Janet and John, Zoe and Hamish

When I first learnt to read English I remember using ‘Janet and John’ books to read to my teacher. ‘Here is John. John has the ball. John likes the ball’.

Dr Corrie has just given us the equivalent book, but in Swahili. It is Book 1 for primary school children. But it doesn’t talk about balls. ‘Here is mother. Mother is holding a winnowing basket. Mother is winnowing maize’. Maybe I was held back by not learning ‘winnowing’ when I first learnt to read. The book focuses on the local priority for farming and growing food. ‘Here is father. Father has a hoe and a cap. Father is hoeing’. To local children winnowing and hoeing must be familiar daily activities.

St Andrews church building now has a new smooth floor. For the past year we have got used to walking on very rough and dusty concrete, which is bad enough when you are wearing shoes, but extremely difficult for many villagers who prefer to stand and dance in bare feet. On Sunday it was our first service there since the smooth concrete floor has been laid and the walls plastered – the building almost looked complete!

Work continues. Malcolm has spent most of the week helping to sort out the problems with the July payroll so that others can go to the Ministry of Health in Dar Es Salaam at the end of the week to, hopefully, get everyone’s pay corrected. It is also the time when students are returning to college so there has been a flurry of sorting out the payment of fees etc. Finally, he is completing a report into an investigation of the possible theft of money from the Hospital which has taken up a lot of time.

The Bar B Q we expected with the gappies at the Secondary school never happened. Unfortunately both have been ill – Zoe had to go to the eye clinic because her face had swollen perhaps because something got in her eye or a bite. Hamish has been suffering from a stomach bug – perhaps from eating undercooked meat. We did have a meal together when Julia returned from her holiday, but kept away from meat with a vegetable lasagne. Squashie has also returned to his rightful home, although looking after him has meant we have both had a bit of exercise.

The other social highlight of the week was when Corrie returned from Dar es Salaam with a cauliflower – the first we have ever seen here. She had thought about feasting on it by herself but we persuaded her to cook cauliflower cheese – a real luxury.

We also went to a nearby village to hear a choir sing to say farewell to Craig. He is an American teacher who has come to the Amani agricultural project during his summer holiday in the past 2 years, and has joined the local church choir.

There has been a slow down in the production of eggs. This is partly because the ‘mothers’ of the chicks stopped laying when they were hatching eggs and haven’t started again, and the other two have gone “broody” and stopped laying in favour of sitting on stones! We also ‘swopped’ our best layer with an old hen of Mama Asante’s sister as it seemed a waste to kill and eat a hen in its prime. The result is that we only had 1 egg last week – hardly worth counting.

This weekend we are spending in Dodoma at the MAF guest house. Our computer has been reformatted, and although it appears to work in sorts, there is clearly something wrong with the disc drive –hopefully it will keep going until we return to England.