What a treat. Today I will get chance to meet with Mumbray’s extended family: his mother’s sister’s daughter – referred to here as Mumbray’s sister – what I would call his cousin – a young lady called Joy and her two children.

Dala dala

At around 2pm Mumbray and I take a dala dala (a 15 seat minibus with 21 passengers, a driver and a fare collector!) to a major cross roads and then another on to Olasiti village outskirts. What an experience. Hot, cramped, friendly and cheap! Probably traveled 5 miles for about 20 cents (15 pence). This is the main form of transport for the locals – apart from walking.

We disembark and Mumbray tells me not to move. He crosses the busy street and finds a guy with a car to take us the last bumpy 2 miles or so to his sisters home. I try not to look out of place (ha!) so I talk to a man about the oranges he is selling. Without me in tow, Mumbray negotiates a good price for our ride. I wait for his signal and then jump in along side him and the driver gives me a wry grin. With our $5 “cab fare” he stops and fuels his beaten up jalopy of a car. Some minutes later we arrive at the destination and arrange for him to pick us up later to return to town.

We walk a few hundred yards up a dirt track and find Joy waiting for us at a turning in the road. We are surrounded by traditional stick-and-mud houses with tin or straw roofing. There are plenty of men and women walking, sitting and talking. Its their “day of rest” although some are clearly still completing chores. Joy can hardly believe someone has come all this way to visit her and finds it hysterical that I would come by dala dala. She graciously welcomes me to her spacious and newly constructed concrete block home.

We spend the afternoon getting to know each other. She is a full time Mum and plans to open a small Duka (shop) at the corner of their garden to sell essentials like salt and sugar. She can buy in bulk at the town market and sell in small batches to neighbors. Her husband works as a driver (“pilot” ) for a tourist company nearby and is out on safari.

Family photos

The family has been to church this morning and was just finishing lunch with a friend when we arrived. The children introduce themselves in immaculate English. ‘Tilda is 11 and Cecilia is 7. Tilda disappears to play with friends but Cecilia remains to get to know her visitor. She’s the most vibrant cheerful child I think I have ever met.

Joy and I tour their small garden and discuss the way of life in TZ. She expalins her children are at a private school where English is taught from the beginning. Her Mother is a school inspector. They have clearly achieved a comfortable lifestyle by working hard and are passing it on to their children by providing them with a great education.

Cecilia and I have a kick-around with a football in the back yard until I am exhausted (and in mortal fear of knocking over the water bucket).  Joy proudly shares her pictures from Tilda’s Communion with us. Its getting on in the afternoon and we need to get back before dark. Joy takes us in her car – she is a great driver with all the pot-hole avoidance skills of a safari driver – to the main road where we meet with the man in his “cab”.

I’ve just experienced my first visit to a middle-class home in this region. It is evidence of what can be achieved when opportunities are available. Very refreshing. Surely, after education, the provision of opportunities for self-reliance (i.e.opportunities to earn an income) is a priority in elliviating poverty.

Mumbray Records Channel

I’m writing this as the setting sun shines a beautiful orange glow on everything, the air begins to cool after a hot afternoon. Mount Meru appears from behind its cloud cover to say good night.  The diesel engine fires up as the hotel electricity cuts out temporarily. A wedding party noisily circles the town: a parade of cars, hazard lights flashing and a pick-up full of guys blasting out on trumpets, trombones and drums in celebration. Bride and groom are somewhere in one of the cars. Locals and tourists stop to watch. Some wave, some clap others look on trying to figure out what exactly is happening. This is Saturday evening in Downtown Arusha.

Farmers Questionairre

Today I spent my time with Mr Mumbray visiting Ngaramtoni, a rural village of 270 farmers that has worked hard to establish an irrigation system throughout its community. Ngaramtoni is one of two villages being studied by Mumbray as part of his thesis on the contribution of traditional irrigation projects to food security. His final task is to collect, collate and analyze the information he has gathered in questionairre form from each farmer in the village before presenting his paper to complete his degree in Regional Development and Planning.  His assessment should provide some quality data to determine if irrigation projects are actually alleviating food shortage challenges when the rains don’t come. If the farmers are growing food crops, then their families food supply is more secure than if they are growing “cash” crops exclusively to sell/exchange at market for perhaps insecure food crops. In reality it seems most farmers are combining the two.

Fully Planted Shamba

We meet Mr Abel Mangulai, one of the nominated Water User Committee members and walk to the source of the irrigation system, the Engore Olmolonyi river that has been partition so that some of the water flowing from the mountains can flow along the 400m of concrete channel the villages have built where it is then distributed via traditional earth draining channels to each of the farm plots. The success of the project is clear with a mixture of banana, soy bean, maize and cabbage being grown in shamba after shamba, the small family owned plots of land, around 1/4 or 1/2 acre each.

