Jambo Africa!

Happy New Year. Or “Heri za Mwaka Mpya” as it goes in Swahili.  So, I’ve started the new year on a new continent, ready for a new adventure. Post Nepalese action, I’ve been to Clapham, Slough, Tewkesbury, Derby, West Sussex, Twickenham and Scotland, bed&breakfasted my way through eleven different residences, had two hospital appointments (all clear with the oncologist, hoorah) and even popped into my old school to do an assembly about Nepal. Three weeks back with friends and family flew past and before I knew it I was clad with a ridiculously heavy rucksack on my back and clutching my passport once again. Farewell Christmas-times.

The plan back in the summer (when I booked my flights) to fly out to Tanzania on New Year’s Eve seemed a great one. Not only was I getting a much cheaper flight than any other day, but I had visions of beaming air-stewards pouring bottomless bottles of champagne whilst the music rang out and we all sang merry tunes to welcome in the endless new years as we flew over time zones across the world. Ehem. Perhaps someone forgot to tell B.A about my dream. Reality certainly struck in a very different form. Firstly, the air-stewards and stewardesses rostered on for said flight were not only at the end of their use-by-date (plenty of Just for Men beards and wizened greying locks abounding) but they were the grumpiest set of folk I have ever encountered. One lady looked like she hadn’t washed all Christmas, ten day old stubble was obviously aok for gents on NYE whilst another vicious woman barked at me three times before take off (for not putting my arm-rest down fully, not having my seat-belt visible enough for her and for not pushing my shoes far enough under the seat in front. Such heinous aviation crimes!) And as for champagne, laughter and collective merriment, well sadly the NYE aviation-party was lacking in all three. Dinner was served in record speed, with the collection of empty trays happening before I’d even unwrapped my main course.

Champagne? Who am I kidding?! No-one sitting in seat 36D is ever gonna get such things, no matter how significant the date! And as for welcoming in the new year, well I raised my plastic cup of tea to the skies with a silent nod to midnight but everyone else was either snoozing or glued to the mini-screen. Not a party popper in sight. Ho hum. At least the captain acknowledged the event with a mumbled new year greeting as he crash-landed onto the tarmac in Dar es Salaam.

I spent a month in Tanzania in the summer of 2011 on a school trip. I have so many fond and treasured memories of that month stored in my mind and felt excited to be coming back to such a beautiful country. But somehow my memory bank had failed to remember the airport fandango. To get a visa (according to pre-departure advice) is simple – fill out a form, give someone $50 and hey presto. And I had lived through this before, whilst getting a visa for 3 adults and 13 kids. Yet somehow I had failed to remember (or most likely blanked from my mind) the ridiculous nature of the event. Take a plane load or two of arriving passengers into 30 degree African heat. Put them in a room with no queuing system (Europeans immediately all in a hot panic) and limited instructions on the walls. Add into the mix five counters of folk all issuing visas at random intervals. Give your passport and dosh plus application form to random official who wanders through the crowd demanding them from one and all. Watch (as best you can over/under/through the crowds of other folk) which counter he gives your bundle to. Then wait. Wait, not for a clear announcement of when it is your turn to pick up the visa-stamped passport; oh no, wait for the slim chance that you can wrestle to the front of the masses to be able to glimpse the windows of the counters where the passport pictures are held up when processing has finished. Then (after a good hour of said waiting) get finger-printed to the max. Four fingers left, thumb, four right, thumb, facial photo. Hilarious. And slightly ironic Fort-Knox protocol when, ten minutes later, I sauntered through both passport control and customs with not a soul in sight. Should have bought some illegal fingers with me or something, just to whisk them through the red channel.

Exit airport into waiting taxi to spend an hour’s excruciating drive to the bus station so that I can book my bus for Friday’s epic drive to Arusha. Delighted to be told (in very vocal and aggressive shouting by the ticket office – obviously a hung-over reveller from NYE) that you cannot book your tickets three days in advance, only two. Quite why puzzled me (and the lovely taxi man) greatly, as the booking form for Friday was sitting in front of him, begging for bookings. Yet no amount of reasoning was getting me anywhere and, reluctant to start the new year resorting to bribes, I took his phone number and decided to risk chancing a phone booking the next day.

