A typical day in Milingano

Hello again!

I suddenly realised the other day how used to life in Milingano I had become. I sometimes forget how different everything is from home.  People keep asking me questions about the little things here and I never have time to reply to all my emails, sorry.  The only way I can give you some idea of what it is really like is to write a diary of a typical day. This may be long and boring so please forgive me... but one day I will be using this to revive my memories of Tanzania!

I sometimes forget how different everything is from home.

I wake up most days at around 6am with the sound of the cockerals and the housegirls Melania and Joyce, busily preparing our breakfast in the kitchen which is separate to the house, just outside my bedroom. M and J are both fantastic and I love them to bits. In spite of the loud greetings I hear them calling to passers by I usually doze off again until they start clonking cuttlery around in the living room.  When I say living room, what I mean is a room with an enormous wooden table, which the carpenters recently made especially for us to save our backs, as compared to them we are giants!  We have four bright orange plastic garden chairs to sit on and a very small side table.  It is sparse but so much better than I had imagined it would be!

I usually climb out of my mosi net at around 7am, get dressed and go outside to the 'bathroom'.  On the way I greet the housegirls, who always say 'Good morning sister, how are you?', and the children playing outside the house next to ours.   I use a cup to get some warm water out of the bucket (heated earlier by the housegirls on a charcoal stove) and pour it into a plastic bowl to wash my face.  The loo is a hole in the ground in the middle of the bathroom (a bit like a shed!), with a wooden cover.  It smells a bit pongy but its not too bad. Going to the loo in the day is far more pleasant than at night as you don't have to deal with the cockroaches that come running out to see what is being deposited!

Usually by the time I have washed my face, breakfast is all laid out on the table.  A plate, a glass (or a jar as we keep breaking glasses!) and a cup and sauce for each of us, usually a plate of bread in the middle and a flask of boiling water for our tea.  It has taken some time, understandably (especially considering they only have a large pan and a charcoal stove to cook with!), but M and J now make pretty fantastic bread in the form of a kind of bun round.  When we first moved in you could probably have knocked someone out with it or otherwise had hours of fun making playdough shapes! Now though, it is light and almost the texture of cake but less crumbly. I'm so impressed!   Thankfully we have discovered you can bu Marmite and jam in Tanga otherwise it would have been a very dull breakfast. We occasionally have a bowl of Ugi for a change, which is a runny porridge a bit like semolina, made from maize flour. It takes some getting used to but with plenty of sugar its pretty good!  We use powdered milk in our tea which also takes a bit of getting used to but its not bad.

School is only 5 minutes walk away so we head off at about 7.45am.  As soon as we reach the market square we are surrounded by children eager to carry our bags for us.  It took a while for them to understand how our backpacks work but now they just sling them on their backs, stick their own bag on their head and off they go! Most children wear school uniform although they do not have to. Usually their shirts only have enough buttons as they need to retain their dignity and sometimes not this many! They are generally an off-white, verging on brown colour, often with at least a few holes or even great big rips here and there.  The girls wear royal blue skirts below the knee and boys wear long shorts.  Most children wear flip flops or plastic sandals, some are barefoot and occasionally I spot a  pair of shoes and black and white stripey socks!  Most school bags are old plastic carrier bags or very poor quality draw string bags, which always reveal through the holes the dirty books they carry in them.

When we arrive at school most children have already been there since 7am and are doing chores or standing to attention in assembly outside.  We often witness caning at this time which is horrible to see, and something the school is working on erradicating.  We greet all the staff by shaking their hands and either saying 'onga' (kisamba) or 'good morning'. Most of the staff speak basic to good English so that makes things easier.  We have to sign in, writing the Kiswahili time rather than English time, which is 6 hours behind.  THeir clock starts when the sun rises at 6am (0:00 Kiswahili time).

Lessons start at 8am, and I usually have about 4 a day to teach, using the time in between to make resources, mark books and plan lessons. As most days there are not enough teachers, I often make my lessons over run or teach extra 'fun' lessons in between.  When we arrived in Milingano, neither of my classes could say much more than 'Good morning teacher'.  (This is nice as the whole class stands to attention as I enter the room - so Victorian!)  So we had to start at the beginning, teaching the alphabet and basic greetings.  Here they have about 5 different greetings and several different responses all based on 'how are you?' so even teaching 'hello' was a challenge! We've ended up making up all sorts of cheesy adaptation of songs from the Sound of Music to help children learn simple phrases.  My standard 1 class is still the hardest work as the children have not yet learned to read and write.  With 80-90 children in one room and not enough desks would be a challenge in their own language, but they are only just learning to write in Kiswahili so English is really tough. One of the things that holds them back is that many come to school with out a pencil or only a tiny stub, sharpened by a razor blade which they carry in their bag! Standard 3 is easier as about 2/3 of the 50-60 children who attend can write.  I still can't believe that I enjoy teaching kids who are aged between 10-17 years old so much! We have great fun and I never have any behaviour problems from them.

