The other news is that Leah took wee pup Rambo the other day. Then yesterday she came and took Nyota too. Not too happy about that, but they are Mary’s dogs, so if she wants to give away four week old puppies what are we meant to do…

Grrr!

Clearly I don’t have enough to occupy me, as two days ago I sat down at my computer and decided that I should remove the unfortunate linux installation attempt, and free up some space for more VCDs. Well, twenty minutes later I felt incredibly stupid because I ended up no longer being able to access the partition that all my stuff is on.

After about 10 minutes of panic and tantrums I calmed myself and thought – I dealt with this on Tim and Job’s computers – I can get my stuff back.

I got out the trusty old Knoppix CD – Linux with X-windows running entirely off a cd – and booted up. Could see all my files but – sheeit, didn’t I, in a month of paranoia, encrypt all my personal files, including email. And weren’t these the only files that actually matter!@!! Well, actually I managed to get all my photos, since I turned encryption off for them. Phew…

But how to recover everything else? Last backup is a month old – so not THAT much lost – I started writing in my notebook again. But still trying to recover files. All the file recovery software I have found is a bit bollocks. Doesn’t do anything you can’t with Linux. Then I found a really useful looking web page today – www.beginningtoseethelight.org/efsrecovery/. Well, yet to try it out.

Found this service on the web that lets you add a tag to your page with geographical coordinates. They keep a database of sites around the world – you can see the sites nearest to me by clicking this button
GeoURL

Does it work? Not yet – I guess they have to add me to the database first. Interesting.

Walking down a path in Uru. It must be very much as it was ever, except for the coffee trees which only have about one hunderd years history in Tanzania.

The path is narrow and snakes through the shambas, occaisonally broken by a stream or irrigation ditch. If the mini-ravine is deep it will be crossed by a narrow and weak looking plank that looks like it has had bites taken out of it by some fearsome beast. If it is just a shallow dip, where it crosses the path will be filled with crushed sections of banana tree trunks; this facilitates the passing of barrows, bicycles or, where the path is just wide enough, pick-up trucks.

The path forks and meets with other paths. Here and there is a glimpse of a hazy view down to the plains. The sounds are of birds and a continuous pitter patter as leaves fall from the tall trees, onto banana leaves, then onto coffee leaves, then onto bean and yam leaves and finally onto the ground.

The fields flanking the path have recently been furrowed. Studded regularly in the fields are gnarled and mossy coffee trees, to old to be producing anything of high quality. Shayo told me the parish field by his house had been planted a few months before his birth – November 1935. Spaced yet further apart than the coffee are banana trees, some held up with props, since the weight of flower and fruit can sometimes uproot the entire tree. Is this how bananas propogate naturally.

Uru is a place where little currently works to its full capacity. Falling coffee prices have fuelled the loss of interest in coffee farming, resulting in the aged trees sometimes abandoned or ignored. The road to Uru, built in three sections by different contractors is already starting to disintegrate in the places where the contractor lacked the necessary enthusiasm, or just went off with the money. Computers donated to the school similarly lack lustre – they will never enable students or teachers to achieve anything more than an enduring patience they already possess.

Walking along the path, being greeted by everyone I meet, watching how interactions are friendly and unhurried I wonder whether some of the impediments to development I see are perhaps willful.

Women giggle and loudly comment when I greet them in the local language.

A large bird flies from one tree to another, and disapears before I can really focus on it. No hope of identification.

I have tried to photograph this place, but it is so much more than a picture, however large. It is sound, smell, the light breeze, the texture of the ground beneath the feet. It is the boredom that turns into relaxation and contentedness. It is the frustration of not being able to find a secluded lonely spot to read and write without being disturbed.

The path becomes familiar again and I find my way back to the Shayo’s house. Bath, dinner, then bed…

“But this is a modern kitchen!” Shayo exclaims to me in response to my comment about the smoke, and the storage of firewood on a ceiling/shelf which itself seems to be made of kindling. “In my mother’s house, she would be sleeping there, the chickens would be there, and the cows would be there” he says, gesturing around the dung and mud walls of this chagga kitchen. My eyes are watering as Mama Shayo prepares me dinner. Bwana Shayo leaves, he is even more susceptible to the smoke than me it seems. “Cooking is a women’s work” he tells me.

“What can you do that your wife can’t?” I ask.

