tomintanzania

I have spent today visiting a blind community in Dodoma. Unlike Buigiri, the village in which I am based, they get no support from the government or abroad. They therefore make their living by begging where they can expect to make between 20-70p a day (30c-$1). Many of them received their education in the school which I am based at – though as they couldn’t afford secondary education (primary is free, secondary is not) then their only option was to turn to begging in the city.

As they are extremely poor, their children will also miss out on education, thus creating a cycle. The guy I’m with in some of the videos is Mr Omar and he is the regional officer for the Tanzanian League For The Blind. His aim is to help these people wherever possible and to try and break them out of the cycle. He gets no funds though and so it’s a very tricky problem to resolve.

I brought them some rice, beans, onions, cooking oil, soap, sweets and fish which should feed them for a month or so. I hope to return early in the new year with clothes, maize and exercise books and pens for the children. I’ll be using a little of the money kindly donated by you guys for that.

Peter and his two children. He is blind.

The market where I buy my food.

The food for the families

Possibly the coolest hat I’ve seen. I told him so and everyone laughed.

After the progress of yesterday, we’ve hit a brick wall today. We saw the surgeon this morning and he is unwilling to operate unless John has a CT scan – the nearest CT machine is 350km away in Dar es Salaam. Even if he was happy to go ahead with surgery, the equipment isn’t working.

As you might imagine, John is somewhat terrified. To him cancer means death as it often goes untreated here. I’ve tried explaining to him what cancer is and the different stages of cancer, but I don’t know how much sinks in.

The total cost of getting a diagnosis was only around £8 – that includes travel, dressings and hospital fees. Yet most people live a subsistance life where they grow their own food and have very little money – therefore even this tiny cost is beyond the reach of many. The treatment may be somewhat more expensive. Assuming we can get it.

As for last night – it was good fun. David ate prawns and then octopus and we had some South African wine – all things he has never tasted before. I don’t think he was too taken by the octopus. I did warn him it is something os a strange sensation, but he is glad he tried something new. We then hit the spirits so he could try new flavours. I ended up rather tipsy and this morning’s hospital trip was therefore not much fun!

On the lash

Some kids’ rendition of my house. The writing means ‘Tom’s house’

I was playing with the blind kids and at dinner, they invited me in. We had rice and beans. The dining hall erupted into laughter when they heard I was eating with them.

This bastard invaded my house. It doesnt look big, but it was massive. And fast. I managed to destroy it though.

Samson playing in my house. His brothers are called Jonah and Israel. Talk about religious!

My recent postings have had something of the doom and gloom about them – but life out here is not bad. Really. I just like to have a bit of a moan sometimes and receptive ears are few and far between here. I think with everything in life there are politics and cultural roadblocks to deal with. I spend almost all of my time with children – their only concern is whether or not they can find enough fun things to do in the day and its good unwinding with them. My swahili improves a little each day. Yesterday I found myself having a conversation lasting around 5 minutes with Thomas Moja before my vocab dried up. Very few words bear any relation to English and the word structure is awkward to say the least – many words start with such stellar letter combinations as Mp… or Ny…

I have discovered the woman who lives in the house nearest mine makes ice lollies which she sells for the princely sum of 30Tshs – about 1.5p (or 0.03c). Again, only the relatively wealthy students can afford them so I’ve taken to buying perhaps 30 at a time and handing them out. I do feel somewhat self conscious giving lollies and sweets to children, but the News of the World doesn’t have a presence here as yet, so I should be OK. I’ve also used the power of penny sweets to condition the children of the rehab centre to learn my name. I would ask ‘Mimi jina nini?’ (pidgeon Swahili for ‘My name is what?’) and the response would be ‘Msungu!’ (White man). Eventually one young boy said ‘Tomah’ and I gave him a sweet – now their initial shyness has worn off and they run around me shouting ‘Hello Tomah, how are you?’ which is the extent of most of their English.

