Old Friends

Tuesday 5th AprilAnother disturbed night – dogs, roosters and a thunderstorm from 5 am that lasted up to 9 o’clock. There was some very heavy rain, even some hail.
It was a busy day. Bruce wanted to leave as soon as the rain stopped but I managed to delay him for a bit whilst I wrote some post cards that I’d purchased from BUDAP. We had no success trying to contact mama Hermalinda re visiting her in her village, so decided to go into town. We were due to visit Aristides later in the morning, then mama Juliana for lunch. On the way, we planned to stop by at Harvest.
We bought some oil for mama Petromulaki, but unfortunately didn’t stop in the little soko at Nyakanyasi to buy some flour and a phone voucher, believing that we’d pass a kiosk on the way to Kibeta hill. Unfortunately we’d run out of money on the phone, but had some exciting texts around midday from NZ – our little granddaughter had just started to stand up holding on to furniture (aged 10 ½ months).
We visited the plant nursery by Nyakanyasi River, which was very swollen and flooding the lower ground. The owner has good English and we had a good conversation. He told us that he’s planted 30,000 trees on his shamba!
At the corner where a path leaves the road to lead to the hill, we met baba Jeni – he told us that his wife was very sick and couldn’t come to visit us. He’s expanded his small business of repairing shoes, sandals and umbrellas to serving coffee. His wife has a coffee stall at the market but found that she didn’t get enough custom.
A few houses from the corner is mama Amina’s. She’s an Indian lady whose family came over some time back and she married a Tanzanian and has several children. One of her eldest ones came to Pre-Form One tuition at Harvest, and had excellent English and seemed to be very bright. We’d become friends with mama and she’d invited us in on one or two occasions, and always wanted to stop and chat or give us some fruit from their tiny shamba. Yasintha was home, she was going to teacher training, and had only achieved Division 3 in her Form Four exams the year before. I was a bit surprised, thinking she’d have got Div 2 quite easily. We heard that they only accept boys having Div 1 and 2 results for Teacher Training these days, but they will take girls with Div 3.
Amina went to a neighbour’s across the path and called Deborah out. She’s another young girl who we’d met in Bukoba shortly before we returned to NZ. She told us she wanted us to be her friends, and we write to each other several times a year. She studied at an English medium primary school so has good English, and passed Form Four a year or two ago. Now she is studying nursing at one of the hospitals. She was very emotional when she saw us and it is rather surprising as we only met up with her two or three times, once visiting her home to be introduced to her father who works for the local council.
We arrived at Harvest at 10.30 and were amazed at the huge increase in the number of houses on the hill. People have been building all over it! We were struck again at how unfit we were, and found we got quite puffed and had to stop a few times on the way up! We’d have been even worse if we hadn’t spent 10 days on Bumbire!
We were pleased to see that Harvest Sec School had been able to expand since we were last there, and most of the buildings looked very nice with blue-painted roofs and some nice paintwork on the walls that hadn’t been there when we last saw it. We went to the administration block – that used to be the guest house and pastor Lucas’s quarters, and were amused to see that our former bedroom was now the Director’s room. The building has been split in half – half is for administration and the other half still has some of pastor’s children living in it: three of his boys and one of the daughters. Mama and three of the other children are in Dar es Salaam and pastor does a lot of travelling. The youngest daughter is at University in Dodoma now.
We enjoyed meeting Pastor Theophil for the first time. He is married to a lovely lady called Editha whom we had met on our first African adventure in 2004. At that stage, she was helping mama Lucas with household chores, and was only about 15. On our second visit, we were quite disappointed that she’d gone back to her home village, and was going to get married. Now they have three little children aged 1, 2 and 4.
We were really surprised to hear that four of the Lucas' children (Pastor Lucas is the head of the Agape Christian Fellowship church and lived at Harvest for many years) are still at Harvest, although the oldest three are in Dar es Salaam with their mama. We had a lovely chat with Victory, and she was really sad that we would only be in Bukoba for such a short time. She said we should have stayed for a week, then we could have had lots of discussions and shared views, opinions etc. In hindsight we certainly realised that we should have planned a much shorter time on Bumbire – but Bruce thought it would be good to spend 2 Sundays there to really encourage the pastor – and a longer time in Bukoba, but it had been really hard to organise with only having cellphone numbers for a few of our contacts and in many cases, not getting any news from them at all. Usually the reason is that they have run out of money on the phone or the battery needs charging up!
