently installed; a sandy alley will soon become a paved street and the most vulnerable families are listed for him by neighbours and the municipal social workers. Caroline went with him last week to the market as he patiently and vigorously bartered the best price for the cloth we were buying with money raised by http://www.mtwaralinks.com – cloth for the school uniforms for some of the children from his mtaa. Amid the easy comfort of shopping and swimming, there are families living close to us who exist each week on what we spend on beer. One elderly woman curtsied, her humility shaming me, as she greeted me, thanking me profusely for the help we had brought.

Our son, Martin, has been staying with us for the past few weeks, quickly establishing himself as a friendly newcomer, as he cycles to the beach and back.

“Good morning, Baba Martin,” someone called to me from a stall in the market the other day, where he is already known for buying seeds as well as fruit and vegetables. He has laid out a garden and set a mesh fence around it to keep out the hens and the dogs. Already the first healthy leaves of spinach, tomatoes and beans provide a splash of green against the red earth, painstakingly watered each morning by Mwakibe. It is the only visible sign of life in the earth as everywhere is parched brown and dusty. The grass has turned to crisp brown stalks and beneath them are bald patches of caked soil. All Mkonga’s best plans for blocking the paths and byways between here and church have come to naught, as without vegetation, the area is an open desert, but for the mbuyu trees, stark, grey monstrous scarecrows guarding a ravaged land.

Tonight, in the night, the heavy thud from the music in the hall shakes the roof and rattles my nerves. Thirsty and hot I creep to the kitchen for water. I’ve worked out how to open the door without it creaking, a feat, which, since Munga the Fundi ‘fixed’ the door and left it squealing each time it is opened, is no mean achievement. I wondered if the small rat which had scurried across our living room as we watched telly the other night had found a home in the kitchen. It was a much smaller, slower rat than its great uncle. I had nearly cornered it the other night in the pantry but had not the courage to go to my knees to find it and kill it. Instead we left out poison and hoped for the best. It hasn’t been seen again so tonight I crept even more gingerly, apprehensive. As I stepped towards the bedroom my foot pressed down into a squashy slime. Had a huge gecko left its doings? Had the cat been in during the night? Worse still, had I found the rat? I groaned out loud as a too-vivid picture flooded my mind. It was Freddy, now spread-eagled outside our bedroom. He must have grown tired of waiting for that damned water, or Caroline to find him and move him and was making his own way out. And now he was squashed under my foot, a lonely prone mush of a creature, not dead, not yet; and after some minutes, as though he’d decided he could play dead no longer, he stretched one slimy scrawny leg after a painful other and dragged himself towards the door and freedom.