St Peter’s Church Bredhurst Pictures From Kondoa and Elsewhere in Tanzania, May 2009
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Home Letters from: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Pictures from 2008

Information on the Parish of Wekense

This collection comes from Graham & Marilyn’s trip in May 2009

Note: Please do NOT respond to any requests for money purporting to come from the church in Tanzania.
These messages don’t come from the church; they come from crooks.
Donations to Beth’s work can be made via Rochester Diocese or via the Curate.

On the Way to Wekense via Dodoma, Kondoa and Chemba
		The giraffe is Tanzania’s national symbol. We found this one at our first-night stop in Mikumi national park – the smallest and least touristy and all the better for that. Knock one over with your car and the fine is 50,000,000 shillings, (£25,000) or about 25 year’s wages. So you don’t. Maybe we need the same rule about knocking down children?
Spectacular scenery is the order of the day wherever you go. Each habitable area is surrounded by hills so you are never far away from them. Increasing population is beginning to result in unsustainable farming of the upper slopes, where the thin soil is rapidly washed away.
		You could allow the porter to carry the bags or you could just pop it on your head and do it yourself.
Beth’s neighbour from Kondoa with her youngest and her house-maid (no, Beth’s neighbour is not rich; she takes in uneducated penniless girls and trains them so they can have a job elsewhere than the Sand Beach Hostel or ‘brothel’ as it’s better known.) We met for sodas (tooth rotting sugar drinks) in Dodoma.
		The Bell Tower, Nave and outside of the Anglican Cathedral in the capital city, Dodoma. The new city is growing fast, seemingly under the direction of the same planners who designed Milton Keynes. The cathedral was built in the 1930s. The main building is brilliantly sympathetic to the Islamic heritage of the area but I can only assume the architect of the bell tower had been sampling the local cannabis which is notoriously strong...
Buying the materials for Wekense (our link church) from the Dodoma version of B&Q. The system is interesting – we needed 85 bags of cement, which I doubt a smaller B&Q could do immediately, and they had 6. But what they do is then buy the materials needed from other stallholders until they have the required amount (they have plenty of time before the frighteningly unstable truck comes to collect it…) The owner (left of picture) comes from the village where Beth has her farm so he offered the best prices! On the right is Dawdi, the son of the Wekense vicar, who did the initial negotiating (the price goes up if there’s a white face nearby, or goes down if they recognise Beth.)
Put video here :		The road to Kondoa is 100 miles (160km) of dirt track. You might think this is why the NGOs all travel in brand-new Land Cruisers but they actually rarely venture out of the cities, which are awash with their gleaming white vehicles. This is a battered old Land-Rover that we borrowed from the Dodoma Diocese. We saw about a dozen other vehicles during our four hour journey from the capital to the regional capital of Kondoa. What I’ve not taken a picture of, because I was scared of him, was the big bloke with a loaded AK47 sitting in the passenger seat for half an hour whilst we went through ‘bandit country’. Why hasn’t Beth told us about this before I wonder?
View from a bridge over a major river (and all the rivers were the same) just a few weeks after the rainy season. That’s not a mass of muddy water gushing along; it’s sand. Something to ponder next time someone tells you climate change is a load of hooey. The clouds exist to make you hope it’s going to rain, but it doesn’t.
Kondoa
		Karibu means welcome, so here is a welcome to Kondoa. After 4 hours of bum-numbing, spine-jarring, brain-jiggling journeying it was indeed welcome.
Near Kondoa and typical of the march of technology. Unfortunately the mobile phone people have discovered that they can put masts anywhere, especially on scenic rock formations. Large masts are sprouting everywhere, though power is a bit of a problem so few are actually up and running yet (one suspects there is aid money involved when it’s incompetent.)
		Beth’s house in Kondoa. Her Kondoa farm produced nothing this year, hence the scrub in the back garden.
The kitchen. That’s not a telly on the right; it’s a glass cupboard door that serves as a mirror.
		Wow, a proper bathroom! Only slight snag is that the builder never actually connected a water supply, hence the two buckets on the right. You wash in one and then use the dirty water to flush the loo. Why not?
Our bedroom. That’s a mozzy net above the bed but we still came back covered in bites, (mainly from Dar-Es-Salaam; it’s so dry in the middle of the country that the mozzies have nowhere to breed – an interesting by-product of drought.) The football shirts get a mention later. Furniture is made in tiny sheds using very basic hand tools. Bed design is completely standardised and utterly hopeless; I suspect they got it from the Chinese (from whom they buy everything else.)
		The living room. The box is a sewing machine, of which more later. No TV for Beth but there is an intermittent electricity supply and some of the neighbours have discovered the ‘joys’ of satellite telly, (and you thought UK telly was bad…)
Inside the cathedral in Kondoa. The people here spent a lot of effort making bricks for an extended building but work ground to a halt and most of the bricks have since been stolen. They were quite dispirited but very welcoming.
		Signing the visitor’s book is obligatory wherever you go. This is us doing the honours in the cathedral.
The trainee vicars are self-supporting. Literally. They are growing their own food. I got quite angry here – some well-meaning outsiders had donated two large packs of brand new theology books to the school. In English. The principal and lecturers have not been paid for months and the students can’t afford to eat but they have some really nice books in a language few can speak. What is amazing is just how happy they were!
		The Diocesan workshop. The carpenters here can make just about anything from next to nothing. The wood is fabulously coloured with tones ranging from purple through browns to white all in the same plank. And then they stain everything dark brown because the British taught them that that was what expensive things looked like.
A gathering of the women. You need to take a few pictures before you get one you feel happy about publishing due to the feed on demand practices of the babies.
