Cindy Vine

Thursday, 1 April 2010

Omigod!  Civilisation!

We’d heard quite a bit about Dar-Es-Salaam from people who’d been there before.  Dirty, busy, horrendous traffic.  Nobody, however, told us how civilised it is.  Especially on the Seacliff side.  Enormous mansions, beautifully tarred roads, great restaurants, shopping malls, we thought we’d accidentally left the country without realising it.  In comparison, Moshi is a one-horse town, and the horse died several years ago.  I do like Moshi though.  We don’t have much traffic.  The traffic in Dar is a problem, but not nearly as bad as Mumbai.  I didn’t find it dirty at all, and yeah it’s the capital so it should be busy.  It was a great getaway but I’m not sure if I could live there, as there are far too many temptations to spend your money on.  I’d be flat-broke in five seconds. 

My book launch was great, A Novel Idea is one of the nicest bookshops I’ve been in, a great selection of books, I felt quite privileged to have my book launch there.  They’re opening a branch in Arusha in June, so that is definitely something to look forward to.

The first two nights we stayed at the Jambo Inn in the city centre.  It’s very budget and has a good restaurant downstairs.  Good for one night if you are catching the ferry to Zanzibar in the morning, but I wouldn’t recommend it for longer than a night.  Our last night we stayed at the Q-bar and this I recommend highly.  Double the price of the Jambo Inn, but worth every penny.  A great English breakfast with proper filter coffee is included in the price.

Of course being me, there has to be some crazy madcap adventure to our weekend away.  We once again fell foul to corruption on the roads.  What is it with me and these traffic guys?  On the way to Dar we were only stopped twice, and both times the little traffic policeman looked in the car and asked if Siobhan was my daughter.  Although, the first one actually first asked if she was my son.  When I said yes, they waved me to continue driving.  Most bizarre.  Did they think I was kidnapping her or something?

But on the way back, a loose wire somewhere in the car was telling the car a door was open, which caused my hazard lights to flash on and off all the time.  I slammed all the doors closed so forcefully, that I almost sprained my wrist.  But, that damn loose wire was still sending out the wrong signals.  We left Dar confusing all the other drivers in the torrential rain, as they didn’t know which way we were turning.  There’s nothing like a car not doing what it’s supposed to be doing, to put me in a bad mood, which poor Siobhan got the brunt of.  My girl, I’m sorry for snapping at you when you only wanted to give me a piece of melted chocolate while I was trying to negotiate the road in the pouring rain with my hazard lights flicking on and off like a disco.

As I gathered speed, the loose wire stopped making the hazard lights go on and off, and the trip became quite pleasant.  Even the rain stopped.  Unfortunately, as I overtook a staggering truck that was going so slowly it was almost going backwards, a little traffic man jumped out from next to a 30km speed limit sign.  Now you can’t overtake a truck at 30km an hour, and you can’t magically change from about 80km an hour to 30km an hour in the space of one metre.  He told me he thought I was speeding.  Obviously, I denied it, so he called over his little helper with the speed camera thing.  71km an hour.  “How do you know that’s my car?” I asked, noting that their speed catching contraption does not record photos of the vehicle or licence plates.

“Look,” the little helper man said, and took the speed of the next car.  21km an hour.  “See how slow he’s going?”  Of course, he didn’t realise by doing that, he was wiping out the speed of my car.

“Well,” I said with a grim smile trying to feign patience, “He’s only going slow because he can see you and me dancing around in the road.  In fact, he’s going so slow he’s a hazard to the safety of the rest of us on the road.  He should be the one you stop and fine.”

The main traffic guy didn’t fall for my advanced female logic.  “So do you want to go to court, or can I write you a ticket for TSH 20 000?”  That’s roughly $20.

“But what speed was I going again?  Show me?”  I knew that I had them foxed as they had replaced my speed reading with the reading from the next car.

The traffic guy laughed.  “If you go to court you’ll win as we don’t have your speed anymore, but think of how much time and expense fighting it in court will take?”

He had me.  His English was far too good.  “Well then, I fine you TSH 20 000 for having such a bad road with potholes, it’s a danger to drivers,” I countered.

He agreed with me, and by then all the traffic police were laughing and pointing to the potholes in the road.  I thought I’d won the battle, but then he produced the ticket book again.  “So, court or fine?”

Bastard.  “How about, I just give you TSH 10 000 and we forget about court and fine?”

“Sure,” the greedy corrupt bastard said as he held out his hand to take my money.

Civilisation comes with a price, I reckon.  It opens the doors for corruption.

Saturday, 27 March 2010

Cars and Condoms

I have decided that the veritable Murphy should be hanged, drawn and quartered, and his body parts put in a black plastic bag and dumped in the sea next to Dexter’s victims.  Murphy and his stupid laws drive me crazy.  They always happen when you don’t want them to.  Take this week for example.  My car has been going swimmingly well.  But frigging Murphy knows full well that I’m traveling to Dar for my book launch this weekend, so what does he do, he creates havoc.

