Final Thoughts

And so my Tanzanian journey comes to an end. It is an experience I would certainly recommend and, indeed, the thought of leaving this place, much though I love my home, makes me more than a little sad. It is also, I must add, an experience which is about to become less available. In order to work here as a volunteer you must obtain a ‘Permit C’, a sort of residency permit, for which you must pay $150. Expensive, but not so much so that it will put many off. However, in a misguided attempt to raise revenues the government are increasing the charge to $550 – an amount which I for one would find too steep for my pocket.

With such an increase, of course, the students who make up the bulk of the volunteers (many of them still at school) will go elsewhere, removing not just their labour (the value of which some dispute) but also their money. While here I went on safari, as did many others. Many also climb Kilimanjaro, visit Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar, not to mention sinking thousands of shillings in the bars and clubs of Arusha. The cost of their absence will almost certainly outweigh any gain from the increased fee.

One might expect the volunteer organisations to group together and launch some sort of campaign, but there is no wider association for these companies, no organisation and no campaign. It is a situation that can be seen throughout Tanzania and one which Philbert and I often speculated upon. The taxi drivers, for instance, could almost certainly make more money if they organised, set standard fares and were not constantly undercutting one another bargaining with customers until their profit is virtually wiped out. Poverty is certainly an inhibitor – many Tanzanians cannot wake up in the morning and ponder the merits of labour organisation because they are too busy wondering how they will eat or pay rent or their children’s school fees – but even the western volunteer organisations suffer from this inertia. There is, perhaps, a certain fatalism, a belief that it does not matter what they do, the government will still fail them and the lights will still not switch on. I am yet to hear a good word said about President Kiketwe and yet he still managed to win re-election last year. Asked why they don’t organise and campaign, the volunteer organisations shrug – TIA.

I, however, remain optimistic. In contrast to this fatalism is an entrepreneurial spirit. Almost everyone you meet owns a tour company or wants to talk about setting up a business. Philbert has even gone into business with with the two men who organised his climb up Kilimanjaro. They are going to start a pig and chicken farm near Engikaret. They plan to improve on existing practices in Tanzania and replace the food which high-end restaurants import from Kenya. It is not a general fatalism, then but a specific one – a disillusionment with government, but a belief that there is still much opportunity, even though some have little idea what they need to do to put their idea into practice. Tanzania is a place of contradictions.

Indeed, there have been countless attempts to pigeonhole Africa, countless attempts to say ‘Africa is…’ or ‘Africans are…’, each of which fall apart just as surely as any attempt to say ‘Europe is…’ or ‘Europeans are…’. Africa and Africans are as varied and contradictory as Europeans, as all human beings. Even our beloved national stereotypes do not stand up under serious examination, and attempts to stereotype Africans, even to portray Africa ‘as it really is’ are futile.

This is especially true of the mzungu, the outsider. In my month in Tanzania I saw the full range of society from the homeless of the old Arusha station to the expats in their compounds. During my last weekend in Arusha I met up with a friend from college, the daughter of the High Commissioner, in just such a compound out near Arusha Airport. They were having lunch with some family friends before heading off on safari to Ngorongoro and I was very kindly (and at surprisingly short notice) invited to join them. It was an excellent lunch with a wide variety of food – unlike the simple dishes I was used to at Engikaret and it was interesting to speak to English people who actually live in Tanzania. It was, needless to say, an entirely different life – one of compounds and international schools and servants. This is the reality of life as a mzungu. I do not mean to imply a racism or even a hangover of the colonial mentality on the part of the expats – that would be a ridiculous slight on my gracious and welcoming hosts – but there is nevertheless a vast difference in lifestyle. The mzungu has money. He also has his own areas – the Shoprite complex on Sokoine or the Njiro complex in the suburbs as well as certain bars (Via Via at the old German Boma for instance) where one can see the same white faces again and again. There are Tanzanians here too, but it is predominantly the domain of the mzungu. A group apart, in Tanzania but never Tanzanian. Living in compounds one never could be. Even if one chose to live for years in an apartment or even a single room in the roughest part of West Arusha, one would still be greeted by cries of ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’

Thus, I do not pretend to depict Arusha or Maasailand ‘as it really is’, let alone Tanzania and certainly not the vast and varied continent of Africa. I have seen things, spoken to people and formed my own opinions, but another person, Tanzanian or mzungu, may well have their own entirely different experiences. These notes are, and could only ever be, the thoughts of a mzungu.

