Hydro, Electric, Plants.

The rains are here. Yeeehaw, brother, the rains have come, and they’re about a fortnight early this year, apparently. This is mainly good, because it lowers the temperature and/or humidity to levels much more bearable for us white folk.

It also has a number of other knock-on effects, including:
The electricity keeps going off. We have a power cut every day, sometimes three or more. Depending on where you are in the town you sometimes hear an ironic cheer when the local electricity supply finally kicks in again, much like the noise in White Harte Lane when Gomes catches a ball.
The coconut trees drop coconuts. Mainly a good thing because they’re a tasty and free addition to a curry, but don’t make a habit of walking underneath the palm trees. I forget the exact statistics but a surprisingly high number of people are killed by falling fruit each year.
It is easier to sleep in between the storms, again because of the temperature, hard to sleep during them as the noise can be pretty thunderous.
Roads quickly become impassable to anything except a proper 4x4. Fortunately we now have our proper 4x4, and have even brought it back from Dar. Currently only Suze can drive it, as she has a proper local license and I do not. [And as I type; the 4th powercut of the day…]
So I never drive it anywhere, oh no sir.

Here is the car, and Suzanne, showing that she was not at all affected by marketing.

So, I am in the process of gaining a driving licence, which brings to my mind the Monty Python sketch where a man requests a fish licence for his pet, Eric (he’s an ‘alibut). In Tanzania it goes a little something like this:
Fill in a form stating your identity, cost TSH 3,000.
Obtain 8 passport sized photographs (taken on a mobile phone and uploaded to a PC, dreadful image making my nose look even bigger than real life), cost TSH 6,000.
Take the form and photos back to the place where you filled in the form, and fill in a new form, applying for a provisional licence, cost TSH 5,000.
Take these 2 forms and your recently signed and stamped provisional licence to the hospital. Queue for about 90 minutes among the sick and unfortunate, to obtain an eye-test form. Queuing, locally, is not quite the way us Brit’s would expect it, and requires you to lean/push/shout your way to the front or you will never get there. I found it hard to judge this process, as I am the size of about 2.4 hospitalised Tanzanians, and have spent many days over the last few months pushing weights around a gym. But it hardly seems fair to throw my own weight around and symbolically re-enact decades of colonial oppression in a hospital waiting room. Fortunately a local contact who was too small to cheat the system offered to queue for me.
Take all 3 forms to the eye clinic, where Matron fills in the eye-test form while you sit and (for example) memorise the sequence of letters on the eye exam chart.
Return the eye test form to the place where you got it, queue for a while longer, and obtain a signed, stamped receipt for your fee, cost TSH 10,000. OK, make that 10 receipts as they are all pre-filled with a value of 1,000 – presumably to make things quicker??
Take all 4 forms and 10 receipts back to the eye clinic, where you sit in the middle of the room amongst about 15 other patients, covering one eye at a time with your own hand, and reciting the letters you learnt previously. (I jest, I did the test properly).
Once Matron has stamped and signed the eye test form, and a fifth form stating that you are sufficiently sane and able bodied to drive (I had to write my own name on this one, which with hindsight may have actually been the test), you simply return all the above to the local police station, and wait an undefined length of time. Simple!
You will have noticed, that at no stage in this procedure did I have to drive, or even sit in, a car.

Finally, yet another list. Learn from my mistakes, here are some useful tips for distance running during a monsoon;
Take water, you are still sweating underneath all the rain.
Glasses may help you to keep your eyes open when the wind is in your face.
When moving through shin-deep muddy pools of about 5m diameter, walk rather than running, to avoid hitting hidden objects or twisting your ankle.
Don’t wear white socks.
Do remember that all your clothes will double or triple in weight.
Do wear shorts with a drawstring.