Essential requirements

So what do you take as essential gifts to people who have spent several months in a Tanzanian village?

This week a family from Llandudno visited for the day. Kathryn Mann had been born in the Hospital in 1963 when her father worked in Dodoma as a telephone engineer. This was her first visit to Tanzania since she left, aged 4. What she brought as were the following essential supplies:

- Bodyshop foot cream for Dr Corrie – when you’ve been walking on dusty tracks here for 18 months you will know why this is essential
- Lady Grey tea and Highlights instant chocolate for Irene – essentials that are totally unavailable here (though last week we were able to buy Earl Grey teabags – amazing)
- Printer cartridges and Duracell AAA batteries for Malcolm
- Theatre gowns, welsh hats, tea towels, toys, exercise books and sweets for the Hospital and school.

They spent an enjoyable day (we hope) at the hospital locating the room where Kathryn’s mother was ‘confined’ (which may now be the eye department workshop) and touring the village and surrounding area to get a feeling of how the locals live. This meant great excitement to the local children who are always looking for opportunities to be photographed and thought it amusing that Kathryn was born in Mvumi a member of the Chigogo tribe?. They bought us lunch at Mvumi’s best reataurant – a total of £11 for cooked meals and drinks for 7. Not bad, eh! They then continued their holiday in Arusha and Zanzibar where they will get a tourists eye view of Tanzania.

Further essential building work has been going on at St Andrews church. Last Sunday there was great happiness because the Mamajus choir had a new keyboard (and speakers and radio microphone) and the walls had been plastered. This week a proper concrete floor is being laid, paid for by the ‘spoons’ project mentioned last week. This is a community effort. On Monday the women walked the long distance to the local well to collect buckets of water (carried on their heads – see Malcolm’s video on Youtube – ‘Using your Head’) to make the cement. On Wednesday the congregation came to mix the cement for the workmen so that the new concrete floor could be laid before the cement set. It was wonderful to see men, women and children of all ages carrying water, mixing the materials and carrying the cement into the church – all by hand and using simple tools as there are no cement mixers, and they had no wheel-barrows.

For those tracking the cost of egg production there has been a bit of a mystery. We had left some eggs with the hens to see if any more chicks would hatch – but the eggs have been disappearing one by one. Each morning, early, the hens do make a bit of a ruckus and our guess is that there may be a n intruder which is coming each day to help itself – we have sometimes seen the tracks of a snake elsewhere in the garden. Our hen run may be cat proof, but not snake proof. This week there have been 18 more eggs – a total so far of £53 for 112 eggs or 46 p each.

For those of you interested in the Hospital dog, Stumpy we are sorry to report that he has fallen foul of the Hospital cull. We will miss him.

We are spending this weekend in Dodoma, with a Ceilidh on Friday and a meal at an Italian restaurant on Saturday.

PS Another essential requirement is a computer. We have reported our broken Dell under a 4 year warranty that we took out before leaving England. It does normally include a home-visit by an engineer to carry out repairs – but not in Tanzania so we don’t now when we will be able to use it again. Fortunately we have borrowed a replacement from Julia for the time being.