We drove, at first, through a very ordinary city passing banks, hospitals, hotels and such like. The traffic was very heavy and we moved slowly enough to write down some of the things, mostly adverts, that we saw written in English. Fight Hair Fall was one of my favourites. Business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark, may not work so well in wink-free India, even with the explanation you know what you’re doing but she doesn’t. And there were two things that were written, as it were, for me, or for someone in my situation, suffering from an increasingly awkward and uncomfortable neurological disease. First, on a big placard outside a church, The Most Useless Emotion is Self-pity, and an ad for mobile phones that said Make the Most of Now.
We drove and drove and the morning seemed to be passing by without us getting anywhere. We tried to get the driver to stop but he spoke very little English and drove on. Then he phoned his brother, who spoke more English, and we explained that we wanted now to stop and have some lunch. That was how we came to eat at Mumbai’s McDonalds. Then we drove on. Our driver was a very nice smiley guy with very dark skin, almost black. Like any big city Mumbai hosts people from other parts and this guy was from Chennai, way down in south India.
Our destination, we discovered, was the Taj Mahal Hotel on the sea front. It had been the scene of a dramatic terrorist attack a few months before (when we were in Nepal) and now was on the tourist trail. There wasn’t much to see, just a few bullet holes in the stonework, but we walked along the prom and then took a boat out into the harbour with the other visitors, all of whom were Indians. People took photos of us as if, Flic said, we are the unusual ones. And Flic made friends with a man from Sri Lanka and his Indian wife who let her hold their baby.
We were taken to the famous Chowpatti Beach and to a park with topiary animals and to a Jain temple. Then we tried and failed to get our driver to take us to the airport. He was very proud of his adopted city and showed us a huge road that was under construction stretching out to sea and back again on concrete pillars; a ring road that would alleviate some of Mumbai’s traffic problems. He insisted that we come back to the city in 2010 to see the completed Sea Link, as it’s now called. We agreed to come back but we knew it wouldn’t happen. We asked if we could go to the airport as our flight time was growing closer. He took us to another beach, hot and crowded with brightly dressed people and vivid coloured stalls selling fruit and juice and icecream, Flic describes it. We walked among the crowds for a little while and watched the sunset before asking again if he could take us to the airport. He agreed. He had shown us as much as we could fit in and we had enjoyed our day out with him. Now it was time to go home.
N is for Nuweiba (Egypt)
I don’t know how many hours we waited in the port of Nuweiba, on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, for the ferry across to Aqaba. It wasn’t run as a convenient passenger service but for the transport of huge lorries which took an unforeseeable amount of time to load onto the boat. Outside of the steel shed that was the waiting room we were invited by some Jordanian guys to join them and eat a share of their lunch. There was both roast chicken and boiled eggs in the same meal making it a sort of mother and child reunion, as Paul Simon would have said.
We had been staying in nearby Dahab where we went out one day in a glass bottomed boat to look down on the reefs and the tropical fish. After we had stopped for a while to do some snorkelling and had started on our way back to the shore I noticed a local man who was out for the day with three of his children. They were dressed in Western clothes but he wore flowing robes and a head cloth. He nodded to me and said the words Alan Shearer. At least that’s what I heard. Alan Shearer, there, he said the name again. I woke at four o’clock the following morning with the name sounding in my head followed by the words Newcastle United and the image of a black and white striped football jersey. What was this all about? Oh yes, the boat had been surrounded at one point by black and white stripy fish. And the Egyptian man spoke to me in the international language of football. Unfortunately I’m not a fluent speaker.
It was a couple weeks earlier, on the opposite shore, that Flic had another typical traveller’s experience. We were staying by South Beach, Aqaba, when she decided to walk along the shore alone as the light faded away after sunset. Be careful, I said, as she set off. It took some time for her to return and I was worried. And, of course, the inevitable had happened. She had been stopped, invited to eat some food with a Jordanian family, and came back with no appetite for supper whatsoever. But I told you to be careful, I said.
