Hope Training - Ngaramtoni

Sally Dec 08 - Feb 09

Not quite sure why I chose Tanzania. I had up until recently planned to climb Kilimanjaro, but due to some kind of spinal injury which lasted 3 years until this year, I had to put it on hold. I still was stupid enough to pack climbing gear, which I keep moving around in my case to fit in other things. I just haven’t had enough high things to walk up and get fit on, so wander each evening to gaze at Mt Meru when the clouds move away, and it glows pink in the setting sun.
Tanzania is a very poor country, filled with seemingly thousands of organisations and individuals, of every size, shape and agenda, trying to help, build, cure, teach etc.
I am working in the banana plantations, a twenty-minute walk from Ngaramtoni, a squalid township half an hour drive in a packed-full tin box on wheels from Arusha.
Sometimes I help with the bananas but my main task is to train teaching methods in Health Education and HIV prevention to six community volunteers who with a bit of luck may be ready to teach this to all the local teachers.

I live with a local family near to the office and near to the villages which I am involved in. I have a lovely bedroom and we have lovely meals, which for me are vegetarian. Between 6pm and 7pm I receive a bucket of hot water for my bath, which I always need as I am always dirty…covered in dust on the dry days, and mud on the wet days (from head to toe). Toilets in Tanzania are places you go to die, or suffer from constipation, as they are mostly not fit for anything else, though, how lizards manage to live in them I don’t know.

It’s very friendly up here with everyone stopping to talk and shake hands, and test me in all the Swahili and Maasai greetings they have in their languages. Do NOT take out a camera though or you could be beaten with a 6 foot 6 Maasai warrior’s stick. They don’t understand if you want to take a picture on market day they are quite welcome to stand aside so as not to be in the picture. I’ve taken to drawing them in my sketchbook instead as 10,000 Tsh a picture is a bit expensive. Many shopkeepers in Ngaramtoni are lovely people, doing a good job in terribly difficult conditions. I would love to take some home with me a swap them for some of our miserable, unhelpful youngsters at home.

In the region I am working there is plenty of food available, and people have a better diet than most in the UK. It’s all freshly picked, freshly cooked and freshly eaten. No junk. I am told other areas are not so fortunate. I do spend a lot of time trying to figure out why there is so much poverty. There are just so many children, even the poorest have huge families and I believe a tour company in Arusha take tourists to visit a Maasai with 97 children. Isn’t that a great idea to encourage breeding!
I am then told it’s education the country needs, correctly so, but every time a new school is built, it is immediately filled with hundreds more children, and not enough teachers to go round. So if they keep building schools how can it solve the reproduction problem within the next 100-2000 years? How much sorrow, starvation, illness, early deaths will have to happen? I must stop worrying about what to do, as I am not getting anywhere.
Having worked previously in some of the poorest places on earth, I do find it difficult here.

There’s a bar down in Ngaramtoni, called The B.M.W. It’s quite out of character for the town, as it’s clean, with little tables, place to wash your hands with clean water, and a relaxing place to sit on the veranda and watch the world (Ngaramtoni) go by. I’ll just go now and have a glass of Kilimanjaro beer, and imagine I’m reaching the last 5,000 metres.

From Sally, retired Health Visitor, from England, working for 2 months as a Trainer, training trainers to train!