The finished foundation wall

A Joint Criminal Enterprise – The ICTR – 22/8/2011

‘Later you went to visit a certain George, known as Duff. Is he a relative of yours, a blood relative?’

‘I don’t know any George, known as Duff,’ the witness replies from his place, obscured by a curtain. ‘I think the person who said that is telling a lie.’

The defence counsel rises, ‘Excuse the interruption, judge, but if you look at the case view it says in the witness’ testimony that he met “a certain judge known as Daff” while the English translation has it incorrectly as “a certain George, known as Duff”.’ Laughter in the court. The judge rephrases his question and the trial continues.

The proceedings of Trial Chamber II of the United Nation International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – situated on the second floor of the towering white Arusha International Conference Centre – is interrupted a further four times for similar reasons in a ninety minute session. Each time the same defence counsel, a French woman with long curly hair, rising to ask for clarification of a discrepancy in the translation. Indeed, the day’s events had started with another defence counsel, a tall bald Englishman, asking that a question be re-asked in order to clear up just such a discrepancy. These are the perils of conducting a trial in a combination of English, French and Kinyarwanda.

Upstairs, in Trial Chamber I, an African prosecutor in a horsehair wig was urging the tribunal judges not to be ‘led into temptation’ by the testimony of unreliable and ‘overzealous’ defence witnesses who, in their efforts to protect Edouard Karemera, a former senior official of the governing party of Rwanda in 1994, had contradicted the admissions made by that very defendant. Things, it seemed, were not looking good for Mr Karemera. He had, the prosecutor went on to say, attempted to discredit a prosecution witness who had not quite got the exact date of a particular meeting quite correct. The prosecutor, however, praised his witness for managing to be less than a week out, even such a long time after the event.

This struck me as not especially indicative of the witness’ reliability but, more than that, it showed the immense difficulty of conducting such a long running trial. The prosecutor made reference to testimony given as early as 2003, which itself was nine years after the genocide took place. Now, seventeen years after the event, it was no wonder that the defendants were questioning the memories of the prosecution’s witnesses.

The events of the genocide which started in Rwanda on the 6th of April 1994 and carried on for one hundred days, during which time one million Tutsis were hacked, slashed, raped and shot by their Hutu neighbours, should not require repetition and the ICTR is an attempt to bring the leaders of the genocide to justice after the UN spectacularly failed to intervene in one of the bloody episodes of the late twentieth century. However, as the years roll by and memories fade, it becomes harder and harder for the courts to convict – a task made longer and more difficult by the translation difficulties I witnessed in Trial Chamber II. One has to wonder, with all these difficulties, exactly how fair the tribunals really are.

The defendants, however, seem unconcerned. They make no effort to question the legitimacy of the court and they submit defences which I struggle to believe they think will get them anywhere. The most common seems to be that they were not in control, but even a cursory glance at the evidence suggests that even if this were true at the end, there was a significant period when they were in control. One defendant, refuting accusations that he made a speech inciting genocide, claims he never used the words ‘Tutsis’ or ‘enemy’, referring instead, somewhat euphemistically, to ‘some people’. That this could have been intended or understood as anything other than an incitement to violence against Tutsis is a ridiculous contention. While getting the exact words might be important in translation, it is less so when the political climate loads certain words and ideas and you use them to incite slaughter on a vicious scale. Even the lawyers and judges us a euphemism for this murder. They call it ‘the joint criminal enterprise’. It is a legal term allowing them to convict people of genocide even if they did not physically kill anyone, but at the same time it seems too technical, too abstracted from the brutal reality of organised mass murder.

