najonajo

We’re just back from a couple of months on leave. Volunteering is rubbish pay but the holidays are fab. And we’ve just been going through the photos. We’re not mad snappers but we have noticed that practically every photo we took had food in it. I put on 1kg each week of our 8 weeks. Says something about what’s on offer over here.

Our first breakfast after arriving, laid on by Ivo, our mate in Berlin. We were starving. Butter, cheese, croissants and pastries from the bakery downstairs. Fantastic. We cleared the table then I ate Ivo.

Then I ate the budgie. Her name is Anabelle and she liked stroking her head along my beard. When she’d had enough she would hop into the middle of my chest have a shit then fly off.

And here we have Nadine about to scoff two entire bowls of parmesan cheese and bacon bits. She’d eaten my bowl before I had a chance to get back to the table.

She also got into the habit of snacking on small platefuls of around a dozen or so sausages.

She eventually dispensed with cutlery all together preferring to drink straight from the tea pot. Here she is with Julia, her second mam, gamely joining in with a pot of coffee.

And we of course drank loads of beer. Here from one of the finest dining establishments Consett, Co. Durham has to offer. They had unfortunately run out of food so we just pretended. Times are hard in the north.

The posh South, of course has it all. Nadine in Harrods at the veg counter looking quite cute in her floppy cap. Yes, it’s for shoplifting.

… and again at Harrods fish counter. The bulge in her cap? Half a salmon.

And as contrast, our local fish counter

… and Nadine at our local veg man.

Our local allowance is about the equivalent of an OK local salary. That means 80-90% of it has to go on food. Like most people around here. Small price increases often mean you’re short of cash to buy your fruit and veg. Not really an issue for me and Nadine, we can always dip into other money but for locals it’s a stressful way to live. The problem is that prices don’t increase in relatively small jumps, 2p or 5p, like at home, they sky rocket. The price of tomatoes is almost double what it was 2 weeks ago. Onions are 50% higher. It’s because agriculture isn’t developed. It consists of very small subsistence holdings (single farmers growing primarily for their family and if they’re lucky with a bit left over to sell on), poor transport lines to market (donkey or a knackered pickup), no storage facilities (of any kind whatsoever. Too much food simply rots on the stalk or tree), no co-operative organisation (let’s put our cows together or join up our plots to make it easier to farm is an alien concept) and no forward planning (it’s all inshallah or ‘God willing’). That means supply is very sticky and very sensitive to seasons.  We’ve had poor rains in Zanzibar which means a useless tomato and onion harvest. The only other place to get them is the mainland but it takes ages to find suppliers, transport, pay bribes, organise labour etc. etc. etc. to get it from there over to here. So, tomatoes double, onions go up by 50% and your average family that can’t grow their own food see what little money they have getting sucked away, go hungry and become very angry.

Gosh, I’m being a bit of a misery guts. What can we do about all this dourness? I know . . .

A photo of a big meringue cake covered in berries and a happy, grinning little brother! The meringue is at the bottom. There are no berries of any kind in Zanzibar and certainly no meringues and whipped cream. I have a tear in my eye now just thinking of the taste I have left behind. And no, little brother didn’t get any of it. It was too close to me and too far from him.

Our only non-food photo. Our friend in Glasgow, Fiach phoning David, our other friend in Glasgow, to let him know his idea of an afternoon showing us Glasgow’s botanic collection of Tanzanian ferns and African palm trees wasn’t going down too well with Nadine. We of course had a smashing time.

And then we came back. And I had my birthday last week

Nadine bought me a tree. It’s a baobab tree and it’s bloody huge. You can’t see it very well on this photo. It doesn’t actually end just behind me at that bush, it continues back to the edge of the photo.

And of course you can climb up it. Well it wouldn’t be a birthday tree if you couldn’t climb up it, would it.

And you can have a lovely birthday cup of coffee and piece of cake in its branches.

A bit of a strange blog that. We promise we’ll do more interesting stuff later once we’ve adjusted back to our diet of dried beetles and cow dung.

I shall leave you with a small foodie ad offering found on one of the local networking sites.

…

Dear Friends, I would like to inform you that we have a big offer on chicken livers. They are about to expire and we sell them almost for free. One big box of 20kg costs 10,000Tsh. If you buy many there is further discount! They are perfect for your animal. If you have doggies or cats (including lions) or crocodiles this is perfect gift for them! You find us in ZIPA, Maruhubi (close to Mtoni Marine). My number is 0774…., my email at work: ……

Karibu!

