Thousands of shillings (part one)

Madam Leemo and Sister Salome both claimed they’d seen me before, but as last summer was my first time in Tanzania, that couldn’t have been the case.  They told me they were sure they had met me in summers gone by and I assured them I’d never spent evenings under the shadow of the Uluguru Mountains until then.  They had mistaken me for another one.  That was all.

We were in the middle of Tanzania working and teaching and living.  Days began with the sound of the monkeys jumping onto the iron rooftops joined with the voices of the nuns singing.  The smell of the incense coming out from the small church melted with the fog snailing down the mountain to come and greet us.  There was time to wait to heat up the milk for the morning coffee and time to breathe in deeply.  Days would end with the smell of the red caked soil in between tired toes and the touch of overly washed bed sheets, hand- knitted blankets and old mosquito nets with too many holes in them.   There were 24 of us in our group, and we lived there.

The first time I met Sister Salome she asked me if I were Catholic, married or a mother and when I told her I was none of these things she sighed.  The first time she saw me smoking in the garden she shook her head and said “my dear me, you are a troublesome one” but her smile had no anger.  I enjoyed our chats in the garden at the start and at the end of days and I missed her when she had to stay in bed because of typhoid.  When she recovered she told me that typhoid was a nuisance for her and her work.  A nuisance.

When people in our group became sick it was a nuisance for them and for our work.  The first one got sick on a Thursday and we went to the hospital nearby where he was diagnosed with malaria and told to take tablets from a plain brown envelope with no instructions or packaging.  When Sister Salome heard about the malaria she said “what a shame” she said to me “you come all this way and you work with us and you get sick.  Of course malaria is normal for us, but for you it is very sad”.

Like the others before us, we went to Morogoro with our plans, cameras and bicycle helmets and insisted on helping those there by sharing our skills and changing their lives.  While the sister just simply fed, protected and restored us when we weren’t looking and smiled slowly while the month moved by.  She did it differently to Madam Leemo, but the upshot was the same, in their unique ways they both looked after us…