My electric window which I’d just had repaired at a cost of $70 three weeks before, refused to wind back up.  I pressed the button and the little motor inside the door hummed and buzzed like a constipated bee.  Luckily, the fundi repaired it and only charged me $10, but I’m a little too scared to use it as I can’t afford to be in Dar the weekend with a car with a window that can’t close.

Then some kind parent points to my back tyre with beautifulk tread and shows me a bulge.  Lovely.  Not a good idea to drive to Dar with a bulge sticking out of your tyre.  There’s not a place in moshi where you drive in and get a tyre repaired or replaced.  No, you have to find a car spares place, negotiate a price for your tyre, load the new one in your boot, then find a fundi on the side of the road who changes tyres.  $130 for the tyre and thank the good Lord, only $3 for he fundi.  My other tyres are all Goodyear.  The new one is called Goodtime or something like that.  A Chinese copy of Goodyear.

Tyre all sorted, my wallet screaming with hunger pains, we go to El Rancho Thursday night to celebrate my promotion starting August of Head of Primary/PYP Coordinator.  I click my key remote to unlock the car to go home.  Click, click, click.  Nothing.  the car stays locked, the blue light on the dash of the alarm stays flashing.  I manually unlock the door with the key, as we used to do in the good old days.  Alarm goes off, sending the waitresses scurrying around like ants.  I try and start the car with the alarm blaring, but it has a special cut out feature.  Good if it’s a robber, bad if it’s you.  I search for some button to turn off the alarm, but it remains elusive.  I look for wires to yank, but they are too well hidden.  Whoever installed the alarm did a blastedly good job.  The waitresses are now sitting on El Rancho porch, laughing at me and my attempts to turn off my car alarm.  I want to get home.  The MSG in their food is already having an effect on my stomach.  I can feel it bubbling and rumbling and I know without a doubt, that I need my bathroom.  My hair stands up on my arms.  “We;ll walk,” I say to Siobhan who glares at me and lifts her heavy backpack onto her back as she’s only just returned from a very wet camping trip on West Kili.  I lock the car, the alarm blissfully stops, but the blue light still flashes that it’s on, and we walk home.  Luckily, it’s just around the crner, but Siobhan grunts and curses and cries, but I pretend not to hear her, just trudging on ahead, selectively deaf.  I sort of sadistically pray that the alarm will keep going off during the night and wipe the smiles and laughter off the waitresses faces.  But it doesn’t.  All it does do is give me a sleepless night as I spend all night tossing and turning straining to hear my alarm going off inbetween the sounds of yapping, barking, howling dogs.  Our usual nightime lullaby.

Of course it rained all night long, so the next morning we had to wade through mud to negotiate our way to school.  Mr. Chucky, the school purchaser, took my keys and managed to get the batteries replaced, so thank God now it works.

On my way walking to El Rancho after school to fetch the car and try out the key, I came upon a pile of five used condoms on the side of the road.  Yes, I’m afraid I did count them as I found them intriguing.  they offered up so many questions.  How did they get there?  Was it one man who had sex five times or a gang bang?  Where did they come from?  Did some man just throw them out of the window as he drove past?  Because he couldn’t have had sex there, as it’s the road which is quite busy, and next to the road is a gravel path, the little stones would have been a passion killer for any woman, and then a deep ditch, so why were the condoms on the gravel?  Intriguing, definitely food for thought.  At least someone is practising safe sex.

Well, had better pack, I’m leaving for Dar-Es-Salaam in an hour.  Siobhan wants toasted hot cross buns, so I have to do my mommy-thing.  Wish me luck for my Book Launch on Monday night!  Have you bought your copy of The Case of Billy B yet from Amazon.com?

