A village visit

The days pass and I am no longer the new kid in town. Our treasurer arrives in late May for what he calls a routine field visit. We come and meet him at the New Dodoma Hotel for a meal at the infamous Chinese restaurant. He has paid his own way here, and is excited to be spending a week in dormant Dodoma, a long way away from number crunching in Edinburgh. His email nickname ‘Wee Kerr’ is an accurate depiction of the snowy haired petite silhouette but his mind and character are tremendously sharp. And I soon learn that so are his accounts. We acquaint ourselves over dinner and by the end of it we are all well informed about his past and forthcoming ‘SKI’ holidays. “That’s spending the kids’ inheritance, you know!” he chuckles over a swig of beer. As I leave the hotel I get a phone call from Jackie...”Jackie?”, “Yes turn around!”. She hangs up and I turn but see nobody. Suddenly a pat on my shoulder...it’s her! She’s just had a drink with a friend here and I have to go, but we arrange to meet once her exams are over so we can go kitanga shopping. Brill, I really need to do something about my room curtains (or lack of)...

After a day of thrilling finance and budget training with Kerr, we venture out into the field. A forty minute drive away from Dodoma leads us to a quiet village with huts dotted around a wide plain of brick red earth and thorny bushes. Little children start running alongside as our car starts to slow down. We greet some of the builders. “Greetings (in Gogo)”, “Greetings, welcome (in Gogo), “Thank you, how’s your day? (in Swahili)”, “Good, sorry about your long journey”, “Thank you, how’s your home?”, “Good, welcome”, “Thank you, how’s your work?”, “Good thanks, welcome”, “Thanks, how’s the village”, “Good, welcome”...and this goes on for 5 or 7 minutes. With each person. The tone is almost like a responsorial psalm, it goes to and fro as a matter of routine. Greetings in Tanzania are essential and it is common to keep shaking hands throughout this jitambulisha dialogue.

Then we wait. Like all the sleepy villages we visit, there is no rush and there is no way to fix a meeting time anyway so these waits can be long. But it’s a great time to have informal chats with people and I always have questions about rural life here. Sometimes we wait under the shade of a great Baobab tree, sometimes we hang around in a school where there are benches and tea or chips are served. On one occasion we wait in a school and are taken to sign the guestbook in the headmaster’s office. A strong stench of urine becomes inescapable as we walk along a corridor and the sound of nesting birds is loud. I look up to check the ceiling and notice what look like little mice jumping upside down. A teacher sees me squinting and says something I don’t understand. I ask my colleagues what he said. “He’s asking if you can do something about their bat problem”. I swallow and say we just do stoves.

Kerr takes out his camera and on this particular visit we are surrounded by little kiddos that for some reason, possibly relatively good nutrition, are livelier than in other places we’ve encountered. It is very common for children to get ignored around here, babies with their little heads tucked into a kanga bundle on their mothers’ backs and toddlers upwards just linger on the sides of crowds, wide eyed and quiet, as if waiting to be woken from a daydream. We start playing noughts and crosses on the ground and Kerr triumphs as the winner. The village leaders turn up and we are summoned into a solid looking shed, the village church. The children look through the rails and the elders speak. Sadly this village is starting to wane in terms of stove building and the builders seem to be losing enthusiasm in building new stoves. We ask why and they say it’s hard to get homeowners to pay their half of the stove price, so it’s too much work for too little money. Unfortunately if they don’t start improving their performance in the next 3 months we’ll have to pull out of this village. As we leave a builder comes up to us and starts saying something about Barabbas and the Bible. “You see”, he says pleadingly, “Jesus had to leave Barabbas to find the way for himself. You’ll see that in 3 months time, we’ll make you proud”. We laugh and nod but deep down I can’t help feeling a bit blue, for some reason I start mulling over the complexity of issues development projects attempt to tackle.