Family Poultry and Livestock

Irrigation water is available all year, albeit in much smaller quantities in the extensive dry season. 3 or maybe 4 harvesting cycles occur each year and a farmer can earn up to Tz 200k Tanzanian Shillings ($145) per plot each time the crop is harvested. That still averages less that $2 per day for an average shamba, meaning these villages remain impoverished but not hungry. Some supplement their crops with keeping kuku (chickens), goats and a cow or two. This is at least a step in the right direction compared to those shamba’s that have no irrigation and rely on the two, now extremely unpredicatble, rainy seasons each year and on supplementing this rain water with river water that may have to be fetched from many miles away each day by the women and children of the community. The challenge now for Ngaramtoni is to improve the yield of their crop, finding more new ways to benefit from their insight of bringing irrigation to their village.

Beans Galore

After some lunch with Mumbray back in town I return to the hotel mid afternoon to relax (OK, I took a nap) and reflect on what I’ve learnt about the significant challenges of rural life and the resilience of the rural farming community.

……here comes that wedding party again on another loop of the town.

Mumbrays Ilboru Home

An easy day that begins with a hot breakfast. Ah, beans on toast!

I’ve arranged to meet Rose and Mumbray for lunch and work through my e-mails before they arrive. We walk to a local restaurant the Arusha Naaz, not on the main “Mzungu” (white person) tourist route but perfect for a hot lunch of traditional food. We are welcomed and soon help ourselves to a buffet lunch of carrot soup followed by curried beans, lentils, rice, matoke (cooked bananas) and my friends enjoy some meat. We talk as we eat.

Mrs Rose Makara is a very talented and generous lady. Chairperson of the Engorika Savings and Credit Cooperative Society, in Sokon II Ward, Rose also works at the local Lutheran Church in Arusha and is taking a Masters degree at the Lutheran University. She has dedicated herself to helping the women in her community find ways of increasing their income through a micro-loan program so that they can reinvest in their businesses and also save some money for the emergencies that inevitably occur for every family from time to time. By having a pool of savings from which the women can borrow, at a very low interest rate, such an emergency should no longer become a family crisis. With 46 women in the group and many more wanting to join we talk a lot about the challenges the women face making their payments and the difficulties of this economic climate as well as the challenges the group face in finding a way to ensure that even the most impoverished of the community, including those who are sick and childern that are orphaned have some means of benefiting from the general improvements in the communities self-reliance brought about by this cooperative.

Children Greet Mzungu

Rose tells me about a one-day seminar that was held for the group. 30+ women learned about cooperative societies and how to run their businesses and also visited another successful cooperative and learned about improved ways of raising local varieties (disease resistant) chickens. All this from a donation of $40. Fantastic leverage by my reckoning showing just how high-impact an investment in education can be. We will visit Rose and some of the Engorika projects later in the week and I keenly look forward to seeing the progress that has been made since I was last there.

Rose returns to her work and Mumbray shows me his home in nearby Ilboru. The children are excited to see a Mzungu in their village. We walk a short way to the location of his new home, where he and his fiance plan to live after their marriage in November. It’s a very peaceful location that will make a great starter home for the newly weds .

Children of Ilboru

At the end of the day I stop at the Bamboo Cafe across the street from my hotel. Mr Sulle the GPFD local partner comes by and we talk over Chai Taranguire (hot milky ginger tea) about the many exciting things we will be doing in the coming week….including having a chance to prepare and cook a traditional African meal with the women of Engorika!

Jacky Vel - Arrival in Tanzania

Left my brother Johnny’s house at zero-dark:thirty to get to the airport at 4am in time to strip half naked with a bunch of strangers and have my first X-ray of the day!  Pretty uneventful journey through Amsterdam though. The Dutch are so well organized! Comfortable but still long 9 hours passing the time with strangers as we plough through the skies of Southern Europe and Africa. In flight map was the best movie, although a little slow . Arrived on time with excellent passage through passport control and customs and soon found my luggage (yeah – all of it) and Lisike my driver from Hoopoe Safari company who “piloted” me along the unlit main thoroughfare from the airport to the hotel in Downtown Arusha. We past lots of fields of maize almost ready for harvest and plenty of men and women walking or riding their bikes in the pitch dark to make their way home.  Through the darkness I could make out the siloettes of new buildings, apartment blocks and hotels as we approached the town center. There are noe two traffic lights. Expansion is well underway in this city of almost 1 million people, the Tourism capital of Tanzania. Despite the difficult conditions of low income existance and limited infrastructure, life has a way of progressing, slowly-slowly, one-by-one, in a daily rythm here.  I’m happy to be back.

Tz -1: Last minute preparations, weighing luggage, jamming in old (but good condition) books and shoes and anythinything else that will be of value to someone when I get there. Almost  at the limit. Not sure it’ll fit in the cab. And then I receive the food parcel from Mum.  Probably eat it on the way to the airport!