Pastor Theophil texted mama Juliana to let her know we were running a bit late, and Aristides – as we had no money on our phone – and we were met by Aristides’ eldest daughter, Flia, just outside Harvest. She took us at a great rate up the hill and along the muddy paths past many shambas and small villages till we reached her father’s house. They had been forced to sell their old one and shamba due to a family dispute over the land. Now they are renting two small rooms, part of a larger house. Only the oldest and youngest child are at home at the moment, the other two are in the village with their grandfather as they can’t afford to feed all four of them. Aristides has been out of work since his accident so they have been in serious hardship with only a small income from his wife’s small business. He showed us his artificial leg which he calls Bruce’s leg – perhaps because it’s white! His stump is still quite fragile and was quite swollen and sore – he’s only had the leg a short time so may be trying to get around too much on it.
After a little taro and spiced chai, we went with Flia to mama Juliana’s, not too far away really but Flia got a little lost. She was still busy cooking as we managed to arrive about 10 minutes before she was expecting us! She is still teaching but has to cope with 120 Standard One pupils! These are in their first year of school – just imagine the chaos and impossibility of trying to get any real learning done. She said some of the better-behaved children help the struggling ones, and get somewhere, but quite a few just mess around and don’t learn anything at all. Her daughter Hilda, who studied at Harvest with us, and was my top English student, achieved Div 2 in Form Four, obtaining a B in both Maths & English. She is now studying Maths, Physics and Chemistry at High School.
Mama had let us know last year that her husband was in trouble at work. He’d been accused of being dishonest in his work (he was quite high up in the local council) – but it was a false accusation. He was taken to court and acquitted as false evidence was given against him. However, his boss decided to get rid of him and wrote him a letter of dismissal, claiming that he had indeed been dishonest and had bribed the judges. As he had had no income to be able to do such a thing – he was stood down from work after the accusations were made, the only income in the family was mama’s wages as a teacher, and she was using all of these to try to keep her children in school and to feed the family. So he was now unemployed and struggling to find another job as he wasn’t given a good reference by his employer.
We caught up with some news about others from Harvest Christian Fellowship and found out that two brothers had moved to Mwanza to set up a business. One’s wife had stayed in Bukoba as she was doing really well selling food to the students at Harvest and cooking them food.
Again we heard how sick mama Jeni was, and decided to visit her on our way back into town.
This entailed quite a long, winding route back down the hill. Unfortunately I’d not taken any photos of Harvest on the way up as I’d imagined we’d return past it again and would be able to take photos at our leisure. Teh way to mama Jeni’s took us quite far away into a very rocky area.
She lives in a very small, dilapidated hut, and was really sick. She had been well until after the mkesha on the Friday night, then became really feverish and couldn’t keep any food down. She was also full of aches and pains and could hardly sleep at night, and was too weak to get up and walk anywhere, hardly strong enough to sit up. They thought it was probably malaria. Fortunately she was able to keep fluids down and was drinking plenty of water. They are very poor and she couldn’t afford a trip to the clinic or hospital to get tested and treated. So we gave a donation to help her both get a ride on a pikipiki (motorbike) and be able to pay for treatment the next day. Unfortunately the clinic is only open in the mornings and it was late afternoon. We found out that two of her sons are now away from home selling sodas from handcarts, one is in Dar es Salaam, the other in Mwanza.
We did end up returning past Mama Amina’s again, and went inside for a brief visit as her husband was home and some more of the children. We also saw Deborah again, but she was very gloomy.
On our way back to our hotel, we met Hassan again, he was due to leave Bukoba to travel all the way to Dar and then down into South Tanzania – a very long journey. He was going to go to High School (in Tanzania a High School is where you can study forms 5 and 6 and take A-levels, Secondary Schools are just for Forms One to Four in general). He was very excited to be going with Godfrey, a top student at Harvest. For a while, they both vied with each other for marks, but in the end, Hassan only got a rather disappointing Div 3 result, and Godfrey Div 2.