15
Africa
It was a cool summer evening in 2001 and here, in our living room, we had lit the wood-burning stove for the benefit of our guest, Joseph Sekiku. He was a short, chubby man with a round head and black skin, in truth more of a milk chocolate colour, which was a novelty to us here. And he was that colour all over; I knew that because he hitched up his t-shirt (and Flic’s jumper, which he had borrowed) to scratch his ample belly. He wore a big smile on his face as he said the words, Richard, when you come to Africa...
Joseph had been telling us the story of the journey he made from Kampala, in Uganda, back to his parent’s home village, Nyakasimbi, in north-west Tanzania. Joseph’s father was a doctor who been educated by the British and had gone to live in Kampala where Joseph was brought up. Joseph’s father was killed by Idi Amin’s soldiers when Joseph was fourteen years old and now, as a young man at university, Joseph wanted to go back to his roots, to the village where his grandparents and aunts and uncles lived. Kampala to Nyakasimbi takes less than a day by car now but in those days, twenty-five or so years ago, the roads were rough, public transport limited, and people didn’t travel that way, into a very poor part of Tanzania.
Joseph’s story included sleeping outdoors amid a group of people heaped up together to keep warm and being given a lift by a nun of whom he was very suspicious. His difficulties included not being able to speak the local languages or even Swahili, only English and Luganda. When he reached Nyakasimbi everybody recognised him and he could see his family resemblance in the faces around him but he couldn’t communicate – only a few older people spoke English in Nyerere’s Tanzania. And when it came to bed time there was no room for him at all; he had to sleep with the goats.
Joseph came from an urban middle-class background and sleeping with goats was not something he had expected. He laughed with horror and delight as he told us the story. But what he was most aware of was the poverty. Here, in rural Tanzania, he witnessed a standard of living way below that he had experienced in Uganda. And these were his people. He decided that he would help them.
It was a few years later, after he had completed his degree in agriculture, worked for a while, and learnt to speak Swahili, that Joseph returned to Nyakasimbi. He bought some land, found himself a sturdy, intelligent wife and settled down to become the one man NGO who now sat in our living-room giggling and laughing as he talked. He had addressed a meeting in the nearby town of Machynlleth, met the children in our local school, and sat with me on the hill above the village, looked out across the fields and said, is it true that some farmers here have their own tractor? Now he looked at me, smiled, and said, Richard, when you come to Africa...
The story of our connection with Joseph Sekiku Mtabazi began two years earlier when Flic worked in a nursery school in Machynlleth. She came home one day with a letter from Africa asking for help. Joseph had been to Machynlleth a year or two before when he had taken some courses at CAT (the Centre for Alternative Technology). Now he wanted a link between his community and ours and he wanted a nursery school teacher to go out there. A conversation took place between myself and Flic that may have included the words, when are you going? and (in an incredulous tone of voice) what? me?
Flic applied for a grant for her airfare and was scared for the best part of a year and then got on the plane, stopped being scared, and spent three weeks visiting schools and various projects that Joseph had set up. She was on the receiving end o
f a great deal of hospitality, kindness and good humour. It was difficult for her get a clear idea of Joseph’s work; she was, as she puts it, overexcited, in a world so different from anything she had experienced before. I think she was brave to go out there alone, to be met at the airport by a man she didn’t know. I know I would have found an excuse for not going.
When Joseph came to Wales a year later he still had the idea of a link between communities with a support group at this end. He wanted me to go out there next. I would not have to be brave like Flic; I knew Joseph and I knew about the wonderful time she had out there. But I needed more of a concrete reason for going, something I could contribute.
I took Joseph to meet my friend Bob Shaw out in the woods south of Aberystwyth. Bob is an expert on green woodwork and woodland management, a countryman and naturalist, a visionary, and is one part tree and one part human being. If you saw lichens growing up his leg and moss in his beard you would not be surprised. We showed Joseph a pole lathe, a simple device for turning green wood into chair legs and tool handles, among other things. I explained that it was an outmoded thing, not practical for the twenty-first century, just for hobbies. Without hesitation he said that it was to him appropriate technology and it could be useful where he lived. I thought I had better go out there and make him one.