		The teachers of the pre-primary in Kondoa. This is housed in a room within a purpose-built classroom unit and is relatively well-equipped compared to those in the villages.
Chemba
The town signs are usually provided by NGOs in return for them being able to advertise what they want on the sign, often a health message. This one is unusually ornate and may reflect Chemba’s planned status as a regional centre. That’s a half-finished house in the background. If you have a good harvest you buy some bricks. If the rains don’t wash it all away in the meantime you might be able to afford the rafters next year.
		The current Chemba church with Pastor Tito approaching. It is planned to make it a permanent school when the new building is finished.
The new Chemba church. It looks massive but is about the size of All Saints in Hempstead. Next steps are building the gable ends (2,000 bricks at 20 shillings each – that’s, ooh, £20 to you guv; shall I throw in a bag of cement?) But the builder (architect in our language) is owed £200 for all his work to date so they want to pay that first. Weekly collections are typically about £2 by the way.
		On the road to Beth’s farm.
And here is the farm, the farmer and her neighbour (the vicar.) Pumpkins are a trial to see if they help fertilise the soil but they also come in handy as gifts. Sunflowers provide oil. Maize and millet provide the flour for making various concoctions of sticky stuff.
		The farm boundary is clearly marked. This is where you discover the meaning of “beating the bounds” that used to be done in England before the invention of hedges and fences.
The proud farmer with her crop – the third to be planted this year and the only one which grew.
		Beth has her room in this complex – a left-over from an aid project to teach people carpentry (nothing else remains, sadly). She rents a small room in the right hand wing; another is used by a youth group and we used the guest room at the back left.
Dinner by kerosene lamp. Not quite as romantic as candlelight. It goes dark at six and dawn is at six. So you sleep a lot.
		The famous or infamous termite mound from which it is possible to get some sort of signal on a phone. A new mast that rivals the Eiffel tower is being built in the village so reception should improve and the chickens will all be pre-fried.
Fruits of her labour for giving to the Vicar’s wife in Wekense. Pastor Tito lives in this adjacent farm and is holding two bowls I made him as a thank you for his support to Beth. He is vicar for seven churches, Area Dean and Diocesan youth coordinator and he is paid, um, nothing. He runs four farms (that means he personally does the work), geographically dispersed in the hope that at least one will prove fruitful (the rain can be very localised) to support himself. The building behind him is his living room and bedroom. The building on the right is the kitchen. The midden is out the back and you have a wonderful view of the hills through the non-existant door.
		And this is Beth’s kitchen in Chemba.
And this is the guest bathroom, (I won’t show you the one Beth uses.) As in Kondoa the plumbing is only for show and is all done from buckets using a rainwater supply. Yes the toilet is sunk into the ground – most Tanzanian toilets are just a hole in the ground and I can only assume that the builders were trying to make this one fit their understanding!
		Busman’s holiday as I work with Mama Gordi’s husband to construct the brand new Chinese sewing machine that is Mama Gordi’s wages for running the pre-primary school. It cost £65, well £60 after Beth had negotiated them down for taking too long to get one from the store. The quality is so bad as to be laughable but it works now that we’ve corrected everything using someone’s granddad’s tools that were too useless to be even scrapped in the UK and so were sent to charity for use in Africa (the screwdrivers were all round and worked only on friction.)
And here’s a happy Mama Gordi with Gordi (the mothers are all called after the name of their oldest living child. That made Marilyn Mama Bethan because they’ve not met the others) and her baby. Her kitchen/living quarters are about 8 foot by 6 foot and 4 foot high, covered in a clay and straw roof for insulation. She lives here for a long time (maybe years) after the birth of each baby before returning to the main building – it’s crude but it works in the absence of the pill (the women have been fed scare stories about health risks from contraception.)
Wekense
		The road to Wekense is like the one to Kondoa but narrower and even more spectacular. It takes about 90 minutes to do the 40 mile trip from Chemba.
Despite being two hours late (fixing the sewing machine needed daylight) we were treated to breakfast in the vicar’s house.
		Some of the St Peter’s gift to the Wekense church project.
And the steel reinforcing for the pillars (the project stalled when an architect told them their original plan of just building blocks would not be strong enough. Not bonding the bricks hadn’t helped either.)
		I promise I will never complain about doing action songs in church again!
I lost count of the church services we attended. This is the Sunday School from Wekense doing a very vigorous dance.
		We received a presentation of a huge bucket of honey. This was extravagent to say the least. More than that, it was outrageous. We kept a sample (which leaked in our suitcase) but the rest will be shared around by Beth. The presentation ceremony is much better than our dreary efforts…
Forget the baptisms. Forget Graham doing bits of the communion service in Swahili. Forget the building materials. This is what drew the biggest cheer and shouts, the delivery of the last and final football shirts shipment from the vast numbers donated over two years ago that have been slowly making their way out in 23kg lots. Wekense hadn’t received any before this so they can now face the other teams with pride. They cleared (by hand) and built a new football pitch with goalposts whilst we ate lunch (maybe we should have got them to build Wenbley?)
		And we finished with two days total rest in Bagamoyo just north of Dar. Amazing what modern digital cameras can do – you can’t see one of the hundreds of pesky mozzies that ate their way through every square millimetre of skin that was not an inch deep in repellant. But the plumbing worked!
And the sun set. And the BA staff were superb.

Home Letters from: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Pictures from 2008

Information on the Parish of Wekense