Imagine if you will the sight and smell of a 20kg expired box of this stuff. Let alone a lion or croc gagging on it.

Just back from a spot of R&R at a very swish hotel courtesy of Eva and Thomas. A huge thanks again you two. Not only did we get to re-acquaint ourselves with the luxuries of bacon, chocolate, brown sauce, mushrooms, cheese and funky cocktails, but we were also unexpectedly visited by a troupe of local monkeys that frequent the hotel. The monkeys aren’t mooching free food. They reject all attempts at being fed. They’re not interested in bacon or extra cheesy cheese pizza. They’re not tempted by strawberry jam filled chocolate doughnuts with sprinkly bits. They simply like the grubs and nuts and the shade on offer from the overhanging palm roofs of the hotel bungalows.

I hung around with them for a while one lazy afternoon to see what they got up to. Nothing much. I took a few snaps and left them to their monkey business. However, the following day having reflected on ‘nothing much’ I have come to the mentally shattering conclusion that our not so distant cousins have got life sussed. We evolved monkeys have screwed it all up. Lost the plot. It’s not about haring around at a 100 miles an hour, spending most of our time engaged in ‘planning’, ‘implementing’, ‘producing’, ‘achieving’, etcetera, etcetera.

It’s about lying on your stomach so your nuts can cool on a shady, smooth rock.

It’s not about the ‘bigger things in life’.

It is most definitely about the smaller ones. . .the absent minded, contentment of scratching your arse.

Nor is it about working yourself into the ground . It’s about lowering those over-achiever goals to something more manageable.

For example, picking out the fluff between your toes. A small,  personal goal that not only promotes hygiene but creates a precious moment of reflective rumination. When was the last time you reflectively ruminated? Go on. Pick a toe cleft.

It’s about sitting around and doing nothing, but importantly, it’s about doing nothing with someone else or, even better, whilst cuddling someone else.

And if you must do something do it together. Fair enough, scratching around for bugs and nuts might not be your thing but I’m sure you can come up with something.

And the answers to all those problems. Working out all those big and not so big ‘life’ questions. You don’t need drugs, You don’t need to develop your mind. It’s not even about cross party, cross gender open discussions aimed at realising mutual benefit for all concerned.

It’s about being very, very still, and very, very quiet, and staring very, very hard. At a point somewhere between your nose and infinity, you’ll find the answers.

And if staring doesn’t work, it’s about having the confidence to shrug your shoulders and walk off with your arse held high to stare another day.

Oh, and it’s about having a sharp haircut.

Instead of reaching for the stars, achieving your true potential and other such nonsense, it’s about time we went in for a little evolutionary regression. Some of us are already pondering this alternative step. Think Scottish de-evolution. Or is it devolution? Some of us have already experimented with it . . .

. . . and tragically, taken a step too far. Alas, our great unwashed brethren in Sunderland.

I am now off to the beach to find a cool, smooth rock, something furry to cuddle and to stare very, very hard at a point somewhere between my nose and the horizon.

You would think on an island where life is so dominated by Islam there would be no room for a world of witches and black magic. Perhaps one squeezed into a small, insignificant pocket for the faithless minority. Not quite, for here there be demons. ‘Shetani’ (‘Satans’) are very real for most local Zanzibaris. Magic and witchcraft have been the warp and weft of life on Zanzibar for a very long time. Well before the advent of Islam. As recently as 1930 Evelyn Waugh, visiting Pemba reported: “Zanzibar and Pemba are the chief centres of black art on the whole coast, and novices come from as far as Africa’s Great Lakes to graduate here’.

And we’re not talking spooks in the cupboard or stories to scare the kiddies at night. In 1995 the demon Popo Bawa (loosely translated as the bat wing or bat man) was set loose in Pemba. The bat man’s speciality was to drive an individual insane though, wait for it . . . buggery. Mostly men. I kid you not. So terrified were people that most villages on Pemba, started sleeping outside, seeking safety in groups. The hysteria swept to Unguja and resulted in a modern day Salem witch hunt. The local cabal of wizards eventually expelled it to the mainland from where it was claimed to have originally been sent by mischievous Tangan witches envious of Zanzibar. So infamous became the incident of Popo Bawa that leading western psychologists were sent to the island to investigate.