The trials, of course, are important. They are a symbol that while it may take decades, the slow-turning wheel of justice will eventually grind out the convictions of the genocidal and the criminals. But, of course, the longer it takes the less effective it is. While lawyers deliberate in the small tribunal chambers high up in the AICC, memories fade. Witnesses and defendants die before a verdict is reach and the Rwandan genocide slips further and further from the media’s eye, a still much misunderstood tragedy. Due process is vital, but if the wheel of justice turns too slowly it runs the risk of going nowhere at all.

The Swahili Speakers – 18/8/2011

In Arusha’s Empire Sports Bar, Philbert and I meet David, a young Tanzanian hip hop artist come to listen to Warriors from the East, a reggae band playing at Empire. As we talk, it becomes apparent that he believes there is a great deal wrong with Tanzania. ‘I hate communism,’ he says, ‘Ujamaa was terrible.’ He is referring to the economic policy of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere. Began in 1967, Nyerere wanted to create a self-sufficient ‘African socialism’ but the economic consequences were terrible – two decades later, with the economy stagnant and the national debt rising, Nyerere resigned. David’s solution is the creation of a class system. One, he says, like the West.

Back in Engikaret I am speaking to another David. This one, David Ndadeba, is a teacher at the Engikaret secondary school and lives in the mission. I come across him fixing a bench just outside the mission compound and we start chatting. Then he points at a group of children who are arranging rocks and working with hoes. ‘Do you know what they are doing?’ he asks. I confess I do not and he explains: ‘They are Swahili Speakers. They are being punished. They must learn English so within the school compound, they must speak only English.’ It is, I am sure, an effective punishment.

More like the West. It is an aspiration one hears a lot in Tanzania. Indeed, Africa’s nationalist leaders of the mid-twentieth centuries seemed to embody this desire, from their centralising, rapidly industrialising policies to the simple act of wearing a suit. Many rejected symbols of the older generations – Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah carried out a concerted campaign against the old Ghanaian chiefs, a symbol of the past and a rival power base which could not be tolerated in a ‘modern’ centralised state.

The punishment of the Swahili Speakers at Engikaret seems an extension of this. Swahili, it is implied, is not the way to success. Working within Tanzania or even the wider East African Community will not provide you with a real income – one must be able to deal with the West, the British, Americans and numerous Canadians in Tanzania and abroad, on their own terms.

Then there are the consequences of trying to emulate the West, a practice which much of the development agenda are only too happy to encourage. No one could dispute that access to clean water, power, schools, hospitals etc. is preferable to not having these things, but when the West and their economic gurus a the IMF and World bank trumpet the virtues of free markets and unrestrained capitalism (while maintaining crippling trade tariffs on African agricultural produce) the benefits are less clear. The policies forced on African economies by the West in exchange for IMF loans under the Structural Adjustment Programmes only served to exacerbate the problem. The IMF tried to make Africa more like the West and the result were an economic disaster. They did not understand Africa but instead carried on believing the West had got everything right and that there was ‘no alternative’. These beliefs seem to still hold sway in Tanzania, as the comments of both Davids suggest. For their sake, I hope there is an alternative and that the West stops pretending they have all the answers.

The Railway – 13/8/2011

I step cautiously across the old wooden sleepers, each one less stable than the last. Through the gaps I can see two iron girders and then the drop into the shallow stream twenty feet below. As each sleeper wobbles, I slow down, my mind running through my options should the sleepers give way. I am taking a walk along the path of the railway line from Njiro, a posh suburb filled with the mansions of the super-rich of Arusha (and a few UN employees). The line actually begins in Moshi, a city some two hours east of Arusha and my walk should take me into the heart of West Arusha where our hotel is situated. Starved of government funds, the line has been disused for a few years now and is overgrown in places. However, given the Tanzanian tendency to put off maintenance work until something actually breaks, the sleepers are probably much older. As I cross the bridge I start to wonder exactly how old the sleepers are and I imagine rotten wood underneath, waiting to crumble under my weight and send me flailing into the stream.