The last part of the drive from Entebbe airport, outside of Kampala, to Nyakasimbi, was along a typical African red-dirt road; the sort of road I had seen in Flic’s photos from Tanzania and an aspect of my romanticised picture of that part of the world. So when we arrived I just set off alone down that road, to get a feeling of the real Africa. I only intended to walk a couple of hundred yards or so. What happened is that one of Joseph’s sons, a twelve year old called Simeon, came and walked with me. It was a remote spot in a very poor part of a poor country but Simeon spoke some English and he took me off away from the road and down through the verdant farmland until we came to a place where a man and wife team were weeding a crop of beans growing between the trees. The man looked at me and burst out laughing, a good natured infectious laughter of pleasant surprise at seeing a white man turn up unexpectedly in his field. We stood and laughed and smiled at each other for a while, sharing no words of each other’s language. Simeon introduced us and explained that the man was his uncle, Joseph’s brother-in-law. The man and wife then took me a short distance to their home. I was their guest.
They lived in a hut of maybe two rooms, built of poles and mud with a roof of banana leaves. There was no furniture, just mats on a swept earth floor. The only decoration, if I remember, was a single random page from a magazine stuck on the wall. They fed me freshly harvested pineapple – or was it mangos and the pineapple somewhere else? I don’t know, I just remember the laughter and spontaneous hospitality. It was good.
I had brought with me to Africa a rough plan of how to make a pole-lathe, a few tools, and a certain amount of scepticism. When Joseph and I dropped in at a timber merchants to buy some square sawn pieces of wood, there, in the corner, was a perfectly good electric powered lathe. The pole-lathe was surely a white elephant. But on our way to Nyakasimbi we had picked up a friend of Joseph, a softly spoken young man called Aloysius Gonzaga. He was a carpenter by profession and he seemed genuinely interested.
Aloysius and I worked together making this simple piece of equipment, not a true pole-lathe but one powered by bungee cord as the pole would have to be seasoned to retain its springiness. Then he made a perfect cylinder out of a piece of jacaranda wood using a hand adze rather than an axe. He fitted the wood onto the lathe and quickly made a pestle for pounding grain. He was pleased and explained that electricity and electric lathes were expensive but here was a cheap alternative he could use in the workshop with his trainees.
I liked Aloysius Gonzaga. When we were in Joseph’s house later on in the afternoon there was some weird African status thing going on that meant that some people in the room were given a beer and others sat empty handed. I was in the first group and Aloysius in the second despite the fact we had just spent the best part of the day working together. I found an extra glass and shared my beer with him. I received a letter from him when I got home saying that he had made several bungee-powered lathes. And before I left Nyakasimbi he gave me the jacaranda pestle. We don’t pound much grain here in Wales but I’m pleased with it and it sits on my desk as I write this.
When Joseph picked me up from the airport he had two of his children with him: Jeff, a skinny little four year old with lots of energy and intelligence and a cheeky grin to go with it; and Comboni, a sleepy toddler somewhere between one and two years old. Joseph was good with children and made friends with children in the village here in Wales. At home in Tanzania he would often take one or two of his kids along with him and had looked after all five of them when his wife, Isabella, was away on a course. But his family life was complicated and needs some explanation.
Joseph split his time between the village of Nyakasimbi and the town of Kayanga where he had an office. In Nyakasimbi he lived with his wife, Isabella and their children, Simeon, Lawrence, Dorothy and Jeff. Isabella was a strong, handsome, capable woman who could carry a plastic jerry can full of water up from the stream on her head, could work in the fields or in the house all day long, and who could deal out large amounts of both love and discipline to her children as appropriate. In Kayanga he lived with his second wife, Eliot, a beautiful, vain, sleepy young woman with coffee coloured skin and the sleepy Comboni as her only child. How did the two women get on and how did they feel about it? I can’t even guess. The children came and went as children seem to in Africa, always looked after somewhere within an extended family.