The new volunteer programme that I am working with for the next seven months is a charity in the north of Tanzania called The School of St Jude’s. Work at St Jude’s school was due to start tomorrow, but I was told a few months ago that the new term is now starting on 7^th Jan so, left with a few days to kill in Dar es Salaam, I decided to exit straight out of the city to a small beach camp that we’d stayed at with the kids last visit. Kipepeo Beach camp is a mild step up from camping, in that you get a little hut to sleep in rather than a tent, but is rustic to the max.

Yet, the hour’s taxi ride, the twenty minute ferry crossing and the bumpy ride down a long and endless dusty track was well worth it to be sitting at 10.30am on New Year’s Day looking at this.

With New Year's Day being a holiday, by late afternoon the beach was crowded with locals enjoying a day off. 

Rather than strip down to roast raw skin, the Tanzanian beach culture is a little more refined. Sitting watching the waves, games of football and ice-cream feasts abounded on this beach, with many people dressed up in their very finest for the excitement of the day out.

There is nothing really to do here. It is cut off from the main road, there’s no shops or infrastructure nearby, just fourteen beach huts, the beach, the sea and the café. Yet it is a lovely way to start the year and gives me a few days peace to get my head around the next challenge.

St Jude’s.  I am so excited to be volunteering at this new charity. Quick low-down about the place: ten years ago, a like-minded volunteer from Oz was working in a government school in Tanzania feeling much the same frustrations about the inadequate education system that I felt in Nepal. Recently married to a Tanzanian, they had been given a banana plantation as a wedding present (brilliant!) but failed to grow any crops, so she decided to start a school on it instead.

Beginning with a small shack serving as a school, one teacher and two students, the School of St Jude began.

Its ethos? Fighting poverty through education. The school aims to provide some of the poorest children living in the local area with a quality education that will give them a chance in life and hope to elevate them out of the endless poverty cycle that so many are trapped in.

The school provides all of its students with three meals a day, a school uniform, books and equipment and transport to school (or an option to board during the week if living a long walk away). All of the students come from impoverished backgrounds and would normally face the educational curse of six or so years in an overcrowded government school with limited resources and little to show for their education at the end of it.

St Jude’s school is run entirely by locals: local teachers, food grown by the local farmers, buses run and maintained by local mechanics, buildings constructed by local builders etc.  They use international teaching volunteers to work with the local staff, implementing teacher training programmes, but the place is a huge boon for the local area. Ten years ago it had one teacher and just two children. At the end of 2012 it had 1600 children!

And the entire project is funded entirely by donations. All of the money for the building, the wages, the food, resources etc. comes from donations from around the world. It is incredible to think just how much is being achieved by people who are nowhere near the school and who have no connections with it whatsoever.

As part of the volunteer team, I will be spending time implementing teacher training programmes with the upper secondary school teachers (as the secondary school is still relatively new, with the school’s first sixteen year olds now making their way up to the top of the school). I have also been asked to work with a new teacher to start up a work experience programme within the school, as well as looking into university grants and applications and working closely with the new head of sixth form. Exciting times.

I travel to Arusha to my new home on Friday. Eleven hours on a Tanzanian bus. (Tanzanian bus meaning that yes, I’ll get a seat, but once they’re all full, another thirty people will probably board, plus a few goats and other animal buddies). It’s 36 degrees here today, I have to admit I am not looking forward to that journey in any way. Luckily the wind is blowing a gale here today which, although making walking rather tricky, is proving to help with the heat. Not that I am complaining; it is wonderfully serene here.

Elephantitis-ankles from the heat are going down a bit now and the view from my little hut this afternoon is a tropical dream. Another day here to get a bit of work done on a volunteer manual for Nepal, read up on all I need to know about St Jude and get a bit of sea-swimming in lies ahead. So all’s good as the new year dawns here in Africa. And I’m all geared up and raring to start my next challenge. Bring it on.

Hakuna matata.