Halfway across there is a hole where a sleeper has rotted away entirely leaving only a norrow beam, maybe two inches wide, resting precariously on the girders. I have seen locals crossing this bridge, one wheeling his bicycle along the rails that still exist there, but for me this is too much. I do not trust that narrow piece of ill-maintained wood to carry me across to the next sleeper, nor do I trust that sleeper to be stable enough to jump onto. I hesitate and from the sturdier concrete bridge to my left I hear three local women laughing at my predicament. Nevertheless, I choose safety over pride and head to the concrete bridge.

The walk itself was an interesting one, unstable bridges apart. As I have mentioned, Njiro is a well-heeled area and the Njiro shopping complex provides a cinema, a supermarket costing over-priced western goods and various restaurants, all of which provide you with a menu when you sit down in the central courtyard – there may be starvation north of here, but at Njiro there is more choice than you can possible manage. It is very much a place for the Mzungu – locals choosing to eat at the more reasonable cafes on the side of the Njiro Road.

From the level crossing on Njiro Road, however, the disused railway line provides a completely different image. Things change as soon as you step off the road and onto the tracks – now used as a footpath. Away to the left, in stark contrast to the gated mansions of Njiro, is a maze of small shakes made of wood, mud and corrugated iron, people wandering the streets with their cattle. This continues for much of the line into Arusha, very few people are working although at one stage I see some women tending to a small field next to the railway line. For some reason, it is the women who seem to be the only ones working – I come across another group burning rubbish and a larger one washing their clothes and their children in a stream (this one crossed by a more stable bridge). As in Maasailand, it seems unemployment is rife and the people on the track regard me with suspicion. Most people in Tanzania will greet you in passing, either in English or Kiswahili, but here there is nothing. For the duration of my walk I do not see a single other white face. I am well off the tourist track and I can only imagine what the local people thought I was doing there.

Eventually, the tracks open out in front of me – the single track I had been following splitting into five, with a sixth joining it from my left. This is the old Arusha station, the end of the line. The whole place is disused. I come to a warehouse first next to a broken crane before arriving at the passenger terminal. It is a low building, the size of a small town’s station in England and, despite being boarded up, the sign for the ticket office remains along with a rusted sign proclaiming in large letters ‘ARUSHA’.

I say the station, like the whole line, is disused, but this is not quite true. People sit as if waiting for a train and by the ticket office some people are cooking on a small fire. At the edge of the siding I see small structures covered in blue plastic sheeting, the homes of the homeless. It may not be in use as a station, but it is still being used in some way.

Next to the station, however, I spot some buildings I recognise. Behind a concrete wall topped with barbed wire is the area known as Shoprite  - the compound of shops, restaurants, internet cafes and even a Barclays bank that is also Mzungu central, the average Saturday night crowd at the Empire Sports Bar being predominantly non-Tanzanian. From a trip through an area where I was the only white man I have arrived next to the place in Arusha where you are most likely to see white people. It is separated from the residents of Arusha station by a concrete wall and thousands upon thousands of shillings. For them, it might as well be on the moon.

Supply Problems – 12/8/2011

This week provided a real sense of achievement. Having dug trenches and shifted rocks for two weeks, we finally have a foundation wall protruding above ground level. Unlike the grunt work of the previous weeks, this felt like something that had required thought and at least a limited amount of skill as well as providing a small yet visible testament to our labours. We are unique amongst volunteers in this, many others complaining of the lack of a tangible product of their work teaching or working in care.

 

The foundation wall under construction

The main reason for our slow progress has been supply shortages of one kind or another. About halfway through last week we ran out of rocks to use as large aggregate. In order to get more we needed a flatbed truck to transport them from five minutes down the road where there lay a plentiful supply of appropriate boulders. Unfortunately, while the mission possessed such a vehicle, they did not possess a working one so we had to wait five days for the truck to be fixed before making four journeys up the road to excavate rocks with a pickaxe and our bare hands.

The other shortage we experienced was water. Again it was having a truck in which to transport the water to the site which was the problem and eventually we resorted to sticking four lengths of hose together to get the water from the mission’s tank to the site. Breakdowns are not uncommon here with few cars produced later than the mid-1990s in general use and a tendency to drive them to breaking point rather than keeping them maintained.