The children learn English by rote. They can say the words and give replies, but they don’t know the meaning of what they say. For instance with some of the older children i might say ‘How are you?’ and they respond with ‘Fine thank you, teacher’. There is never any deviation from this, they are always ‘fine’ and I am nearly always a teacher. They therefore manage to combine speaking the language with not knowing the language – quite a feat! I have to be careful of some children though as they have had no education whatsoever and feel awkward when I ask them how they are in English as they don’t know the response and then they seize up and won’t even repeat ‘fine thank you’ which their friends are whispering to them. It is sad coming across these children as their future really is bleak. The other kids with primary education at least have some hope, although their future will probably just involve farming the land and at the very most they might become a teacher.

Anyhow, pics:

I stuck an over-ripe pineapple on a pole to lure the local monkeys for a photo-op

Some of the younger children from the school.

Myself and Thomas Moja. He laughs uncontrollably when I speak swahili to him and that in turn cracks me up. His blindness is caused by cataracts – something which would be resolved almost overnight in the west.

Kenny – he never stops smiling

Some of the rehab centre children

Jared is one of the adults from the centre. Here he is modelling his new collapsable white stick.

Being mobbed. From L to R Nasson, Ayama, Joseph, Savella, me, Moses, Unknown, Abdul, Samson, Mordeh and Winnie. Several of these children I remember as toddlers from my last visit and they play in or around my house every day.

I got to tell someone yesterday he has cancer – that was a first for me! I assumed he knew when he showed me his medical records but he is blind and his family illiterate and the medical system here doesn’t seem to be advanced enough to actually verbally inform you of a disagnosis.

John is around 40, his wife is also blind and he has 3 children, the eldest of whom is around 12. He is the only English speaker in the blind rehab centre (a community of 11 families who live and farm in a small compound) but when I arrived in Buigiri he was in a hospital in the neighbouring region where he is initially from and where his extended family are still based. I heard he had a wound on his head and assumed he’d fallen over, as is the common cause of injuries amongst the blind here. I later heard his wound was natural and his sister had had the same problem, so naturally cancer came to mind.

He discharged himself from hospital last week and returned to his family in Buigiri. The following morning he came to my house. We’ve always got on well – he is an intelligent man and I often use him as something of a contact within the centre. He told me his discharged himself for two reasons, firstly his extended family were having difficulty supporting him (all they had to do was supply him with food and bandages) during his month stay in hospital, and secondly word had gotten to him that I was back in Buigiri and he was worried that he would miss me if he stayed there. I didn’t quite know how to deal with that infortmation. He was a fool for discharging himself, but so be it.

He has a cancerous ulcer in the skin atop his head. When he first arrived in hospital it had been untreated and when the nurse scraped away the dead skin various insects dropped out. Since his return to Buigiri it has become infected once again as he does not have the resources to get to the nearest clinic, let alone to pay for the Hydrogen Peroxide and bandages the wound requires. It stinks. I tried to stay upwind of him, but when the wind changed I struggled not to retch.

The guy who runs the centre is trying to disown John as he doesn’t want to take responsibility for his treatment. He is claiming that John isn’t an actual member of the centre, rather he is there as the husband of his blind wife. Not only has he been a resident there for 13 years, but he has also been a chairman – a position only attainable by members of the centre. Kenneth, who runs the place, recently had £2,500 spent on his own medical treatment by the centre’s UK based benefecators. He was grumbing to me yesterday about having already spent £7 on John and he was unwilling to spend more.

The centre has a car, donated by a school in the UK. The main purpose of the car is to take members to the hospital in Dodoma when they are ill. This has in the past included everyone resident in the centre, but Kenneth is refusing John help, insisting his family must take responsibility – a family who have zero resources whatsoever. I managed to secure a compromise whereby John is hitching a ride with Kenneth when Kenneth uses the car to come to town for personal reasons on Monday. I’ll come in with him as hopefully the presence of a white person should ensure he gets better treatment in the hospital. Currently his only medical advice is to change the dressings each day and to use the Hydrogen Peroxide to remove the dead skin. This in no way helps cure the problem. To the best of my knowledge there is only one place in the country equipped to deal with cancer and that is 350km away in Dar es Salaam. We’ll see what the doctor says on Monday and then go about sorting something out in Dar. In theory if he can get there, then the medical treatment is free for people like him. Kenneth will no doubt refuse to give him the pittance for the bus fare, even though he receives funds from the UK for eventualities such as this. An added problem is that John would need a sighted person to accompany him and as his wife is also blind and his children too young, there are no obvious candidates. Plus his guide would need accomodation and food whilst in Dar.