Just after noon we wander back home for lunch with our little entourage of pupils, and J and M give us some more bread.  They sometimes whip up a sauce made from vegetables but we're not keen on that so we usually have a 'salad' of carrots and peppers or cabbage and tomatoes. Occasionally the children give us eggs and when we have been to the farm in Lushoto we have some sweaty cheese or home made strawberry jam to liven up the bread!

We head back to 'shule' an hour later. Many children wait for us outside our house or stay at school during the lunch hour.  A lot do not eat any lunch. Some take home made snacks to school and some go home to eat the staple food, ugali.  This is a kind of stodgy food made from maize flour.  We generally don't eat this as it takes a lot of getting used to!

Lessons finish at 2.30pm when the children do more chores, such as sweeping the classrooms.  They are usually sent home at about 3pm unless we decide to do some sport with them.  So far we have taught them the fun of relay races (including egg and spoon, which they love!), rounders, stuck in the mud and football. The school has its own football kit which was donated to them a few years ago but has not had much use as they had no football, so Kirstie's arrival with a brand new England ball was well recieved! They really want us to teach the girls netball so we are going to make some posts and try to get a ball for them.

Most days when we get home we spend some time entertaining the increasing number of kids who hang around our house, playing games, singing songs, drawing pictures in the dirt... The ground is perfect for drawing on with a stick as it is like red clay so when it dries it goes hard and dusty.  I occasionally get some paints or pastels out to do some art work but usually this ends up with me being surrounded by kids so I either give them pencils to do their own drawings or just draw one of them.  Recently I have started getting adults knocking on my door asking me to draw a 'photo' of them!

Our showers are ready at 4pm as this is the best time to avoid being bitten by the mozies.  I say shower, I mean a bucket of maji moto, (hot water), collected from the river and heated on the stove.  Using a cup you just pour the water over yourself. It actually works quite well and is much better than some of the cold dribbly showers we've had in cheap hotels here!

Some evenings I teach an English class for adults. I usually only have 5 or 6 students but its fun and most of them are people I now consider to be my friends.

It gets dark at 6pm so Joyce lights our kerosene lamps before serving us dinner. After a trip to Lushoto or Tanga to stock up, this is often a delicious selection of vegetables cooked in their own juices, accompanied by potatoes or rice. When supplies are starting to get thin, it is more likely we have lentils or beans with rice and cabbage.  Occasionally we are given a gift of a chicken but these are so skinny we dont usually bother to buy them.  We have loads of peanuts and bananas to snack on and usually a good supply of oranges (which are green here!) from our shopping trips.   Its amazing how plain our food can be and yet we enjoy it so  much - probably because we know we are eating luxury food by local standards.

We send the girls home after dinner when they are replaced by Godfrey, our night watchman.  He is a lovely guy who takes his role very seriously! When he is not killing spiders or other 'very bad' insects for us, he is either patrolling outside or sitting reading the children's books we brought over, to improve his English.

We usually have a few games of cards ir Yahtzee in the evening before retreating to our bedrooms ridiculously early to read or listen to music.For some reason we all seem to need stupid amounts of sleep here and still feel tired after going to bed at 930 or 10pm.  It is warm enough to sleep under just a sheet but thankfully it cools down a lot from the daytime.  Most days now it is very warm and humid with short bursts of rain, mainly in the evening.  Some days the rain is long and torrential, causing damage to some of the roads.  On the way to Lushoto we had to dig away at the side of a big hill to make part of the road wider as a large tree had fallen, dragging away a huge part of the road, making it very unsafe to drive on!

There are a lot of Muslims in Milingano, so last week we joined in with some big celebrations for Eid el Fitr.  During the day music could be heard everywhere as groups of children went from house to house, some wearing masks, singing, dancing and drumming and asking for small change.  It reminded me of a cross between 'trick or treating' and carol singing.  It was a public holiday so we spent the day relaxing, and on a casual walk through the village were  invited into several houses to have something to eat or drink. The Christians here celebrate Eid alongside the Muslims so there were parties all through the night.  The next day the village was certainly a lot quieter. I think there may have been a few sore heads from the local brew!

Well I think thats quite enough from me for now. I'm sure I've bored everyone stupid! I'm in Lushoto this weekend, next weekend I'm going up to Yamba, the weekend after that I'm in Pangani again and then its our last weekend here!  Only 6 weeks until Mark comes out to see me for our little holiday in Zanzibar! I can't wait! Anita is coming straight after so she'll be here for my birthday, then I'm coming back to work for Village Africa for as long as I'm allowed to stay in the country.

Hope everyone is well back home. Miss everyone lots!