Such supply problems are frequent in Africa, and not just with water or materials or even working vehicles. The key shortage is power. The mains, such as they are, provide at best an unreliable supply of power to some areas and none at all to others while generators frequently fail. At our hotel in Arusha, the Meru House Inn, as at other such places one needs to be opportunistic with the shower, hot water availability fluctuating with the temperamental generator. The lack of electricity is a problem across the continent from Nigeria to South Africa, usually ranked among the ‘developed’ countries of the world. As the man we met in an Arusha internet cafe asked, how can you have a business without power?

The only enterprises without such problems are the high-end hotels and those buildings being funded by the Chinese. These are the ones that go up in record time while local builds look like they were started decades ago and will take at least as long again to finish. The Chinese ones are easy to spot, they are the ones with cranes.

However, one thing we are not short of at Engikaret is labour. While volunteers are sparse, it is not uncommon for unemployed Maasai wandering past our site to offer their services, sometimes for as little as 5,000 Tanzanian Shillings (or £2) a day. When we explain that we are volunteers and there is no money, they wander off. It seems that while Maasai women do all the work around the house, their husbands and sons are struggling to get any job, no matter how ill-paid. Many people at home have an idyllic vision of Maasai life – tall, noble warriors in their traditional red robes watching over their flock or taking part in traditional ceremonies and doing their famous pogo-like dance. Certainly these things happen, but the reality is that, like so many Africans, they struggle to get by. Rural Tanzanian life is far from idyllic.

Safari – 5/8/2011 – 8/8/2011

The tembo

 

They say the camera never lies. Even if this were true, it is also the case that the camera does not always tell the whole truth. Nowhere did I come to appreciate this more than in the Serengeti.

We were spending a four-day weekend on safari, starting at Tarangire before moving on to the Serengeti and then finishing up in the Ngorongoro Crater. The animals themselves were spectacular and it was a thrill to see zebras, gazelles, lions, cheetahs, rhinos and all manner of other animals in the wild when I had previously only seen them in photographs or, sometimes, at the zoo. I was particularly impressed with the elephants, a favourite animal of mine. Huge, plodding and somehow relaxed, they wandered their way across the savannah seemingly at ease with everyone and everything around them, pausing only to much on a few blades of grass, their very presence exuding a solidity and a slow but determined progress. Occasionally, the safaris became less of a tour and more of a stage show. In Tarangire, we stopped next to a row of other cars, bristling with long-lense cameras and binoculars (these things always gather around the exciting or potentially exciting things). On the other side of a dip, about two hundred yards away, was a flat areas backed by a small ridge and with a mound to the right of it. On the flat area grazed some zebra until, suddenly, they fled up the mound and away to our right – exit pursued by a lion. The cameras clicked and whirred and the spectators gasped their approval before, when the lion had given up and sat down in the sun, the cars pulled away in search of another performance.

The next day, in the Serengeti, the actors did not seem so willing to perform and so they were cajoled into making an appearance. We could just about make out a lioness concealed in the long grass about fifteen yards away, but she was well hidden. In order to get a better view, the driver of one of the other cars – there were about four or five there – stepped out of his vehicle, picked up a rock and hurled it in the general direction of the lioness. As it landed, she raised her head but, as if from nowhere, about five yards closer to us, a large, maned head suddenly emerged from under the long grass, the crowd once again gasping in amazement. The head looked around for a few minutes before, having ascertained that nothing was happening, re-submerging itself below the grass, leaving the savannah looking as if nothing had ever happened. This was Africa on display, an exciting performance certainly and something which could not be seen anywhere in the world.

This thought returns me to my point about the inaccuracy of the camera. It was a thought which first struck me while watching from the lip of the Ngorongoro Crater a black dot lumbering its way across the crater’s floor (binoculars told me it was an elephant). However, I did not fully understand it until I tried to capture the Serengeti on film. It is a vast, flat expanse of land punctuated by a few large hills and flat-topped trees. It is the sort of place where the horizon is formed not by some obstacle but by the Earth falling away, its curvature taking it out of our range of vision.

