I am sitting in the living room thinking about going to work – also thinking about learning to touch type as I can’t see the letters on the keyboard!  It is pouring with rain outside and the electricity will not stay on for more than a minute before ‘tripping’ off with the thunder.  The fridge defrosts if we are not home to turn the electricity back on.  These are some of the ‘downsides’ to life in Tanzania.

On Saturday we found a piece of paper in the long grass near our front gate.  It was our water bill for the month!  Yesterday I went to the CRDB bank to pay it – a sum of less than TZS4,000 (~$2.90).   The queue of 60 people waiting for the three tellers snaked around inside the building.  I watched for a minute and it seemed to be moving so I joined it!

There was a lot happening.  There was a large screen television high on one wall – I saw previews for The Bold and the Beautiful and for Desperate Housewives.  I learned that American Idol would be on later.  I watched the news and guessed that Barak Obama had some visitors from the middle east and that Nadal had won the US Open.  Then it went to a cheesy, never ending, music video so I watched the customers instead.

Twenty minutes had crept past.  The queue was creeping forward and I was no longer on the end.  People pushed through it from time to time to get the deposit slips and carbon paper they needed from the counter.  The young man at the closest teller to me had emptied the contents of two bulging supermarket carrier bags on to the teller’s counter.  The piles of bundled notes would have formed a stack over 60 cm high and most were TZS10,000/=.  The teller had to put each of the bundles of notes in the ‘counting machine’ and rebundle them in sheaves about 5 cm high – this would take a while!  The queue kept creeping forward as the other two tellers worked on valiantly.  It slowed when one of the them decided to take a break but by now I’d invested 40 minutes and was in the middle of the queue.  I wasn’t giving up!

I thought about how lucky we are to have water on tap – some of my neighbours carry water from the little creek near us back to their houses in 15 L buckets on their heads.  I suspect our waste water flows into the creek, hopefully cleansed by the soil and grasses it flows around.  I hope our septic tank is effective.  I wondered if I had to queue to have water on tap in Hamilton how long I’d queue for, and how often.  I wondered how long a bank would last if its customers had to queue for an hour!

After an hour I had reached the red cord where a shorter queue would be corralled.  There were 12 people in front of me. This was a major achievement.  I had drunk all my water and was wishing I’d brought some sandwiches.  I turned and watched the cheesy music video and was moving to the beat to keep my circulation going.  When I turned back to see how the queue was going I found there were now 18 people in front of me.  I wondered if the armed guards were in the bank to stop the riots that happen when people queue jump, but no one was perturbed.  My wait in the queue was going to be a little longer!

In the end I was in the queue for just under two hours before I could hand over my TZS 4,000/=.  The teller said to me “Is that all you want to pay?”  I could understand his amazement.  I couldn’t quite believe it myself.