This is the view of the lake I had this morning as I walked to work.  Musila Island seemed to be floating in a golden light!  When I stopped to have a good look at the scene a young man walking my way asked, concernedly, if anything was wrong.  I don't think he really 'got' the beauty of it.

This picture I took yesterday at his mother’s behest.  I gave her a print of it this morning and she was delighted with Castrol’s portrait.

We have had our older son David staying with us in Bukoba and it has been interesting to see this place through his eyes.

 He arrived at the town bus stand on the Bunda Bus from Mwanza on Monday to our continuing unseasonal rain.  It was a seven hour trip, for much of which he had a small child on his knee ‘helping’ him read his book – the passenger in the next seat had given the little girl to David to hold when she alighted for a ‘comfort stop’ early in the trip and then had failed to repossess her until Bukoba!

Our town’s streets are not all paved and those that are are only sealed in the middle so we waded through the mud back to our car, David carrying his heavy backpack.  As always, our (lack of) colour was noted by many who greeted us with “Mzungu”.  David came in for extra attention with his long, blonde curls.

We’d been cogitating for several weeks about what we would do with David while he was here – Where we would take him? What we should show him?  He said he had no expectations for his stay – he just wanted to see us and a monkey.  He was also pleased to unload his backpack which was full of goodies for us – the vegemite and DVDs were especially welcome – that he’d carted around Dubai and Al Ain.

As it turned out our plans for expeditions into the country side and walks around town to see real life in Bukoba district were stymied by the rain, and we couldn’t even produce a monkey all week when normally a day rarely goes by when we don’t see one somewhere. (David is sceptical of this claim!)  We did take him on our favourite drive over the Kyanyabasa ferry and back over the Ibwera bridge and he saw what looked like an honour guard of 4 and 5 year olds – orphans from an ELCT home near Lake Ikimba who were lining the road in the rain waiting for something exciting and were happy to see us!  David now knows how it feels to be Royalty.

We also sampled the Bukoba hospitality industry and David has firm views on how it could be improved – he sat flabbergasted as our order took 15 minutes to get from the waiter to the kitchen in one restaurant and he found the lack of correspondence between what was ordered and what arrived amusing at another but, as always, after the long wait we either don’t remember or don’t care and are grateful to have any food especially as the ferry departure time was approaching!  He may come back to Tanzania to volunteer in a Vocational Training College and show the students how a kitchen should be run.

David left on the ferry to Mwanza on Friday night and will have nearly a week on Zanzibar during which time he hopes he will finally see a monkey.  Then he’ll return to a hopefully dried out Brisbane.

We were a bit ‘flat’ after he left – we don’t often get homesick but we do miss family and friends (and you could all e-mail more often!!) but a trip out to Katoke on Sunday unearthed a new ‘life list’ bird for Steve and a monkey so all was again right with the world!

Book Update:  My book is now with the printer.  I will let you all know of progress.  Thank you to all the generous people who have supported its production!

Yesterday was very exciting – I finally held my CRDB TemboCard, with the picture of the elephant, in my hand.  This means that now I can use the ATM to get my living allowance from VSO, not collect it as wads of  Tsh10,000/= notes on rare visits to Dar es Salaam or stand in a 2hr queue to get cash from a teller.

My allowance must be paid in the local currency and that means it can only go into a Tanzanian bank.  VSOTz prefers volunteers to use CRDB or NBC and I favoured the card with the elephant over the card with the giraffe (and I had heard queues in the NBC could be 3 hours long!)

To open a bank account  I had to have a residence visa and a letter from Bukoba District Council.  The latter I had by the end of the first week here and the former was stamped into my passport at the beginning of October.

Then I went to the CRDB to open an account – a Belgian friend had said it was a simple and painless process and showed me her elephant card that said VISA in large friendly letters on the front and I was convinced!

Opening the account turned out to be easy – I achieved that part of the process in less than an hour.  The only slightly ugly point was when the bank officer said I would have to deposit the minimum Tsh20,000/= and get a teller stamp on a deposit slip and I looked at the queue in the main banking hall and went pale.  He must have felt sorry for me (or worried that he’d have a banking related fatality on his hands) because he took my Tsh20,000/= and jumped the queue by going behind the counter.  So my first deposit slip is signed all in capitals JENIFA.

Once he had my money the officer told me there was a problem.  The TemboCard Photo Point camera was broken.  I could queue to do teller transactions from my account but I couldn’t use the ATM until I had a card with my photo on the back. I was assured that the camera would be fixed,  they had my mobile phone number, the bank would ring very soon, the card would be made!

Three weeks later, after no contact from the bank, I went to find out where the bank was up to with the camera.  A look into the photo point corner told me it hadn’t been fixed.  The bank officer said there was still no problem, I could fill in a form and hand over two passport size photos and the card could be made using those.  Easy! I never leave home without passport photos so I filled in the form and was told to come back in 3 weeks.