All of my attempts to capture this image failed. No phtograph can convey the sheer size of this place, where the sky is huge and Africa stretches away from you in every direction, seemingly forever. The thousands of words told by these pictures are all too small, too limited. I could describe, I could even show you pictures, a wide column of buffalo, strung out for miles, marching towards water, or perhaps gazelles fleeing a lioness across the plain, or even the huge Ngorongoro Crater itself, twelve kilometres wide, capped by dense cloud creating a bubble which feels cut off from the rest of the world. And you would nod and imagine, but it would not be the same. It is not something you can experience through a picture, it cannot be properly experienced anywhere other than Africa. And it is an experience worth having.

 

On the prowl

Kilimanjaro Mass – 2/8/2011

For the boys and girls of the SUMA Engikaret Secondary School, the day begins at 5:30am when they are summoned by bells to mass in the round church next door. Through the large wooden double doors one enters an outer passage that curves left past the vestry before passing under a cross and into a large, open room capped by a small dome. Before the altar there are six rows of wooden benches arranged in three blocks but, apart from the large crucifix looming above the altar the darkness makes it difficult to see other details. Usually the church is lit by solar power but today it is not working so a lamp is set on the altar along with two candles and teh boys place torches in the window sills but even these do not provide a great deal of light.

As Father Renatus and Father Matthew enter, the children rise and begin to sing. ‘Praise him, praise him,’ they sing, but it is not the uncertain, monotonous drone that I remember from the religious services and assemblies at my own school. It is full-throated and harmonious, different groups of students taking different parts. It is beautiful.

Father Renatus welcomes the congregation – ‘my little brothers and sisters’ – and says a few words reflecting on weakness and the necessity of both faith and hard work. Faith alone will not help you in your exams, he warns. The service proceeds, in English, much like those at home, with prayers, singing and readings. The first reading is given by one of the boys while a girl holds the lamp over the lectern. His English is good but when he struggles with one part the padre stands behind him and intones the problematic words: ‘And he will build up Zion again and appear in all his glory.’

Then, things change. The children rise and begin to shuffle back and forth in a sort of dance. From one of the rows a drumbeat emerges and the children begin to sing in Kiswahili and the language of Father Renatus’ own tribe, Kihaya. It is a strange mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, a blending of traditions, just as early Christianity took on ancient religious traditions in Europe.

The service over, the children to to wash, eat and then at 8:00am begin lessons. I stroll the short distance back to the compound. It is still cold and not yet light but, away to my left, the horizon is turning red. And then, as I emerge into more open ground I can see, silhouetted against the reddening sky, a black shape rising from the horizon. It is not a shape I have seen before from Engikaret – it is wide, culminating in a flat top. It is a famous silhouette. For the first time I see Uhuru Peak, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest point on the continent. Even at this distance, even only in silhouette, it is an awe-inspiring sight and I am again struck by the size of this huge continent. I feel small.

Working with the Maasai – 1/8/2011

Today I saw a goat butchered. We had been continuing to prepare the foundations of the school in the morning so didn’t see it slaughtered but on returning to the compound we see it layed out in the back yard, its throat slit almost to the point of decapitation. It is skinned, cut open and, having removed the goat’s front legs, the butcher begins on the guts. Squatting over the carcass with a knife, he slices the oesophagus, releasing blood and bile, then he cuts out the goat’s liver and lungs before giving the intestines to another man to empty. Rather him than me. My gaze returns to the goat. Its skin is splayed around it, blood mixing with the dirt on the floor. Its semi-severed head seems somehow forlorn, its eye staring into the distance. Almost every part of the goat is used, although that night I am not sure what part of the goat I am eating. I am not sure I want to know either.

Earlier in the day, Fundi an some of the mission’s other workers had been pouring water through a hose from a truck into one of the tanks the volunteers installed. They are using an engine to pump the water and their first attempt ends in Fundi being soaked as the hose leaks and sprays him with water, causing much laughter. The second attempt is more successful but when the water has been transferred, Philbert notices that the water-level gauge is missing. Someone has opened the tank and taken it. Philbert says it was probably a mistake putting the tank in such an exposed location. Telling the children and villagers how important it is will do little, he believes.

