A quiet day - family history, interesting people & a soccer match

Wednesday July 15th Cloudy, not so hot today. It was a quiet day, we felt lazy! An elderly man came up to greet us as we sat on the steps waiting for Michael, telling us that he was off to the hospital up the mountain, and needed money for medicine. I didn’t know how he’d get there, he was so frail, although matatus do climb the hill. We had no small change to give him.
When I heard a noise inside, I went in & got a lovely smile from Michael who was tidying up his room. He said he’d been up a little while!
We had a nice breakfast of boiled eggs & maandazi (square doughnuts).
Afterwards, we looked at family photos. There were a couple of Michael aged 9 or 10, he looked SO different! There was also one of his mother taken in the early 90’s when she worked as cook for Swedish missionaries in Tazengwa. Before that she travelled around, giving birth to Michael in 1980 & Jeremia in 1984 to unknown fathers, leaving them with her parents. She eventually married before giving birth to Evelina in 1998. A couple of years later, she got sick with a stomach ulcer, but they couldn’t operate because she was pregnant again. After asking for the pastors to come to pray for her, she lost the ability to speak, then died - so they don’t know whether she’d become a Christian or not. Evelina now lives in Arusha with her father, Bonifac, who's a businessman.
Babu died on Michael’s 18th birthday (20/9/98), it was a severe blow to the family. He’d biked up country to take some seeds to his younger brother, and seemed fine until he entered the house, when he was hit with severe stomach pains. They called the local missionary who got him to hospital, where they were told that if they’d been half an hour later, it would have been too late. They operated, but he remained very sick, and eventually was sent to a larger hospital. A 2nd operation uncovered a pair of scissors left behind from the 1st! Unfortunately he never recovered, and after having both legs amputated, he died. He told Michael to look after the family being the oldest male descendant.
We were shown some photos of him, one when the new church was opened in Tazengwa – he was its 2nd pastor. We looked at another book but it was mostly of Rosa in different outfits - we teased her about that!
Michael got out his English course certificate from last year, he was sad to have only got C’s, he wanted A’s – but as he averaged over 60%, (GOOD), I gave him my hearty congratulations!
We walked to Saidi’s place later, he's one of the mzee’s nephews, & sat in the shade drinking weak tea. His wife is from the same tribe & village as Michael so they get on pretty well. We talked about the drought and how dried up the fields are. They are looking after a child with severe tongue-tie from an area suffering severe hardship, and also have two others, aged 5 and 6. The little girl was SO scared, it was a real shame!
We walked back through the primary school grounds, lots of boys came over to say hello, and didn’t want to stop shaking my hand. They kept asking us to come back when we carried on walking!
Lunch was at 3: of ugali, yummy mchuzi, bananas, avocadoes & oranges. We got full up fast as we had 2 cups of fresh fruit juice first!
We watched an interesting TV documentary about wildlife problems caused by climate change as a result of deforestation. It covered a whole year in a river catchment in Tanzania. It was fascinating to see a brown trickle meandering down a dry river bed shortly becoming a raging torrent, sweeping large section of bank away, but it was sad to see the wide-spread death of wildlife in the floods and also in the dry season.
We went for a short walk to visit Saidi’s old aunt briefly, then watched the first half of a soccer match between two local teams, played on a bumpy sandy pitch. One team was much better than the other (won 7-0), but the ball would shoot off at odd angles, and once knocked a spectator off his chair, which everyone thought was veyr funny! There were no nets, just goalposts, and the lines were marked with silver sand. We were surprised to see an armed soldier patrolling the grounds; a group of ladies were rather cheeky to him so he only passed them once.
Back at Rosa’s, we watched some of the Tour de France on TV, then a music channel. Poor Frank slept on a sofa for two hours after school!
I was told the squeaky noises on the roof were rats not monkeys, so I was glad they weren’t visible!
We bathed at the guesthouse, before eating fried salt pork and mashed potato sausages at the restaurant with Fanta to wash it down.
After tea, we went into town in the dark to visit the mzee’s mother, who’s over 100 years old! We were shown into a room in a large house by one of her daughters:- the tiny lady was top n’tailing with another of her daughters. A friendly little boy came into the room too.
She’s very frail, only sitting up with help; her hands are deformed & crippled by arthritis so she has to be hand-fed - she can just manage to hold a cup. She has to have throat massages + sips of water, that she tries to gargle & spits back out, trying to remove phlegm.
A short walk away is her husband's house, he's an elderly Muslim. He'd been out the day before. We were told by three men sitting outside to go in and wait, so we sat down on the sofas. I had to reach past Bruce to shake his hand when he came in, and got quite a fright when he seized my arm & dragged me forwards to face him! However, he was really very friendly, and loved talking to us!
Afterwards, we said goodnight to the 3 men sitting outside in three languages – Kipare (the local tribal language), English & Kiswahili - it did make them laugh!