
It is Sunday night around eight o’clock.
Above me is the serene, dark sky, edged by the four walls of the little yard of the house of the family I’m staying with.
The moon and the stars are shining bright. The view is healing. I don’t know why, but it gives me the impression that there is more to life that an office job in the big city, though I doubt I could ever exchange the remote vastness of the Southern Highlands for a longer period of time with the kilele of the big city.
‘Have you ever seen such a clear sky?,’ my host, John asked last night.
I have. Once in northern Uganda, where we drove by the back roads between Arua and Koboko one night. And once I went by dhow from Bagamoyo to Zanzibar. But it doesn’t happen often. To see such a clear sky you need to be far off the infrastructure. In Denmark it isn’t possible.
I have no exact idea of where I am, but far off the infrastructure. The village is called Kanani, and it is no more than a few scattered houses, two churches and a school. I left Iringa Sunday morning at 9 o’clock, and met with John in Makumbako two hours later. Makumbako is a trading centre and a junction for the traffic moving up from Zambia via Mbeya, and to and from Songea, a town close to the Mozambique border.
BuI lost track when we drove off the road at Halali Village 22 kilometres after Makumbako on the road to Mbeya. We circled for 30 kilometres through Ilembula Village, where I waited for John to have a haircut; then to Mambegu junction; and finally the last 2,5 kilometres to Kanani.
To our right we had the blue Livingstone Mountains at Lake Nyasa. Livingstone made it all the way down here, entering from Mikindani at the southern coast of Tanzania. Years before he did another trip, the one he died of. (I think)
Someone is beating the drum, walking round the few houses which make up Kanani.
‘All people are requested to show up to make bricks tomorrow for the school toilets,’ my hosts explain.
We are far out. At least that is what I’m thinking as the life here is such a contrast to where I come from.
Even to Dar Es Salaam, which in this perspective has got it all; power, newspapers and people; network and tarmac.
The wind rustled the house all night. It was freezing cold when I woke up this morning, and slid my feet into a pair of cold malapa. The procedures for my morning toilette were another cold affair, and I’m soon to long for a warm shower.
Nevertheless, how often does an mzungu get a chance to stay with a local African family? I get it too seldom. And if offered we are likely to say no, because it takes extra energy to stay without these amenities we have grown into not living without.
Today I have been facilitating a training session on how to make a newsletter for John’s organisation, Njombe Agricultural Development Association (NADO), and right now, here at the end of it, I’m impressed with our progress, and the fact that it got concrete. Tomorrow will show if I’m too optimistic.
More about it later, my laptop battery is running low.
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