I think back to something he told me in Arusha. Father Renatus has been trying to empower the Maasai women by giving them a cultural centre – a ring of zebra-striped mud huts – where they can sell the beads they make to passing tourists on the Nairobi Road.  However, this requires careful negotiation with the Maasai men so as not to cause too much disturbance. During the water project they made deals with the Maasai as well. I get the sense that while the mission is well within the village and intimately involved in its religious and educational life, it exists, if not actually in conflict, then certainly separately from the village.

Arusha – 29/7/2011-31/7/2011

For us, Arusha meant two things – internet and a shower. Having been out in the dust of Engikaret for a week, I was absolutely filthy. The mission house does have a bucket which can be used to take a shower, but there is so little water that it feels wrong to use it to remove dirt only to replace it the very next day when the people of the village need it for themselves and their animals. Thus, the hot shower at the Meru House Inn – four storeys arranged around three sides of a courtyard in West Arusha – feels fantastic and I come out feeling clean for the first time in days. Then the lights go out. The generator has stopped working and thus the hot water is finished. Still, even if the hot showers depend on an unreliable generator, it’s still more than we have out in the bush.

Arusha itself is Tanzania’s second city and a popular tourist destination, not so much for itself but for its location. In the shadow of Mount Meru, it is the jumping off point for climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or safari in Serengeti and Ngorongoro. As such, there is a fair number of locations dominated by foreigners. We eat dinner at one such place, the Blue Heron Inn. There we meet Shelby, an American volunteer formally on the water project but now working in a hospital. It is also Katie’s last few days in Tanzania, so it is something of a special occasion. The restaurant itself looks like a small safari lodge and we sit out in the garden at a low table with wicker arm chairs and sofas, eating by candlelight with a small pot of hot coals suspended from a tripod for warmth. It is a wonderful setting, a postcard version of an African safari lodge and the bushes and trees make a change from the dust and thornbushes. It is entirely patronised by foreigners.

After a night under a mosquito net we head to an internet cafe by the Projects Abroad office before meeting the other volunteers for a social. We arrive at the internet cafe at 9:45 and are told the generator will not be turned on for another fifteen minutes. While we wait one of the many tour company owners talks to us. There are many people in the city with companies offering safaris or treks up Kilimanjaro. They are easy to set up and offer the potential of a decent income stream but these smaller, local ones are often squeezed by mzungu – owned companies trying to establish a monopoly. He tells us about his work but when we mention the generators he repeats Father Matthew’s observations: ‘The President is useless, how can you have a business without electricity?’

From the internet cafe we go to the Projects Abroad office and thence by bus to the banks of Lake Diluti some thirty miles away. We sit with the other volunteers – mostly girls – at a long table on a terrace just by the lake drinking and eating barbecued meat. It makes a change from goat. The lake itself stretches away from us to heavily-wooded banks on the other side and after lunch we walk around it, a journey of some six or seven kilometres seeing studded vines, iguanas and high above us, monkeys climbing around the treetops making odd grunting noises.

Lake Diluti

Back in Arusha we dine with Phoebe, an Australian medical volunteer, at the Empire Sports Bar (an odd name for a building that is clearly less than fifty years old). It is situated next to a supermarket – Shoprite – after which the plaza of shops is commonly called. It is also ‘mzungu-central’, another area populated mainly (although not exclusively) by non-Tanzanians.

After dinner I head to meet some other volunteers at Via Via, an nightclub popular with volunteers and, again, mainly frequented by non-Tanzanians, although less so than the Blue Heron or Shoprite. It is mostly outdoors and while we are there a jazz band entertains us while we drink the local beer and Konyagi – a local spirit which tastes like gin but, as Philbert later remarked to me while I am nursing a headache the next morning, has ‘something evil’ in it.

The next day we catch a dala-dala from an eerily quiet bus station to return to Engikaret. Dala-dala drivers don’t usually leave until their bus is full if not over-full so the ride is cramped with four of us in a row meant for three but the journey is fairly quick, although still long enough to explain the rules of cricket to Philbert. When we arrive the village, like Arusha, is oddly quiet and Philbert and I sit in the mission house until we hear singing from outside. The boys have been to play football down the road and, although they lost, the singing sounds upbeat. Even so, with Thibaut and now Katie gone, the mission feels a little emptier than the previous week.