Of course this all points to an obvious, logical conclusion. Christian Bale in a reprisal of the batman oeuvre. Picture it, ‘A dark and troubled knight drawn to a dark and troubled distant shore, not to fight crime, oh no, instead to satisfy a terrible, insatiable hunger. A hunger that must be satisfied.’ I see a title . . . wait . . . yes, of course . . .

. . . ‘Batman Be Buggered!’ Christian would be magnificent.

Closer to home some of our very own colleagues practice the art of witchcraft. We have been assured they do the nice, touchy feely kind. We had a Ministry of Health colleague recently conduct an exorcism of someone afflicted with a Shetani that had apparently driven the poor man off his rocker. Our ‘white wizard’ fasted for 3 days then stood over the prostrate victim for 7 days reciting appropriate Quranic verses. Cured? But of course. Another example, a local teacher, again a colleague, is presently preparing with some fellow local witches to do battle with a Shetani that has possessed a Zanzibari, now living in London and of late taken to wandering the streets aimlessly for days on end. The preparation will take the form of a 7 day fast followed by communal recitals of the Quran over a period of 1 month.  We hope for a successful outcome.

Nadine has actually just completed her Shetani Little Witches Advanced Drivers Licence. Here in a practice session with two unfortunate souls before her final exam.

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A sobering footnote:

Unfortunately, there’s a far more disturbing side to all of this and it’s an example of how strong a hold the belief in witchcraft still holds on large swathes of the population in East Africa. About 6 months ago, on the mainland, in the far west around the area of Bukoba, children started to disappear. Tragically their bodies would invariably later turn up, horribly disfigured. According to reports, they were kidnapped for local ‘witches’ who believe children contain powerful magic. Now admittedly, wild rumours are a daily aspect of life around this part of the world, however, these stories have sadly proven true. The local communities are naturally very scared and very angry. People have been accused of being involved in kidnapping and have been dealt with in a similarly brutal manner. But it is always only ever people accused of kidnapping. It is never people accused of being a ‘witch’. A volunteer colleague caught in the middle of this horror asked why on earth weren’t these so called ‘witches’ themselves brought to justice. They do live a hermit existence but they’re easy enough to find. The reason? The locals (including the police) are afraid to. They apparently believe ‘witches’ are too powerful and cannot be confronted. To do so would mean that person’s death and the death of all those close to them.

A local policeman comes home to his wife in Stone Town.
“Fatma, you won’t believe what happened today, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Oh yes dear? What happened ?”
“I came across two men down by the beach. One of them was drinking battery acid and the other was eating fireworks!”
“Drinking battery acid and eating fireworks! What did you do to them?”
“I charged one and let the other off.”

And from here, dear reader, we make a small but perfectly segued jump into more fireworks and the celebration of revolution day in Zanzibar. January12, the day when Zanzibar commemorates throwing off the shackles of Arab dominance under the Sultan of Oman in 1964. A shame about the thousands of local Arabs killed in reprisals in the immediate aftermath, but that’s another less celebratory story. The only documentary evidence appears to have been shot by an Italian film crew with subsequent speculation as to its authenticity. The local Indian shopkeeper who stopped to show me the film on his mobile was clear in his head what happened over those few days. You can make up your own mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHqEXc3u6So

Anyway, we went down to the beach to see the fireworks from the end of the jetty. All very ooh and aah. Stone Town about 6km away all lit up in sparkly puffs of light and, wait, what are those long, lazy arcs of red lights stretching into the evening sky? There’s more and more of them, and that staccato sound? Paka paka paka. Of course. Tracer bullets. Ho ho. Those cheeky chappy soldiers letting of live ammunition again. Wouldn’t want to be in a fishing boat anywhere within a kilometre or so of that. Ouch.

Try and buy these fireworks

The more observant amongst you might also have noticed that we have changed the blog’s header to a bright and breezy shot of Stone Town. Nadine thinks my face is scaring off followers to our blog. So, here’s looking forward to a flood of new bloggy visitors to our site. Let’s see if we can push that monthly ‘viewer’ tally up to double figures.

