The Plague

We’ve been in the house a few days now, so I thought it would be a good time to give an update on things.
The house is nice enough. It is huge compared with anything we have ever lived in before, and the bedrooms have some old and noisy but effective air-con. It is very basic in some respects – a hard dusty floor rather than any carpets and the shower is a trickle of unheated water – but it’s impossible to miss the many reminders of how much luxury we have here compared with most people. Luxuries like running water or a fridge are way beyond many of our neighbours, never mind air conditioning (old or noisy or whatever). It is good to get into the house and out of the insulation/illusion of Tanzanian life which we had in the hotels, but at the same time this is when you start to feel the culture shock and it starts to get much harder.
An immediate problem is that everybody wants to be our maid/houseboy/washer-woman etc. I leave in the mornings and people who have been sitting in the garden approach me to offer such things, usually without being able to speak a word of English*. I don’t want to be mean and I suppose eventually we will end up hiring somebody, but (aside from the fact that I am pretty uncomfortable with having “staff” and telling someone to clean my house for me) for the moment it is the only thing I have to do! Currently my daily routine goes something like:
Do some exercise before it gets too hot (i.e. before 0800).
Put some washing into soak (the “washing machine” these days is a large plastic bucket, a tap and me).
Boil some of the tap water.
Go to the market for vegetables/fish. This is done before the midday heat but is still searingly hot; something in the 30’s and humid.
Scrub and rinse the washing. Hang on branches or broomsticks to dry.
Pour the now slightly cooled boiled water into the gravity-fed water filter.
Lunch
Sweep floors.
Fold and tidy washing.
Generally clean the place.
Cook dinner. etc etc

So if I hire someone to sweep the floors and scrub my smalls then I will have absolutely nothing to do except start writing a novel or something.

AND then, on day 5, the plague of winged things arrived.
We had a fair bit of rain, and then these big 4-winged termite things started appearing apparently from nowhere. Now this is obviously fantastic news-
If you are a gecko or frog, as you get to eat like a king. If you are a human it is nightmarish, a kind of Hitchcockian world in which little beasts push under your door or through you netting. They just pushed against the windows or against each other, reminiscent of a miniature "Night of the Living Dead" (forgive me mixing my horror metaphors, as NOTLD was Romero I think, but you get the picture- it was horror). One got through at first, then 3, then dozens, all flinging themselves with suicidal abandon into the lights or into us. They were posessed of a hydra-like quality where the disposal of one seemed to lead to its replacement by two. Eventually there was no option but to go to a bar and have a couple of beers, and hope.
Our wishes came true and by the time we returned there was nothing to see but sloughed wings, dead insects and bloated frogs. Made me think about the way a basic knowledge of the weather and/or biology could have made people seem like wizards or gods in days gone by...
Other early observations:
Nothing which used to be white will ever be white again. White clothes will soon become grey clothes etc.
I need to learn more Kiswahili*.

Next update will hopefully be around Xmas time, so anyone who has been reading, have a merry one. :-)