Three weeks later:  The bank officer solemnly took the biscuit tin out of the desk drawer and  went meticulously through all the cards in the J stack.  Mine was not there.  He could not explain how that could possibly have happened.  Perhaps if I filled  out the form again and pasted on two more passport photos? Fine!  3 weeks? I asked. No, only 2!

So just before we went to Dar for the conference I called in to the bank.  The officer was very embarrassed – still no card.  I was over being annoyed, I just sighed “well, this is Africa” and he indignantly responded “No, we are a modern institution, we don’t use that excuse!”  He said he would make it his personal mission to find my card and it would be there before the end of the year. 

Between Christmas and New Year, in a triumph of optimism over reason, we went to the bank.  The biscuit tin came out yet again and the Js were meticulously checked.  No card for me!  Steve suggested try the Cs.  The officer looked perplexed but had a look in that pile too.  Again no card for me.  Maybe next Friday, he said, we are expecting more cards then.

Well I knew on Friday that it was to indeed be the day even before the bank opened!  As I walked along the track to work at 7:30 a big 4WD pulled up along side me and the driver wound down the window and said “Good morning, I work at the CRDB.  Your card has come.”  Excellent!

Two o’clock came and I couldn’t wait any longer, I packed up and headed for town.  By 2:30 a bank officer had handed me my card with the elephant and a sealed envelope with the PIN.  By 2:45 another bank officer had demonstrated how to open the PIN envelope and had pointed out my PIN to me!  By 3:00 a third bank officer had pushed the buttons on the computer that would activate the card and let it talk to the ATM.  All done!

And today I tried it out, and it worked!

It is now two days into the New Year and after having had two weeks of enjoyable and relaxing holiday it will be a shock tomorrow to return to 6.30 am starts to the day.  It will be good to be walking to work again – I wonder how many of the little children along the track will have forgotten me in the three weeks I have been absent.  It will be interesting to see whether I will have “Mzungu” echoing after me as I did when I commenced this placement last August.

Today two English friends accompanied us on a drive in the Ngono valley.  We set off in brilliant sunshine in our little Suzuki with a picnic morning tea stowed safely in the back.  Along the way we passed many large groups of people walking either to or from church, sometimes in quite isolated areas where you’d think no-one lived.

Our first stop was at the Kyanyabasa ferry.  We spent about half an hour there looking at the birds in the shallow wetland next to the causeway.  Val has an interst in birdwatching and her own binoculars.  Sheila was introduced to the ‘sport’ today and used a pair of compact binoculars belonging to Val.  We saw some great birds – the Shoebill was probably the highlight as it is one of the most sought after birds in Africa for serious birders.

We also entertained the locals, who were wandering past and who stopped to watch us, with our kiSwahili and kiHaya.  The locals found the binoculars fascinating – Steve wondered if he was going to get his back!  A fisherman who was the first to join our little group put down his machete and his fish and eels and really warmed to the task of finding the birds he was seeing and others he knew in Steve’s Field Guide.  He was able to manage the binoculars very well.  He pointed out where the hippopotamus is sometimes to be found.  A woman in another group who stopped for a chat enjoyed using Steve’s binoculars to look at the baby a second woman in the group was holding!  She had to walk quite some distance backwards to achieve this. (I suspect she thought the binoculars were some sort of camera.)

We crossed the river on the ferry – the ferryman insisted that Val, Sheila and I get out of the car during the short ride as we had paid 100/= to be ‘passengers’ – and continued up through several small villages to a point where there are good views of Lake Ikimba.  We stopped in what we thought would be a quiet spot to enjoy our picnic morning tea.  No sooner had we spread out the picnic on the rug than we had an audience!  The looks of puzzlement on young faces (Don’t these Wazungu have tables and chairs and a nice house to live in?  Why are they eating outside on the grass?) turned to joy when we gave them a packet of biscuits to share.  Just then the rain started so we piled everything back into the car.

The rain thundered down as we drove down the far side of the valley and we could see the road washing away in muddy red streams.  We had the wipers on their fastest speed to be able to see but the rain had sent everyone under cover so the road was actually less hazardous in the deluge!

The sun was shining as we approached the Ngono bridge but we’d had enough excitement for one day so we kept motoring, just stopping to buy pineapples from our favourite roadside stall (up to 7 pineapples for Tsh1000/=) and we were back in Bukoba in time for lunch . It was a very successful birding excursion – though we’ll have to warn Sheila that she shouldn’t expect a Shoebill, a Goliath Heron and a Lesser Jacana everytime she ventures out with binoculars.

Christmas Day 2010

A very different Christmas

As I sit typing this I can hear the girls at the Rugambwa Girls Secondary School, the  boarding school across the road, in their classrooms singing Christmas songs – some in english, some in kiSwahili.  It is a beautiful sound!

“But it’s Saturday” I hear you say, “and holidays, why are they in classrooms?”