Now here’s an often forgotten rule for a happy working life: Celebrate your successes! Especially since some things are not that easy to achieve. Tasks that might seem quite simple at first sight here can be incredibly difficult to complete. Take tele-medicine, for example. There is a simple free service available from a British charity (swinfencharitabletrust.org).  It’s a no-frills online platform for writing up case referrals and uploading photos of x-rays, ultrasound images, visual indications of the patient’s condition etc. Within a day or two a volunteering specialist doctor from somewhere around the world will reply via the platform and comment on the case. Often a dialogue ensues, more detailed information is requested, provided and commented upon.

Given the lack of people called doctors in most hospitals, let alone well qualified specimens or specialists, this service seems heavens-sent, a no-brainer. The service was introduced in all hospitals before we arrived here in 2011. It wasn’t used. And now it’s taken us over half a year to get the first hospital hooked on this.

So what are the barriers?

Technical:

• You need a PC
• You’d better have a camera
• You need more or less stable and not too slow internet
• You need technical support if there are problems

Skills-related:

You need to be able to:

• use a computer
•  use a camera and upload pictures
• write medical referrals in English
• understand medical advice in English

Attitudinal:

• Admittance that help is required
• Interest in trying something new
• Willingness to enter into a medical dialogue with a peer
• Willingness to commit time to writing the referral and reading replies
• Ambition to help the patient (you thought every health worker had this? Come to Africa.)

Now you can probably guess which of the three types of barrier is the trickiest to overcome. You can buy computers, sit people down in front of them, give them lessons in this that and the other. If you don’t have someone with the right attitude it’s all going to go nowhere. I have to say, out here it’s a constant reminder: It’s all about people, people, people.

So now we are super delighted that we have found the right kind of people in one of the hospitals in Pemba. We’ve set up computers they can access in the little hospital “resource centre” we have established, with the link as a bookmark on it, easy to access.

The new resource room

The charity has provided them with a camera. The internet is semi-stable, there is an administrator who can give a bit of technical support. We have the nurse matron who can use a computer, can use a camera and whose English is reasonably good. And a radiographer whose English is pretty good and who is also computer-savvy. Note: They are both not doctors so under usual circumstances would be seen as the wrong kind of people!  BUT: They are both dedicated, ambitious, disciplined and charitable. What a find! When we did an induction with them we submitted the first couple of cases together.

Interruption a serious team effort at posting case number 1

By the way, it took anything between 1 and 25 minutes to upload a photo such as this one.

Pneumonia?

We agreed with them that the matron would make the rounds each Wednesday to ask doctors whether they had cases worth referring, help them with the camera if photos were necessary, help them write the referral. I promised to keep track of what they are doing in the system and ask them for regular feedback to see how things are going.

Since mid November they have submitted 8 cases. In one case the doctor suspected Huntington’s disease to be the diagnosis for a 34-year old woman and asked whether videos showing her sitting, moving her hands and walking were available. They made three vids and uploaded them, without asking for help, advice, anything. The specialist’s suspicion has been confirmed and advice on medication and treatment was given.

After having had many attempts with doctors in other hospitals at getting this up and running, I must admit I just wanted to cry when I checked in the system for the first time and had seen that without any prompting whatsoever from our side they had made 2 additional referrals. Cases cover skin diseases, all sorts of infections, tuberculosis, tumors etc.

We’re now inviting them to come with us to the other hospitals on the island when we organise induction sessions. Let them inspire the others.

It might not seem like a big thing to you, but this does mean contributing to saving lives or at least making some people’s lives more bearable. A small success. Hongera! Congratulations to all involved….

A ‘mzungu’ (foreigner) customer walks into the meat section at the local food market. There are no fridges at the market so hygiene can be a problem. The customer goes to the first stall and checks out the meat. It’s covered in flies. ‘Uugh’, he thinks. ‘There must be better kept meat around here’. So he walks to the next one. However, it’s the same as the first stall. Big slabs of meat hung up on hooks dripping fresh blood and all of it crawling with flies. The same experience is repeated at all the stalls he inspects until he gets to one where there are no flies. He thinks to himself, ‘At last. Fresh, clean meat.’ He checks with the butcher that the cow was slaughtered this morning. Yes. Checks the price. It’s a fair price at about €2 a kilo. So he buys his meat, takes it home and cooks it up. Delicious. He continues to buy from the same butcher, pleased at having found one that takes the issue of hygiene seriously and makes sure his meat is clean and free of flies. After a couple of months of this it’s obvious that his butcher is the only one in the entire market with such spotless meat, so the customer on his next shopping trip asks his butcher how he, and he alone manages to keep his meat so clean and fly free. The butcher puffs out his chest, clearly proud of his meat and, aware that for the ‘mzungu’ cleanliness is important, he shows his customer the secret of keeping his meat clean. With a big grin he pulls out from under the table a family size can of heavy duty fly killer and sprays the meat. – a true story.