We arrived back at the New Banana Hotel at 5 and sat outside with sodas. We were surprised to be greeted with the news that two ladies, mama Hermalinda and mama Spia, had come to visit us just after we’d left in the morning. I was really sad to find out that one was Mama Hermalinda who’d come on the bus to see us and invite us to her home. If only we’d stayed in our room a little longer! She’d run out of money on her phone which is why she hadn’t responded to my texts! I’d assumed that she couldn’t come into town for some reason or other.
We booked tea for seven and put our phone on to charge as the battery was getting flat. we were really happy to meet up with mama Spia again after tea. She came back specially to greet us. She has AIDS and seems to keep alive quite miraculously. From time to time she becomes so sick she is close to death’s door, but then recovers again. At least one of her children has the disease also. She was infected by her husband and has been a widow for some years now. Another widow in a similar situation had lost her eldest son to AIDS in January, we were very sad to hear that. Mama Spia and mama Hermalinda live quite close together, so they can encourage each other in the Lord. Mama Hermalinda is also a widow.
Later on we received a phone call from mama Hermalinda and I apologized profusely for not being still there in the morning and for missing her visit. I really did feel bad. We also had some nice texts from Michael wishing us a safe journey. We were to leave Bukoba early the next morning on our way to Europe.

A trip to Bukoba

Monday May 4thThis time our sleep was disturbed by a mosquito, then poor Meshaki woke up in the middle of the night coughing. There seemed to be a big discussion going on between pastor and mama, and they all seemed to go outside for some time. Meshaki was crying, and still couldn’t stop coughing. it gook ages to get back to sleep, especially as the rats were very active. One fell with a great thump in the main room, from the top of the rafters. After some wild dreams, I was woken again by the rats, then a bat – which landed on me twice! At one stage, it seemed to be being chased around the room by a rat, and that made me really nervous. I’m glad that vampire bats only live in South America, it was rather worrying to have it land on my shoulder on one occasion. Then the mosquito returned, and at 2 am when pastor’s alarm clock rang, a peal of thunder crashed out and lasted for some time. A second thunderstorm began just before 6 am.
We left the house at 7 just as the rain was stopping, aiming at reaching Rushonga in time to catch the 8 am boat. However, pastor kept stopping and looking back to the hills where black clouds were amassing. he said that yet another storm was brewing. He hoped we’d be able to reach the primary school on top of the hill.
We just got there when the rains burst – it poured for about 20 minutes then stopped as suddenly as it had begun. There were impressive displays of lightning and huge roars of thunder, some right overhead. It was too noisy to be able to hear pastor and the headmaster’s conversation across the other side of the room.
As we were now too late to reach Rushonga in time, we decided to head to another landing stage where the boat would leave from at around 8.30. Danieli ran ahead once we reached the flat near the lake to warn the boat that we were coming. They’d started to blow the horn, the signal that they were about to depart.
We were very surprised to find out after some time that pastor hadn’t joined us on the boat – on previous occasions he’s come ashore with us – but I guess it was a good cost-cutting measure, it costs 10,000 Tsh to make the round trip – a lot of money over there.
On the way to Kemondo, we stopped at two more places to pick up passengers, but unfortunately, at the second, on another island, another boat had already taken all waiting travellers and goods on board so we didn’t draw right up close to the shore. It was quite windy by this stage, and we had to stand out some way from the landing.
Once out away from the islands, the waves became quite large, and at one point, the engine stopped! This meant that we had no steering and we started to get tossed around by the waves, the boat rocking further and further over onto each side so that the water came close to coming inboard. I estimated that the swell was about 1.5 metres.
We were glad when the engine was able to be restarted, and we soon landed at Kemondo, at 10.40 am – a quick trip really.
We went to a small cafe where we’d picked up a snack on previous occasions – but as it was too early for lunch, they only had 2 left-over chapattis from breakfast – but these were really nice so we enjoyed them with some Fanta.
Whilst we were there, a man came in, claiming to have seen us in Bukoba a few times when we were living there. He said he used to work at the Fido Dido but now worked taking tourists around and organising trips for them. He said he could speak German well, as well as English.
