Another Year in Africa: January 2021

Today, with nothing else to do, it's probably a good day to reflect on the year just finishing.

We started last January on safari with our friends from home, the Drummonds. New Year’s Day was spent at Lake Natron, a breeding ground for beautiful pink flamingos. We then spent time in the Serengeti and at Lake Victoria. The highlight was Ngorongoro Crater, a unique, natural wonder, and the reason tourists will continue to come to Tanzania though increasingly just the ridiculously wealthy as the Tz government price increases in all things national park related becomes exponential.

Lake Natron, Engaresero.

The second half of January we settled back into work (the reason we’re here after all!) and all was cruisy. My education resource room was ready and the students started to use the library. Steve was knocking out grant applications. We were looking forward to a productive 8 months then a little more safari-ing before packing up and coming home.

We had always planned a brief visit home to Australia at Easter and bought tickets in January with Ethiopian Airways for a two week trip. Then the corona virus story started to make its presence felt and we could feel our plans slipping away. Flights were cancelled and rescheduled, quarantine requirements in Australia made two weeks look undoable then AVI repatriated all volunteers in late March and we were home in Hamilton, still unable to see family apart from younger son, Toby (who had to share the house again!), and with many loose ends including car and house in Arusha.

Pink Lakes near Ouyen Vic with Auntie Lyn

Victoria’s lockdown was much easier on regional people than Melbournians. Over the seven months we were home we had several trips to the Mallee to see my mum’s twin sister as well as Hattah, Murray Sunset, Little Desert and Wyperfield NPs. We spent time in the Grampians NP and other local nature reserves and forest parks. We did have a couple of trips to Melbourne to see David, our older son, and Steve’s dad, and a trip to the northeast of Victoria to see extended family - my sister and her family and some Lappin cousins - but were not able to get to Tasmania so haven’t seen daughter Liz and granddaughter Sophie for nearly two years, or my brother and his family.

We saw a lot of the Grampians!

By August I’d had enough of enforced idleness. Yes, I was walking up to 5 km most days and knitting 3 pairs of socks a week, and I’d made a few hundred face masks, but I was feeling restless. I don’t think I’m ready for retirement! The restrictions on travel were not helping and I was frustrated about not being able to visit our girls. I figured we had as much contact with them from Arusha as we had from Hamilton, so I applied to Border Force for an exemption to travel overseas. It was a pretty slapdash effort, just a little rebellion against incarceration really, and I didn’t think for a minute we had a chance but less than 24 hours later we had permission to return to Tanzania! So then we had to choose.

We spent a long time making the decision to return here and discussed it endlessly with family and friends. Some can understand why we made the decision we did, others think we are foolish, even suicidal (Pam!). In the end the decision is actually not about coming here to Tz; it is about not being able to go home and increasingly about not being able to travel anywhere in the way we had planned. We had hoped to use Tz as a base for exploring further southern and western Africa, and even Europe in the coming northern summer, but neither will be possible. Our visa situation changed and that has become an additional problem as we need to leave the country periodically when it is becoming more difficult to do so.

We have been back in Tz for two months now and half of that has been spent travelling, first to Kenya then to central and southern Tz. I have been volunteering again at the centre for people with disabilities at Olkokola and the maths program is up and running. I know, from the state of the box of cards, that it was being well used in the last three weeks of term while we were away. When the students return next week we will have to appoint a Maths Monitor to keep the box in order and supervise its use. The library is also being used as well as the Kagera Reading program, an English language learning program devised by a VSO friend David Jackson. For me the next two months at work will be about work programs and lesson planning as well as record keeping for the teachers. The language barriers will continue but there is heaps of good will and we’ll all do our best. In all aspects of life there are things you can change and things you can’t. It is a life’s work getting to know the difference!

Work is always a place of the unexpected. Last week I arrived to find a note taped on the door of the workroom I share with the Flying Medical Service pilots that said “Do not enter and stay until after 12 noon. Room sprayed for fleas at 7 am”. I had to sneak in and get the work computer and TIN register but I didn’t linger. I hope the insecticide has worked - one of the pilots has been bitten all over, I mercifully have escaped. TINs are taxpayer identification numbers. The government has decreed that everyone who pays in to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) should have one. Also everyone must have a NIDA (National Identification Authority number) in order to register their phone SIM but that’s another story.

I have been helping the staff to get their TINs so their pensions will be secured. It can be done on-line provided you have a NIDA number. The web-site is a bit clumsy but manageable. The biggest problem is that we take a less than rigorous approach to names here - the system demands three - and spelling is not set in stone. ‘Ph’ and ‘F’ are interchangeable as are ‘Ch’ and ‘K’ in European derived names, ‘l’ and ‘r’ are interchangeable in local names. If someone doesn’t like the name they’ve been given by their parents they will sometimes choose something different. But a computerised system demands an exactitude that is foreign here! Most of our staff have some work to do now to get the names on their NIDAs, NSSF and TIN to be all the same or their pensions will be slow in coming (one of our guards is 80 years old so he needs to fix it soon!). Another of our guards has three totally different names on his NSSF compared with his NIDA and all of the teachers had at least one different name or a different spelling. The computer system to get the TINs is slow but people here are patient - I’m sure they were perplexed by my (of course fruitless) efforts to hurry the process along. And I can now do the Swahili for ‘a message will come on your phone with a password, stand by the tree where the network is strong’ without thinking.

The Green-winged Pytilia or Melba Finch is in my Top10 Tanzanian Birds though why it is named for an Australian opera singer is a mystery.
I took this photo in Ruaha NP.

In December we travelled south to Iringa, Ruaha NP and Mikumi NP among other places. We saw so much Steve has written three posts with accompanying pictures. You’ll find them here.

In Ruaha NP, this bus managed 90 deg of the 180 deg it needed.

We spent a morning on a hill called Ibofwe east of Iringa. While Steve and his mates chased birds I studied the wildflowers. They were amazing - some like the Fireball Lily are spectacular but many were delicate and had their own beauty. It was a very special place to visit.

We visited Neema Crafts in Iringa which a workshop, retail centre and cafe staffed by people living with disability, many with similar issues to ours at Olkokola. It is quite similar to Shanga as it makes 'high end' goods to sell to expats and tourists, and for export, rather than equipping people to go home to their own villages and earn a living there. The crafts include weaving, carpentry, tailoring and screen printing. The cafe makes an excellent Rolex! (Spanish omelette rolled in a chapati.)