home delivery service

And as we’re on the subject of true stories, here’s another one courtesy of a recent security email alert sent out to all VSO staff in Dar Es Salaam

Subject: FW: SECURITY ALERT

FYI

Dear Sir/Madam,

Information reaching Police formation indicates that: There is a syndicate of criminals selling beautiful key holders at Petrol Stations. They sometimes parade themselves as sales promoters giving out free key holders. Please do not buy or accept these key holders no matter how beautiful they look. The key holders have inbuilt tracking device chip which allows them to track you to your home or wherever your car is packed. The key holders are very beautiful to resist. Accepting same may endanger your life. All are therefore enjoined to pass this message onward to colleagues, family members and loved ones. Alert everyone in your clique, including Drivers, Domestic staff etc

Many thanks,

Yours faithfully,

Mkokota C. Kihiga

KK Security Tanzania

Too beautiful to resist

Here at Najonajo we like to think we bridge the UK/Germany/Zanzibar divide. With that in mind we thought it appropriate at this festive time of year to explore some of the traditions surrounding each country’s interpretation of this magical event. So, what does Christmas Day mean in the UK? Well, Christmas day fall’s on the 25th December. This is the day when baby Santa redistributes all the loot he received from the 3 Kings to children throughout the land. AND be warned, any children who have been naughty during the year won’t get any presents. Instead they get a ticket straight to hell come the day of reckoning. Or something like that. On the great day itself we all eat and drink until we’re slightly ill and grumpy which is usually round about the time of The Queen’s Speech. The Queen’s Speech is an annual TV tradition stretching back to the 16 century. To Queen Elizabeth I no less! Heavens knows what TV looked like then. Wood fuelled contraptions I presume. Her Royal Maj’ uses the Queen’s speech to regale the land with anecdotes taken from the past year’s Royal Calendar to bring cheer and mirth to her subjects. Perhaps a story of the Princely princes and princesses enjoying a polo match or of flying here, there and everywhere in a royally royal luxury jumbo jet. Gosh, what japes.  Often it includes a timely moral hidden for us all to discover. To give you a flavour of the pearly wisdom her Maj’ passes down to the commoners here’s a little link for you all to enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXrbw4y9BYc

So there we have a traditional British Xmas day. What about our German cousins? What’s a German Xmas look like? Well, as usual the Germans well and truly beat the Brits, again. We did, after all, nick the whole idea off them. You could say that Germany is the home of Christmas and we can’t really expect to better them at their own game, can we? Crikey, they have a town where it’s Christmas all year round, every street filled with Christmas shops, Santa Grotto’s and Santa’s little Japanese elves. In Germany the snow is colder, crisper, whiter. They have bigger and better Christmas markets. They even pip us to the post for the grand day with 24th December the start of the yuletide festivities. Sorry England, you don’t even make it to penalties. There are no real TV events on the day itself. There is the Chancellor’s Christmas Speech, but that’s just a party political broadcast. Far more interesting is  New Year’s Eve when a rather special offering is dished up in the form of a unique television event called, ‘Dinner for One’. A highly complex and subtle study of the interaction between an elderly lady and gentleman. I say complex and subtle as the same episode is watched by many, many Germans every year. Sometimes more than once on the same evening. It must be similar to our own marvellous Queen’s Speech, containing so many subtle lessons and hidden truths that only a lifetimes viewing can hope to uncover its secrets . Here, now, for your viewing edification, the absorbing, contemplative: ‘Dinner For One’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVd_VLO9xcc

And what about Zanzibar I hear you say. Well, about 50% of Germany and Britain appear to decamp to Zanzibar every Xmas and book into hotels up and down the coast and don’t go back until the New Year. You can’t move for them. So I guess by popular vote a true Christmas is only to be had on the tropical shores of a sun kissed beach. A Pina Colada in one hand a handful of suntan lotion in the other.