He told us he could get us a ride in a taxi for only 1,000 Tsh each, which we thought was much cheaper than the fare we’d paid with Gayle which was Tsh 1,500 each. So we agreed – although I did say that we’d much prefer to go in a daladala.
However, once he hailed a taxi that had a couple of spare seats in it, it appeared that he himself along with his elderly father would ride with us to Bukoba, and that we’d pay for all 4! There were already several people in the car, but the driver pushed most of them out, much to their anger and our horror – and I was about to remonstrate with him and say that we’d go by daladala and to let the other passengers use the taxi when he slammed the boot lid down on our cases and shoved us into the car. It was a squash – seven or eight of us in total! We were glad when 2 got out part-way to Bukoba, and another one on the outskirts, so that we ended up the journey in a little more comfort. However, the driver only took us to the taxi stand, not to our hotel – but as it wasn’t much further, we decided to walk. It proved to be a little hard to shake off our ‘Fido Dido’ friend and his father, but eventually, once at the hotel, they left and we were able to proceed to our room in peace.
As it was only lunch time, we went to the Rose Cafe for a snack and were warmly greeted by the proprietor, who knows us quite well from our Bukoba days. Many of these cafes have some rather unusual-looking menus – you can get ‘paper’ steak and chips, bittings (snacks) including ‘burns’, and in Uganda one was selling ‘diary’ food.
We visited the main market – the Soko Kuu – where we had had a number of friends including an elderly lady who sells fruit, eggs and vegetables. We bought some fruit from her and had a good chat. She had had a very sore, swollen foot for some time. One of our ex-students just happened to pass by and looked very surprised to see us but didn’t stop to do more than say hello. Apparently he’s doing very well, has now completed Form 4.
Inside the main building, we went to look for our old friends, the Fataks – but they were not there. A neighbouring stallholder told us that they’d gone to Arusha. We were greeted by several people who wanted to know how we were.
We started off to go to the lake to find an organisation called BUDAP – the Bukoba Disabled Assistance Project – as we’d put a friend of ours in touch with them and wanted to find out more about them and see the project up close.
After a bit of wandering around and asking some passersby, we found it by the lakeshore – an office containing a few of the items the disabled members produce – belts, jandals, postcards, jewellery and traditional drums. The man I’d corresponded with via email was very welcoming and told us a bit more about the project, but said that it is really difficult to continue, as, once trained-up, the members tend to end up starting up their own small businesses and cease bringing in income to the project. They are looking for more sponsors, as they are lacking tools and equipment, and are thinking of working more with widows. The project was started with the intention of helping the many victims of polio to learn a handcraft and thus be able to sustain themselves and their families.
Our friend Aristides Petromulaki had been one of the fundis that worked on the building site at Harvest alongside Bruce. He’d become quite friendly, and had invited us to his home shortly before we returned to NZ. There, we were able to share the Gospel, and we heard a few months later that he’d become a Christian, also his wife and children. Unfortunately he then fell on hard times – he had an accident whilst working chipping stone, and had to have an operation on one foot. We’d sent over some money to pay for the operation because we knew the family couldn’t afford it. Unfortunately this operation had left the wound infected, and over the course of almost a year, his foot had swollen up, then his leg right up to his knee and it of course became extremely painful. He delayed getting medical help, believing his leg to be infested by a demon, but we assured him that if it were due to that reason, that he could command the evil spirit to leave in Jesus’ Name – and if he found no relief, he needed to get medical help urgently.
He had a second operation after Christmas – they amputated his leg up to close to his knee, and he started a long period of recovery. Thanks to our putting him in touch with BUDAP, he was able to get their advice and help, and ended up going to Uganda to get an artificial leg. Unfortunately this cost him a huge sum of money that he had to borrow.
Whilst on the way back to our hotel, we met a mama in the street, an old friend of ours and retired nurse, mama Hermalinda Gabriel. She was one of the people that we hadn’t been able to let know about our visit, so it was a special joy to meet with her like that, especially as she now lives in a different place from when we were last in Bukoba. She was really keen for us to go to her home the next day, and gave us her phone number.
We had a lovely dinner at the hotel of fish, chips and salad. I enjoyed drinking the spiced milk that you were supposed to put coffee in – but I liked it just as it was! Unfortunately we got well-bitten by mosquitoes every time we entered that restaurant!