I am friends with two of Joseph’s boys, Jeff and Simeon, on facebook. They were both likeable, intelligent children and I expect that they are turning into capable young men. I can’t imagine that they remember me and I don’t have so very much in common with them. The last time I looked at Simeon’s facebook page he was pretty keen on sexy white women, fast cars and Jesus, if I remember correctly. Now I check again and see a handsome young man, a graphic designer by profession, looking very community spirited and very happy. As for Jeff, he’s just chillin...
There is so much I could write about my two and a half weeks in Africa. I was taken around by Joseph to meet people and see projects that he had initiated. Some looked good to me; others I was doubtful about. It did seem like there was grant money available to start new projects but not enough to keep them running. Joseph was therefore always scratching around for new ideas. The priority had, perhaps, become ticking the boxes in a grant application form rather than meeting the needs of poor people. But Joseph was a good man with his heart in the right place and at least some of what he did was worthwhile and successful. And for me it was a special experience to be travelling around with Africans and staying in their homes.
On the way back to the airport Joseph took me to a game reserve. We drove out with the warden through the long grasses and scattered trees and caught an occasional glimpse of something with horns. Then we went to the river and watched hippos messing about. We passed an airstrip used by wealthy South Africans when they fly in to hunt. And then we came across some locals hunting with spears illegally. They hid and slipped away but their dog put its feet on a termite hill and stuck its head up to see what was going on. The warden raised his rifle and with no hesitation shot it dead.
A better memory to finish on. I sometimes walked around the town of Kayanga on my own. The children there would call out m’zungu, m’zungu in greeting, smile, run up to you and take your hand to walk along with you for a while. That’s what they do when they see a white person, a real stranger. I liked that.
O is for Omorushaka (Tanzania)
I was driving with Joseph Sekiku through a town called Omorushaka when he remembered that a friend’s wife was in hospital there and we stopped to call in. She was sitting on her bed recovering from a major operation and looked rough. Her husband looked pretty shaken a
nd I empathised with him very much; I had been in that situation, seeing the person you most care about suffering from a life-threatening illness. I must have given him a sympathetic look, we certainly didn’t say anything as we had no language in common. Or perhaps I looked worried, remembering how it was when Flic had cancer. When we left the ward he took my hand. We walked down a long, long hospital corridor like that, holding hands all the way.
16
I felt it touch my face with its whiskers
Now we come back to the recent travels of Flic and Richard. Times of hanging around at home feeling, off and on, too ill to do anything much, certainly too ill to think of another adventure. And then one day I would feel good, we would talk ourselves into doing one more special trip and I would buy some air tickets. Then I would feel rough again and be certain that we couldn’t go. The days would pass and my condition would improve, worsen, improve, and we would get on the flight. Once out in some foreign place the same pattern would continue. Days when it seemed too much, too dodgy to be so far from home and so dependent on both Flic and my medication. Days when we were having the time of our lives. Always the certainty that this would be our last adventure. Until next time.
In 2010 we went to India and Nepal again and visited some wonderful places. We started with Agra. The Taj Mahal is the big thing in Agra; it’s big and it’s beautiful and it’s visited by large numbers of tourists (most of them Indians) and I’m not going to write about it here. I’m going to quote from Flic’s journal:
We took a tuk tuk to Agra Fort to visit the bazaar. When we got there we weren’t sure which way to go so we got out our guide book which was a mistake. As soon as you look like you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing men gather around giving advice and offering to help, very cheap, so we put the book away and walked off purposefully probably in the wrong direction. A rickshaw driver followed us and we gave up our independence and climbed into the vehicle. He cycled off proudly as if we were fish he had caught.
The Road to Zagora Page 12