Wishing you all a splendiferous Xmas and a digit injury free New Year.

I have had a small accident dear readers, hence the lack of posts on the blog. Apologies to all the thousands of our fans who’ve written in asking our whereabouts and pleading for the next bloggy instalment. Alright, we’ve had nobody writing in apart from a final debt demand but I’m sure you’re all dying to know the juicy details of the accident so without further ado…

First of all please stop your fretting. I can confirm the dashing good looks are still intact, however my plans for a move into classical piano and violin as a career are now in tatters, along with my little finger. Yes, an accident involving only my little pinky, but a tale in the telling that contains all the requisite elements of a box office smash hit: danger, excitement, a hero and heroine (that’ll be me and Nadine) a moral or two for us all and the vast magic landscapes of Zanzibar and Consett, County Durham.

Ouch yer bugger!

So, if you’re all sitting comfortably I shall begin the story of, ‘Big John and the scumbag driver who is going to get his as soon as I lay my hands on his filthy, cowardly hide.’ (the title needs a bit more work).

“It was 7am. A warm golden sun had risen into a high, pale

blue African sky. The house . . .”

You know, this is going to take forever and my buggered little finger keeps slipping on the keyboard, so how about I just give you the details and you use your imagination to picture it all on the big screen in ultra-quad sound wrap around feelme 4D vision. Yes? Good.

I got hit by a car on my motorbike.

Not quite the punchy read I was intending. Nevertheless, containing a few points worth elaborating on. The first being my wife. I drag her out of a career and away from her family to the other side of Africa and stick her in a shack and a penniless job that has at times been a challenge to say the least. Then I start careering round on a motorbike and have the inevitable daft accident (not my fault) to which she responds in her usual calm, assured way. And still looks great throughout it all. She whisks a bloodied me, with the help of some equally able colleagues and VSO, to whom huge thanks is also owed, from the roadside to x-ray, back home to pack, then arranges transport to the mainland via the police station to make a report, another hospital on the mainland, to the VSO office to arrange flights home and from there escorts me back home to blighty and another hospital. If my motorbike accident was a bad piece of luck this woman is without doubt the best bit of luck that has or will ever happen to me.

The second point has to be the state of hospital care in Africa, or at least from our perspective here in Zanzibar.

If you have an accident in Zanzibar don’t bother calling the emergency services. There’s no number. And if there were there’d be no ambulance on standby to come to your aid. You make it to hospital under your own steam irrespective of your condition which as you can imagine with some injuries can significantly shorten the odds on arriving alive. ‘Hospital’ is probably too generous a descriptive label. As an illustrative example, I was treated on an old wooden gurney by an orderly in a less than white orderly’s tunic, the cuffs frayed and coloured by dirt and/or old blood. He had dirt under his fingernails. His sole possessions of medical succour were two swabs and a knife and fork in a glass that for some reason sat on his tray.  Could be the medical ethos here is, if it can’t be saved, eat it. My hand and arm were dripping in blood and at this point were also covered in flies. Two swabs were not going to do it. He gave it a good go though. The first one was soaking in blood and flies within a few swipes so too the second one. The orderly looked at me, then he looked at the two soaking swabs. Then he looked back at me. Paused as though pondering the consequences of his next move, then picked up the swabs, rang them out on the floor and started wiping again. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An example of hospital care or what passes for it in a land that from where you’re sitting is probably no more than 9 hours away on a plane. And I need to add here hospital care that has not lacked millions of dollars being pumped into it over decades by western donors. Quite an eye opener or little finger cruncher.

And as further contrast, I was back home within 24 hours and walking into Newcastle RVI for follow up treatment. Within the space of 1 hour I was seen by two nurses, one X-ray team, a plastic surgeon and a physio-therapist. And had a cup of tea thrown in. As a personal plea to any British nationals reading this blog, be proud of your medical health system. It is a rare and wonderful thing staffed by dedicated and wonderful people. Be warned, let those Tory wankers dismantle it and sell it off at your, your children and your grandchildren’s peril.

We try to be topical here at najonajo and with the US elections just finished (a gazillion billion dollars dished out to maintain the political status quo equivalent of a handbag fight on the dance floor) we thought it would be instructive to take a comparative look at the two political systems of the US and Tanzania. Part 1 in a broad encompassing series of 1 is below:

The US House of Representatives.