I think it is a bizarre situation when someone doesn’t receive medical treatment not cos the hospital refuses it on the grounds of finance, but because they can’t even afford the bus fare to get to the hospital in the first place! Hopefully we’ll get something figured out though.

John

Two of John’s kids

John in 2006 with Harry in the middle

John’s wife in 2006. The baby is now the young boy in the second photo.

ADIML (if you look carefully enough)

A fake sleep photo

Time stamp#1

I have no running water so I fill this tank up each week by hand.

It is surprisingly tricky taking a pic whilst brushing teeth

I boil some water up – most of it was added to a bucket of cold water for a rudimentary shower and the remainder was used to boil two eggs for my breakfast

I read yesterday’s paper which I hadn’t gotten around to looking at.

I had an ant infestation the previous night, so I located the entry point and made it an ant no-go area

Time check#2. This is a talking watch. I bought 20 or so out with me

I had some time to kill so picked a DVD to watch. The second review from the bottom cracks me up

I bought out a portable DVD player and I’m mighty glad I did. The film was a little rubbish though

I was interrupted by Jared. He lives in the nearby adult blind rehabilitation centre. I needed to know how many people there were in each of the 11 families there

I do my maths for later

Time check

This is the house I’m living in

Very few white people come to this part of the country and I’m something of a curiosity. As such whereever I go kids either run away or come up to me to say ‘Hello sir, how are you’ or somesuch

As I pass a classroom in the blindschool I hear some children singing so stick my head around the door

More singing

I walk into a dormitory to say hello to some children. Some are on a bed listening to a rather crackly radio

Other kids have less entertainment. There isn’t a great deal to do here without vision

Some sighted kids are playing a game of marbles with seeds. I figure out how to play, join in and get beaten

I swing by the only place to dine for a chip omelette

There is a sloping pool table in the village. The cloth is torn, balls are chipped and the sticks are cracked and missing their tips. It’s good fun though and I can hold my own against the locals

On my way back to the blind school I see Charlie and Barracka. Barracka never stops smiling

I join them for a quick photo

As I continue, I spot some kids doing their washing

Others clean their plates

I get home and invite in some children to watch Die Hard With A Vengence. Some have probably never seen a film before but I’ve learnt that films with black men in lead roles go down well, especially if guns are involved, so this seemed to be a good choice, even if they do look somewhat bored

When the film is over I head over to the rehab centre – the road is pretty decent for Tanzania

Here I am with David – he is my main contact here and is a top bloke

We arrive at the centre and check out the 1000KG of maize I’ve bought.

As per usual, the children sniff me out

We divide the maize up amongst the families, hence the earlier calculations

Time check

The families potter around outside with some of the grain

Children here don’t really do the whole cleanliness thing

They seem happy enough though

Leia is one of the adult blind

No grain is wasted as every spilt piece is collected

Eli is the son of one of the blind people

This is Kenneth – he ferried the maize from the neighbouring village over 2 days on his bike.

Time check and my daily dose of choccie

I settle down to some serious MCOG watching. Best Program Ever

I’m joined by a lizard. He lives in my roof

I’m invited to David’s house for dinner. He cooks a mean curry considering he can’t really see anything

He then kicks my butt playing Poppit. It’s the one toy the children have but most of the time it doesn’t have batteries

I return home to find I infact have two lizards

Time check – and view of my kitchen

Bed beckons and I leave you with a slightly simple pose.