The Opinions of Father Matthew – 28/7/2011

When I arrived in Engikaret the schoolhouse we were to build was just a grid of half-completed trenches but, on the third day with the trenches dug we began to fill them with rocks to provide a base for the foundation wall. The rocks are heavy but most can be carried with those that cannot being rolled the twenty yards from the pile of rocks to the foundations. It is exhausting work, especially as Thibaut left in the morning to return to France in a great show of emotion, especially from Fundi, our foreman. Fundi is not his real name but is actually the Swahili word for a repair man or handyman – it is a nickname which reflects his many roles around the Engikaret mission. He is a small, friendly man, full of energy although not exactly the strictest when it comes to timekeeping, frequently announcing in mid-afternoon that ‘The work of today is enough’.

Afterwards, when the work of the day had been deemed to be enough, Katie and Philbert showed me the sights of Engikaret. Father Renatus’ round church; the large water tank they had constructed as part of the previous months’ water project (emblazoned with the Arsenal FC crest); the small secondary school with classrooms and boarding houses grouped around a circular underground water tank; and the larger state primary school, flying the flag of Tanzania.The tour takes around half an hour and we end up at the drop-in health centre, deserted initially but soon primary school children swarm around us. Some of them take my camera and sunglasses and, with a bit of guidance, start taking pictures. Eventually my things are returned to me and we hastily leave, more children following us – Katie and Philbert liken it to a zombie film.

This one grew rather attached to my sunglasses

Back in the compound, Katie and I try to teach some of the children how to play rugby. Katie has brought a ball with her from America and while most of the children stick to football, six or seven join us. They are enthusiastic but there are some problems with the rules, particularly only passing backwards. Nevertheless, we get a game of touch going and, with some bending of the rules on both sides, my team triumphs over Katie’s. One boy, Innocent, wearing a Barcelona FC shirt, takes to it greatly and as we head back for a much needed rest he is still playing with the ball which Katie decides to leave to the school.

In the compound, one of Father Renatus’ friends Father Matthew, has come to visit. He has been in Ethiopia for the past few months. I ask him what it is like and he says it is much worse than Tanzania, people are not interested in schools and parents need their children to work. ‘And they are lazy,’ he says, ‘very lazy.’

As the night draws in, I wonder why the generator has not been turned on yet. It is usually turned on at 7pm for three hours and, although there is some limited solar power, we have no real electricity and hence no light without it. Father Matthew says electricity is a real problem. ‘Our big men, the people in the positions, they do not live like us, they don’t have any idea. They have 24 hour generators, as do all the people they live with.’ It is a problem I have often observed at home – an elite so disconnected from ordinary life that they cannot begin to deal effectively with the problems of their country.

At the other end of the scale, Katie talks about the porters on Mount Kilimanjaro. Despite being paid 7000 Tanzanian shillings, the equivalent of £2.80, per day, it is a popular job. Similarly, a major Tanzanite mining company grants land to local people to mine despite having already deemed it without Tanzanite. It is a desperate life for these people, even more so than the terrible conditions of the miners, and women from the village are often raped by the miners – the men having to patrol the perimeter at night. And yet, they choose to do it, just as the porters choose to do their jobs. The alternative, Father Matthew assures us, is much worse – working for 3000 shillings a day as a farm labourer with no food or water provided for you.

The example of the Tanzanite mine demonstrates another of Africa’s problems. It is not, contrary to common belief, a poor continent, or rather it should not be. However, now as under colonialism, whenever resources are found, whether it is cobalt in the Congo, gold in South Africa, diamonds in Sierra Leone, oil in Nigeria or Tanzanite, which can only be found in Tanzania, it is outsiders who mine, export and refine it. They gain the profits and expatriate them to their own countries, the only Africans to earn any real money are the elites as the companies pay off ‘the right people’ – or the wrong people as Father Matthew observes. It used to be the West, but now of course it is increasingly the Chinese. Either way, such investments rarely help Africa.