“Climb and cut down trees” he replies, confidently. The household cows, which live in a room next door to the Shayo’s bedroom, are fed on the banana trees that Shayo fells in the shamba. Despite my “modern” western sensibilites, I can’t help but feel that perhaps the division of labour here isn’t as unequal as might seem to be the case at first.

Somehow I found myself in Uru without the usual youthful entourage – it seems most of my friends have headed down to Tanga. I didn’t know and couldn’t contact them. So here I am, staying in this idylic mountain village, amidst the banana trees. I am wondering to myself whether I should ever have left the UK – my computer projects are falling dismally on their faces. At the same time I am asking myself if I can ever go back. Can I leave this society that seems to be without strife, without conflict, where elderly (and I mean in their seventies) ladies, drunk on the local brew, insist on escorting the 9usually sober) young men back home through the darkness. Darkness which is subtly relieved by the glow of the moon reflecting off the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest mountain. It can’t be photographed, something you only see with the people you are with, and try to remember.

This mountain, a dormant, but not extinct, volcano, is home to the chagga, a seemingly less exciting tribe than the maasai. Chagga dress as often in baggy jeans and t-shirts as the more traditional kangas – colourful sheets featuring cheeky swahili phrases like “Take your eyes off my ass!” The mountain is blessed with regular rain and fertile soil – it doesn’t take very green fingers to make things grow up here. But the chagga are renowned amongst agricultural developmentalists for their complex multicropping techniques which maximise the quantity and variety of food available year round. There is also the ruined irrigation system that was built hundreds of years ago and may have supported even greater numbers of chagga.

So I am here, watching Mama Shayo frying bananas, cutting tomatoes, beating eggs, while a black cat sits with it’s tail milimetres from the fire. “Paka mbaya” she tells me. The cat is evil. “Kwasa baba?” I ask – why? Because it is black she tells me.

A friend recently told me something I had never heard before about the chagga. Apparently chagga men are meant to have nothing to do with excrement. They must avoid any contact at all with faeces. Nothing at all to do with it. For boys to become men they had to have their anuses sewn up. Chagga men simply do not shit. Such was the initiation ritual. Not circumcision or other genital mutilation that usually has Europeans and Americans up in arms. But the initiation ceremony was much more interesting than that. The terrified young chagga boys would be taken off to a secluded part of the mountain, where they would await their ordeal in terror and anticipation.

And then the ceremony began. And the truth was revealed to them. Their anuses would not be sewn up. In fact this was just a trick. The initiation ritual in fact consisted of being sworn to secrecy, about the fact of the anal seaming, and that chagga men ever went for a “long call”. This leads to chagga men waiting till the dead of night so they can go for a shit. I asked a couple of friends about this. One laughed and told me he didn’t know that his father went to the toilet until he was more than ten years old. Another told me that this ritual still occured, but that the chagga don’t like to relate it. Maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this secret, but it is in an ethnography which I am desparate to get my hands on.

But disaster strikes – the avacadoes which have been brought down from the smoky loft are tiny. How can this be. It is the end of the avacodo season. THe last ones are coming down from the trees. They won’t be back till next April. I thought they would never end.

Duncan has given me editorial permissions on this website. As I type he is looking on expectantly, but I have stage fright…

Last night at dinner with Brad and his sister Valerie, Duncan exclaimed, “Springtime has arrived in Mary’s garden!”

Indeed it has. Flowers in bloom everywhere, fluffy yellow goslings, the vegetables and herbs we planted last month are sprouting, and Shadow’s puppies – Nyota (Swahili for star) and Rambo (popular icon in Tanzania) frolic in the sunshine. Shadow has started to wean them, which makes for noisy nights, but not as noisy as the days when the geese were going at it. Mary makes oatmeal for their breakfast, but like children everywhere, Nyota and Rambo are unenthusiastic. This morning Duncan rubbed their noses in it. Typically, Rambo submitted and took a nibble. Nyota did not and so spent the morning with oatmeal stuck to her nose. I read online that what puppies need are chicken backs.

Yes indeed – I did make the cover of the front page of the Arusha Times – well Parvis’ picture did, and an excerpt from my story. Quite pleased.

Found this interesting article on The Register.

Apparently GNER are thinking of putting WiFi hotspots on their trains – not as a money spinner, but as a way of encouraging more passengers onto trains. Pretty good idea.