Thousands of shillings (part two)

Madam Leemo did it differently.  She protected us with her paper-work, ink stamps, and permission letters and without her we couldn’t have been in Tanzania at all.

One afternoon she took us to her office and gave us coffee and mandeza with bananas and said “you are very welcome to Tanzania, thank you for coming all this way with the new computers”.  We told her that the pleasure was all ours and we smiled while the wooden fan dragged some air around the ceiling.

Her office overlooked the movements in Morogoro and she had been watching from the hillside since the 70s.  She had been a teacher herself at one time, and while she loved her country she told us that she worried about the schools, the books and the students.  She told us how important it was for the teachers to learn how to use computers, so that they could then teach their pupils.  And even though so many schools didn’t have electricity, this was bound to change sooner than later.  Computers were the future, ICT training the way forward, and Tanzanian teachers were ready for tuition.

She took us to the balcony where the Germans had once looked out for enemies “but I look out for friends” she said and smiled.  Then she gave us tourist advice about walks in the mountains, the best places for the best views and how to look after our belongings in the market.  She was also concerned about the sickness in our team and asked “is it true you now have two people in your group with malaria?” and she shook her head.  The afternoon ended with the start of the sunset, so we left her on her balcony and returned down the hill.

They day before we left she said “please come back next year with more volunteers, more computers, more time” and I think she believed we would.  We didn’t even take new computers to her teachers and her schools, but second-hand old ones we were throwing out anyway.  She may have suspected that we weren’t really aid workers, but holiday makers with a bit of tame guilt, but like Sister Salome she didn’t breathe a word of it.

This was very un-like Claudia.  Claudia was the doctor at the hospital we visited and she did it differently again.  Not with paper-work, food or a soft place to sleep but with medical training and a prescription for thoughts.

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