Children as young as 4 are sent away to boarding school in Tanzania, often distances of several hundred kilometres from home.  They often remain at school over the long holiday period either because their parents can’t afford the bus fare to bring them home or they are sponsored orphans at the school and have no other home. 

There is quite a big group of girls in residence at the moment and as they often do, they have congregated to sing.  Sometimes the tunes are familiar to us, sometimes they are Bantu tunes with the distinctive Bantu ululation at the end.

Yesterday afternoon we came home from Dar es Salaam after the volunteers’ conference and a holiday on Zanzibar.  The house was empty of fresh food.  So we went shopping this Christmas morning.  It was business as usual in the market and all the shops though the bakery had not delivered any bread. (This is a Christmas bonus I reckon.)  Only a very few businesses have any Christmas decorations up, and those are of the tinselly bunting variety and often accompanied by tinny carols played at double time (think Nahum Tate meets the Chipmunks!)

But at 9 am, despite the shops being open, there were people everywhere on the streets, all dressed in their best clothes, heading to or from services of worship – Lutheran and SDA mostly.  The Greek Orthodox had contributed to the festivity of the day with coloured balloons along their front fence.  Last night the RC Cathedral had been full for midnight mass and this evening there were again people everywhere, families out congregating and celebrating together. And not a piece of wrapping paper in sight!

We had Christmas lunch at our friend Valerie’s house with some other ex-pats and locals.  It was a lovely, nearly traditional, Christmas meal.  Valerie had done most of the cooking but guests also contributed to the menu including (from Matt) a cake given him by a Moslem colleague to celebrate the birth of God’s prophet!

Tonight I am listening to Handel’s Messiah and thinking about an early night – we were up very early this morning to talk to family in Australia on the phone.  This morning there was no sign that Santa had visited the families of children next door.  I think he missed Bukoba!  The only evidence I have that Santa was active last night is from Matt – his niece in Wiltshire texted him, that she was delighted with her present from Santa, at 3 am UK time (6 am here).  She had been warned not to wake her parents early and thought waking an uncle thousands of kilometres away was a safer bet!

Steve and I had our Christmas present to each other early – 6 nights on Zanzibar – but he has also given me a new pair of earrings which I will treasure!  (They are Stoney tangawizi bottle caps)

I love the ingenuity of the children here!  They have so much fun with so little.

At Jambiani (Zanzibar) last night we watched children having a race along the beach pushing plastic bottles on sticks and making interwoven tracks in the sand.

Yesterday we met some children who obligingly posed with their slalom track for racing bottle caps in the sand.  It looked such fun!

Someone famous said ‘childhood is an invention of the developed world’ (or something similar).  He was right in that children here have responsibilities and know hard physical work from a very young age.  We often see children as young as four years of age minding their younger siblings, maybe taking them to get water with each child carrying a vessel the size depending on the age of the child.  

But the household tasks the children have to do doesn’t mean they don’t have time for fun!  Sometimes it is quite Victorian – children with bike tyres or other ‘hoops’ and a small stick bowling them along.  Sometimes it is far more modern – the children next door to us love to play ‘Emergency sirens and car alarms’.  They can spend up to half an hour running around imitating all the noises they have heard on the videos their dad plays in the little cinema next to our house.  They are very good mimics! 

We often see children pushing home made trundle wheels or little cars they’ve constructed from waste materials and attached to the end of sticks.

One of the joys of my job is seeing the fun the children have with the teaching aids I (and previous volunteers) am teaching their teachers to make.  To a western child it would be very ho-hum to be given a cardboard box clock to use, or a pack of cards made from a calendar page.  But here the children’s faces light up!  “What, you can have fun doing maths?”

Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the costs of printing my book so that more children will be able to have fun in maths.  I can now print plenty!

And a very merry Christmas to you all!

Love from Jenny.

Maths teachers in Bukoba are crying out for help – they want to teach maths in a way that is contemporary and relevant, they want to use teaching / learning  aids but they have no money to buy them, they want to know more about the Algebra and Geometry they have to teach.  Would you like to help them?

My new project is this – to write a book and have it printed and distributed so all the teachers in Bukoba District will know the joys of Tangrams and Bottle Caps (and know what Algebra is and what it isn’t!)  This gives teachers the power to better use what they already have and can easily get – it makes them less dependent on financial hand-outs!

The book has written itself – it is based on the collection of resource sheets used in my seminars.

The printing can be done here in Bukoba – Ebrahim Sokwala, Director of Best Deal Publishers and Book Sellers, has told me he will do it at cost !

Distribution is easily solved – teacher mentor teams will take it with them when they take the Pupil-centred Teaching message to the rest of the District.

All I need is $2000 to have it printed .

Here is the front cover.

I will send a (PDF) copy to anyone who wants to see what is inside. 

And you can have your name on the Official Sponsors page.

I hope to have it printed in January so if you could put a little something in Bukoba’s Christmas Stocking I would appreciate it.

Contact me at jenclark59@gmail.com if you would like to help and I will give you more details and tell you how to send money.  Thank you - in great anticipation.