Sights and sounds - Rose

We look out the back of the house over a beautiful valley dotted with small gardens including one in the backyard which has been cleaned up by a gardener over the past week. Corn, tomatoes, mchiche (a type of spinach or kale), and potatoes are planted in small plots all over and provide food for families or for sale. Coconut, papaya, mango, orange, lime, avocado and pineapple can be found in almost every yard. Water is carried in to the plots by hand from great distance. Plants are shaded by fallen broad leaves. There has been a lot of planting lately as the short rains are here (shoulder season to the rainy season) although we have been days without rain now after several hard rains.
In front of the house is the road between the Muheza open market and the Teule hospital. It is packed sand, rutted by rain and cambered quite severely to drain water into the ditches on each side. Based on the height of the cut on both sides, I would expect at least 2/3 metres of water in the ditches during the rains covering all but the very centre of the road.
We have cattle and pigs penned across the street and chickens are everywhere scratching in the ditches and yards. There is also the occasional cat and dog wandering by and a few Muscovy ducks.
Former residents of the house installed a stand pipe in the back yard for people to collect water and people start arriving in the pre-dawn hours to fill buckets or jerry cans for transport back to who knows where.
There is a steady stream of people up and down the road in front of the house at almost all hours: women carrying children on their backs, pedestrians, cyclists, cars driving too fast, some transporting patients to hospital and the odd Dalla Dalla (mini-bus) full to bursting with humans and cargo. The hospital has visiting hours at meal times and families bring food in for every meal.
Although we have seen a few donkeys here, the most common beasts of burden are people. Women frequently walk carrying things on their head: machetes, hoes, 10 gallon pails of water, bundles of wood. We have heard that neck fractures are not uncommon, not from compression but from loads shifting. Men carry enormous loads on bicycles and can often be seen pushing the bikes uphill with 5 jerry cans of water or enormous piles of fresh cut grass for penned cattle or huge bags of charcoal or furniture for sale.
Sometimes we hear keening and wailing when someone dies. We’ve heard many stories about people presenting at the hospital too late to receive more than palliative care and about people dying for want of diagnostic tests or treatment due to communication problems or lack of nursing staff.
Night sounds are extra special. In addition to the lowing of the cattle and the whining of what we think are locked up guard dogs, we have an insect or bird that sounds like the beep cars make when you leave the door open and a resident colony of fruit bats who chitter most of the night. The colony nests in the trees within a few houses of us and they chitter away at each other while roosting. They periodically fly into the air chittering more loudly in response to some unseen cue or threat. They sound a bit freaky in the night when you can’t sleep but fortunately the noise of the fan blocks a lot out.
Property crime is a huge issue we are told and the house has to be locked up tight every night and while we are away. We lock and padlock the sunporch door, double padlock with a chain a metal door between the sunroom and living area, padlock the front screen door and lock the inner door. We have a night guard who arrives at about 8pm and patrols outside all night. Cars are kept inside the gate at the hospital. It feels awkward to have to use so many locks but given the stories we have been told, we comply for the most part however we have stopped bringing the bicycles into the house from the secured sunporch at night even though Julietie and Hatibu, the night guard, say we should.
En route to school in the morning and on our other forays into town, we frequently encounter the students from the various state and private, primary and secondary schools in the area. They are identified by the colour of their uniforms. I don’t know what percentage of children go to school but the other group of children we see are those playing near their families’ stalls in the markets and the ones who come to the house to sort through our garbage for anything of value.
Temps are reaching 30 and climbing. So far, it hasn’t been that different from Ottawa in August but yesterday was 40 at one point on Leah and the boys’ cycle home from school. We have ceiling fans running virtually non-stop in the living room and bedrooms because of the heat but the locals haven’t turned on their fans yet as they say it isn’t hot enough. Many of the children wear wool sweaters to school so maybe this is cool for them.