Moving around Masasi

This is the rainy season and here nestled among these bulbous rocky outcrops, electric storms and torrential downpours are more dependable than the power supply. They arrive each afternoon, like clockwork, whereas the power cuts never stick to the timetable.

But the English classes are going well. Teachers attend and, by and large, attend punctually. I tried to impose discipline by requiring latecomers to give a full explanation and apology, but invariably the teachers’ group listens attentively, asks one or two supportive questions and then offers sympathy for the defendant’s plight and welcomes them to our group. Each morning there are at least six latecomers. Of these six, the reasons for lateness will be one or other of the following,

“The bus broke down.”
“My child was sick and I took her to hospital.”
“My headteacher required me to collect some papers.”
“We were stopped by the police who told us we were overcrowded and so we had to wait for another bus.” 

One man had travelled some distance and had had to wait for a bus, once again, stuck in the mud; but, when I suggested that he should leave his home earlier, the group remonstrated, came to his defence and said,

“But it’s far, sir. You must forgive him.”
“But it’s not as far as Edwin or Lucy have travelled and they arrived on time.”
“No sir. Thank God, they were lucky.”

Fate and the hand you’re dealt plays such a large part in people’s lives here.

We discussed health issues today and the class was asked to share their good and bad experiences of hospitals, doctors and the healthcare system in general. Mama Nyoni started in one group,

“Well it’s a good story and a bad story. I was five months pregnant and one morning had bad pains and was vomiting. I went to the doctor who told me that the baby was ‘out of my stomach’ and I should rest. For the next three months I went every day to see the doctor and then the baby was born dead.”
“That’s a very sad story Mama Nyoni. How is it a good story as well as bad?”
“Because I thought I was going to die and I didn’t.”

The honesty, the grim tales of harsh reality, the farcical mistakes and carelessness on the part of doctors, moved us and entertained us for the next hour. We heard from the boy who had influenza and was told to bring in a hen; the woman who was treated for one month for syphilis and was told the following month she had a simple fungal infection; and a woman who waited for six weeks by her baby’s hospital bed only to watch her die as the hospital did nothing, once they had lost the X rays. We cheered when he heard from Angela who had had her baby delivered by Caesarian section by the light from a mobile phone during a power cut; and mother and child both survived. It was supposed to be an exchange of good and bad stories from our personal experience, but in reality it was a litany of horrific sadness contrasted with the odd tale of good fortune.

Small miracles seem commonplace in this forgotten region of one of the poorest countries in the world where eighty percent of the population exists on less than £1.00 a day. Brother Edward, a chubby man in his fifties, with a smile etched into the crow’s feet round his gentle eyes, has started Masasi Radio. He started it in the sense that he built the steel broadcasting tower by hand, hauling each heavy steel strut into position himself. The station belongs to the Salvatorian Fathers and the equipment needed to open the station was a gift of £15,000 from the UK. Today there are four young trainees learning the craft of editing and production while five journalists move around the district interviewing farmers, covering the visit of a Deputy Minister and gathering news from across the region. Brother Edward proudly tells me that his mission is to keep remote communities connected. When there was trouble last year, sparked by a dispute over the price farmers were offered for their cashew nuts, Masasi Radio kept the farmers informed and united.

Masasi is a small, bustling town. Its sits at the crossroads where the roads to Newala, Tuunduru Nachingwea and Mtwara meet. Scores of villages use the town as their focal point for trade and shopping. Down the road, out of town, sit the same furniture shops  - beds and coffins – you see all over Tanzania; the same guest houses, gaudily painted in pink or yellow; the same  containers daubed in sky-blue paint, offering ‘Spares’ and ‘Computa’. The market is full of the same tatty Chinese imported bric a brac – torches, watches and kiddies’ toys. Shops dedicated to skin oil, hair pieces and soap; hand-made wooden tables, covered with plastic water bottles, filled with kerosene; and shop after shop of shirts, dresses, T-shirts and patterned cloth. Stalls selling second hand clothes – neatly washed and pressed and along the road, a display of blue jeans and shirts, suspended on hangers made from a twig, tied to the branch of a tree and swaying in the wind.

At the bus stand as the great buses from Dar spill a weary line of passengers, the bajaj and motorcycles wait for a fare, circling and heckling.  The huge ancient buses, advertise wi-fi and air conditioning. In fact they have rust, bald tyres and a very loud TV, blaring bongo fleva videos continuously for ten hours. They sweep into town, where rickety stalls huddle round the muddy patch of earth called the bus stand. The drivers of these great beasts sit arrogantly chewing a stick, or calling their ‘boy’ to fetch a soda. They have driven at frightening speeds through villages and along dirt tracks to get here before dusk. Cars, mini buses and motorcycles scurry to the roadside as their blaring horns terrify all before them. Like some biblical beast they thunder through, leaving a demonic trail of dust or spray and scattered humans behind them.

Evance, a young candidate for the Brothers, made it as far as Masasi last night. His bus from Dar had waited for hours at a number of stages, whilst small cars, unable to ford the thick red bogs of mud, held up a long line of buses and lorries. He arrived at ten o’clock having been on the bus for seventeen hours,

“I’m very sorry, Brother. “ I sympathised.
“Oh we were lucky. There are many cars and buses that would spend the whole night in the mud. Only God and a Land Rover with a rope can help them.”