tomintanzania

My sister is here and it is time for another photo update:

Atop of the lookout above my house

Imogen is a teacher and she joined in on a class.

We held an impromptu dance competition.

We were very busy visiting lots of places. Here I am with John’s family at the Rehab Cente. He is the geezer with the skin cancer.

After the village we went on safari and stayed in a fantastic place by the river.

The view from the front. There were wild animals all around us.

We had this beast all to ourselves.

Only a little posed

And posed once again. Tomorrow we go to Zanzibar for a week of beaches.

I spent 4 days this week in Kondoa which is a small remote town north of where my village is. Dodoma is one of 27 regions in the country and Kondoa is one of 6 districts within the region. The blind school I’m living at is meant to serve all 6 districts but noone from Kondoa ever goes to the school. I met one of the leaders of the blind community there and I had a meeting with the District Education Officer who oversees all 210 schools in the District. He has agreed that he will find funding to transport 4 Kondoa children to and from school at the start and end of each term. I have to handle the initial costs of getting them and a guardian to the school for registration as well as things like buckets and uniforms, but that is all cheap. All being well, this promises to be a sustainable endeavour and should see other children coming to the school in future years.

I hired a taxi for a day and visited several villages. I think in some places a 4×4 would have struggled and i have no idea how the crappy Toyota Corolla made it. At times we had to drive down dried river beds and narrow paths carved out by people’s feet.

This is Lucy who goes to a secondary school in the district. She is the only blind student there and no teachers can read Braille, so her education is somewhat futile but she tries her best. I gave her a ream of braille paper for her notes and a talking watch.

The guy on the left is Abubakir. He lost his sight as an adult and depends on his family for support. He also got a watch as well as a white cane. I do worry though that by giving him a cane it gives him the identity of being blind and so might be treated differently by the community. In the middle is Amiri who is a local leader and on the right is Omari who is the regional representative of the Tanzanian League for the Blind.

I was mobbed at one school. Perhaps as many as 500 children flooded from the classrooms to investigate why a white man was there.

I was invited to dinner by this woman. I wasn’t keen on going because it had been a long day but I’m very glad I did. Mariam lives in this room with 3 other people. The room extends no more than a meter to the right of the image and I’m sitting against the front wall. She cooked up a real feast of rice, chicken and vegetables. It was probably the best meal I’ve had in someone’s home in Tanzania.

I took this last night. I cooked up ‘Spicy Tom-Meat-O’ which consists of spaghetti, tomatoes, frankfurters, onions and chillies. I gave a bowlful to these children and this was their reaction.

It’s been a while since I added some photos, so here goes:

This is Lake Victoria taken from my hotel room in Bukoba.

We’ve had some teachers training to work with special needs children living at the school for 6 weeks and this was their graduation ceremony. I had to stand up and introduce myself – I hate public speaking at the best of times and its even trickier when using another language. My piece seemed to go ok though and I got a couple of laughs at the intended moments.

Their ceremonies have far more music and dancing than ours back at home.

Some of the choir are reading braille

The kids go crazy when music plays. They are all really good dancers. Ive learnt a little tribal dancing, but it usually just results in people laughing their guts up.

After the ceremoney the adults were having special food and sodas and the children were eating their usual crap, so I bought them all a drink.

Not at all camp.

I gave my camera to a boy and this is the photo he took. I think its pretty good.

The spare balloons were a big hit.

One boy converted the broken balloons into a catapult.

I gave out a few toy cars. This is Nico.

And this is Reuben. He is only 5 years old – that’s very young to be at boarding school.

I got home to see these two girls learning to cook on a tiny fire.

Finally, me outside my house with some children.

I was up early to visit Joel’s shop. He is blind but is determined to make his own living. With some of the money friends have given me I provided the stock to kick start this small business.

The outside of his house and shop – he serves people through that small window.

Time stamp. Again, way too early.

I then headed back down the road to meetup with some of the teachers as we were going on a….

…road trip! A teacher does some work for a UK publishing house and he gets paid a western salary which means he is one of the very few to have a car. We were going to Hombolo which is perhaps 40km away from my village. There is a primary school there with a tiny residential unit for blind and partially sighted children who can’t get a place in the specialist school I’m living at.

Here they are. I had some items left over from a previous project and so distributed a few things. The guy on the left is Tom and he is an albino. There should be 6 more children but they can’t afford the tiny amount it costs to travel to school at the start of each term.

Here are the guys I went with as well as some of the Hombolo teachers. There are two blind teachers at the school and I gave them talking watches. One of them kissed my hand and said I’d given him a new life. That was perhaps a bit over the top but I’m amazed just how much of a difference the watches make to the people out here. My sister is visiting me in April and bringing out a further 20 so that should keep me nicely stocked up.

We left the school around lunchtime and I noticed the temperature gauge…

Our next destination was a vineyard. An Italian has set up a wine-making business here. I was expecting it to consist of a few mudhuts and so was surprised to see how advanced everything is – I didn’t expect to find this in the middle of the bush. The tour was more centred on tastings rather than finding out how the stuff was made.

I was expecting the tastings to consist of just a couple of mouthfuls, but we were handed full glass after full glass.

I felt a little fuzzy and warm here.

In fact this is probably how I was seeing things. These guys were emptying crates of grapes into the crusher.

Omary and David have cropped up in previous ADIMLs

David really hit the wine hard. He likes wine but doesn’t often have the opportunity to drink it – here it was plentiful and free, so he went to town.

For some reason I’m slightly red faced here.

After a few hours we headed back towards home.

Time check.

You can observe David dozing in the back.

And here he is again.

We stopped off in Ihumwa for some food. The butchers don’t mess around with fridges and I’m sure the concept of hygiene is unknown to them, but they do have very tasty meat which is prepared daily and so fresh enough for me to not worry a great deal. Here we picked up 2kgs of goat.

The butcher prepared and barbecued it on site.

This man came over to have his photo taken. at the end I tried to shake his hand only to realise it was actually a withered stump. Whenever I read the numberplate I think it says something else.

Here are two of the teachers on either side and the man in the middle is our driver. For some reason I thought having a hired designated driver would mean he didn’t drink, but oh no.

Our dinner eventually arrives in individul plastic bags and we are also given a plate of tomato and chilli.

The woman on the left is the one who served us drinks and the other two are the guys who cooked the food. If there are child labour laws here, they are not enforced.

Time check.

One of the many feral dogs hoped we had dropped a treat for him.

We then returned back to our village for drinks at the local bar.

David and I headed back to our homes around 10pm.

Although we bumped into Omary on the way.

Final time stamp.

This is taken outside my front door. Good night.

On Friday I completed my main project here. I said a while ago how I hoped to give all 100 school children a bag with various items. The money you guys and others have given me enabled me to do it and everyone got the following items:

o Tshirt
o Socks
o Pants
o 2 pens
o Sweets
o Biscuits
o Toothbrush
o Toothpaste
o Skin cream
o Soap
o Comb
o Shoes

It was actually quite tricky to get hold of all the items as no shop stocked more than a handful of any one thing. Also getting everything back to the village by bus was often quite an effort, but it is done now and the children were delighted.

The contents of the bag

I was pleased to be able to clear some space in my house. Everything came in under budget also. I had planned on 10,000tshs per child and it ended up costing 9,000tshs (£4.50, $6.50)

Everything was arranged into small, medium and large sizes

Then they filed into the room in batches

Here are some of the children immediately after