Constructed in the 19^th century and consists of six principal Congressional office buildings, three Library of Congress buildings and a museum of American art and history. To quote: “A fine example of 19th-century neoclassical architecture, it combines function with aesthetics. Its design, derived from ancient Greece and Rome, evokes the ideals that guided the nation’s founders as they framed their new republic”.

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The Zanzibar House of Representatives.

Fair enough. Perhaps you could quibble over the architectural proportions. You could even question the wisdom of locating  the local football pitch to its left and the road side bicycle repair shop to the right in attempting to evoke the aesthetic grandeur of Greece and Rome. The grazing cows in the car park don’t help much either. However, you cannot deny the intent. Zanzibar might be a small “country” but it has the ambition of a behemoth. It’s also spitting distance from our house and I am on friendly terms with the cleaner so I’m hoping to get my first hand glimpse of Zanzibar politics in action quite soon. I am very excited.

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. . . I did indeed manage to get in and sneak a peek at one of the chamber debates. Didn’t understand a single word which is pretty much the same reaction that politics in the UK gets from me. More interesting was the interior design and idiosyncracies of debate chamber politics. Whereas the UK Parliament goes in for oppressive mahogany and fetish leather as an interior motif and a lot of horse naying as a means of communicating approval and disapproval, Zanzibar is very much your wedding salon white with gold trimmings and a lot of banging and thumping on tables to communicate their pleasure or otherwise.  Quite rhythmic actually. For the first 15 minutes I thought the noise was the handyman doing repair work in the toilets. They also have a very nifty House Speaker who is much grander than the one we have. He is a splendidly large individual that sits on a splendidly large chair, behind a very impressive large desk on an equally impressive large podium. He sits at his desk and, well, sits mostly. He pressed a few buttons and lights flashed every now and then. I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. Pacman? Anyway, I got bored after 20 minutes and left. In hindsight you could probably swap both Parliaments around and neither country would notice the bloody difference.

Evening all. We’ve just had a friend, Ivo, staying with us and for part of his stay we took ourselves off to the other side of the island where all the tourists hang out. As it turned out we were about the only tourists there. A bit of a quiet period apparently. A brief selection of pics to capture the mood follow:

A Masai walking down the beach. Coolest dudes I’ve ever seen. You try making a red and purple check skirt, sandals made from old tyres, and a brolly (yes, they carry brollies) look cool. These blokes can.

Rothco shot (the two blotches are Nadine and Ivo). And below, a picture of the Rhine by some Gursky bloke  which went for $2.7 million a week or two back. A rip off if you ask me. Mine would look much better on the wall. It’s yours with a frame for 50 quid.

$2.7 million for this! You have to be off your trolley mate.

This has much more going for it than the sad, wet polaroid snap above it. Yours for a tenner. I’ve dozens of them. That other bloke only did one.

We basically spent the entire holiday sitting on our arses watching stuff drift in front of the camera.

Some photogenic little kiddy lost in a daydream. It was only when I hit him with a decent half pitched coconut that he woke up.

View from our room balcony. Don’t know if it has anything to recommend it as a shot but I like it and it’s my blog.

My wife under a tree shrub thing surrounded by the druggy dayglo colours of Jambiani.

You might just be able to make out the wee lad playing with a home made boat. All the kids had one. Each had makeshift rigging that mimicked the larger boats. We were told its how they start learning the mechanics of sailing before they graduate onto the real thing. A shame they don’t do the same with swimming. A lot of fishermen still die each year because they can’t or are weak swimmers. While we were there we heard of a celebration in the village for a fisherman who had turned up alive 3 days after his boat had gone down. He’d simply clung to a piece of wood for 2 days and ended up a couple of islands away. If he hadn’t hit that last island the next stop was a 3,000 or so mile drift to the Indian sub-continent.

Our holiday front door.

Local kids walk up and down the beach selling home baked food.

This one was selling ‘visheti’ small sugary doughnut twists. 10c each. I managed to knock her down to 3c. She wouldn’t stop crying until I gave her a pen (no ink left in it). Anyway, very tasty but a bit of a sugar hit.

Local game of footy between the ‘Village Under 10s’ and the ‘Masai Calves’. The calves got slaughtered, during and, I think, after the game.