love

Cindy

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Roll on holidays

Barking dogs and power cuts

This past week has flown by in the blink of an eye. First it was Monday, and then it was over, and now here I sit on a Saturday morning, woken up by my neighbour’s loud generator , knowing that it means that we have no power. Luckily, I charged my laptop last night while I was waiting for said neighbour’s barking dog to stop. That dog is driving me crazy. Granted, it doesn’t do that yappy thing every night, but when it starts it just can’t seem to be able to stop. Maybe the neighbour has a switch and instead of turning on the generator, he turns on that bloody dog. It’s not a deep booming powerful bark. It’s a high-pitched yappy bark that operates on a level of sound that penetrates your brain. And it’s non-stop. The other night, it barked like that until 5am. I couldn’t sleep and could hear the damn mutt’s bark getting more croaky and high-pitched as the hours ticked by until its throat was obviously so sore from barking continuously, that it stopped. In fact, it was probably still barking, but because it had strained its voice from overuse, it lost its bark. Imagine the dog barking, but no sound coming out. I hope the dog grows those nodules on its voice box that famous singers get. But last night I was tired. I’d just returned from a three day camping trip with 56 ten year olds, had nipped over to a friend’s for a BBQ and was home ready to go to bed for an early night’s sleep at 9pm. I hadn’t slept at all the night before as my room was next to the kitchen and the camp cook decided that the only way he’d be able to feed 80 people pancakes for breakfast, was if he stayed up all night to cook them, so I had him banging around the kitchen all night, and of course, the smell of cooking pancakes wafting through my window…
However, on my return home, it was to find that bloody mongrel across the road having one of its non-stop yappy sessions. No way would I be able to sleep. For some reason, that particular yappy bark seems to carry, and it sounds like it’s right in my garden, which it isn’t as my dog is fast asleep. At eleven pm I was debating whether or not to take that dog out permanently by chopping off its head with a machete, or using my bare hands to strangle the life out of it. Instead, I wandered down to my front gate and shouted extremely loudly for the dog to shut up. Unfortunately, the askari who is supposed to be guarding the house was asleep next to the gate, hadn’t heard me creep up but woke up with a fright when i suddenly started shouting next to his sleeping form which I hadn’t noticed in the dark. I think he might have pissed his pants. The dog stopped for a total of five seconds after I shouted, and then started up with more urgency than before. I am at my wits end as to why it was barking as it was overcast and there wasn’t a moon. Just for the hell of it, i guess, well i might just terminate it, just for the hell of it. So take the infuriating dog with the boom boom boom and African rhythms coming from the Glacier Hotel down the road, sleep was not going to be easy. At half past midnight, I finally staggered to bed and attempted unsuccessfully to sleep. Finally, utter exhaustion set in and I slept dead until the bloody generator. What does he use to run it? Rocket fuel? Why does it have to be so loud? Maybe, he has his blasted dog running on a treadmill to generate the energy to run the thing and the yappy barking was the dog’s protests!

After some school issues that didn’t involve me other than me having to spend a total of seven hours after school in meetings Monday and Tuesday, I went on camp for the rest of the week. We stayed on a farm in West Kilimanjaro. Spectacular views of the plains and the mountain on the way there. I was lucky, my tent had broken poles so I got to sleep inside the guesthouse. A real bed! The first night, we were supposed to be having vegetable curry and chicken curry. I looked at the bony bits of emaciated chicken, and thought great! Can’t wait! Thanks goodness the kitchen at school had forgotten to pack in the curry powder and tomato pastes, so I had to drive around until i came to a big town so I could buy the necessary ingredients, and some potatoes as they’d forgotten to buy those for the BBQ the next night. As I’d taken along my potjie, I bought some pieces of beef ‘steak’ which could have been anything hanging up from a peg on the ceiling, and thought I’d supplement the chicken curry by making a beef potjie. I knew the meat would be as tough as an old boot, so I bought a can of coke and after browning the meat and onions, boiled it in the coke, then let it cook slowly with some veggies for three hours. Oh my God, it was delicious, the meat so tender, unbelievable! I was in charge of dishing up the veggie curry, and discovered that it’s not only my daughter that doesn’t really like vegetable. Next to me was Katy, serving the rice.. She’s the 18 year old sister of a girl in my class who has Down’s Syndrome, and she came along to keep an eye on her sister. She was brilliant, a credit to her family! Anyway, a little Indian girl in my class, only child in her family, treated like a princess, had brought a backpack filled with food for the three days. Her mother had not trusted our cooking, obviously. This of course was banned, bringing your own food and keeping it in your tent, as it’d attract safari ants and the last thing we wanted, was the little princess being chomped by safari ants in the middle of the night. The other teacher from our other campus confiscated her food, which of course up set the princess making her cry and wail and sob and want to call her father and go home and ask, “why, why, why, why can’t I?” over and over again like a stuck record. “Because i said so,” didn’t work with her either, neither did the explanation of why she couldn’t keep a three day’s supply of cooked food unrefrigerated on the ground in her tent. I asked her why she wouldn’t eat our food. She said there was nothing there she liked or could eat. I looked at the sobbing little girl in front of me with an incredulous expression on my face. “What?” I asked, sarcasm dripping from my tongue, “Don’t they have rice in India? Or curry? They don’t have curry in india?” Katy next to me started laughing so much, she dropped the serving spoon in the bowl of rice, but the little princess nodded and said, “Yes they do have curry and rice in India.” She dished up some, enjoyed it and came back for seconds. Later, we did sneak a look inside her backpack and found it contained rice and some kind of a curry, probably vegetable!

Another highlight of the camping trip, was the little down syndrome girl in my class falling in love, with a pretty boy from the other campus. The staff were all relaxing on the veranda, when we were interrupted by a little boy, “Miss Croome, you must come quickly there’s an emergency, Jack can’t leave his tent!” Expecting the worst, my colleague from Arusha jumped up and raced to see what the problem was. When she returned, she couldn’t stop laughing, apparently my little DS girl who is 14 and filled with racing hormones had parked herself outside his tent and was waiting for him to come out so she could kiss him. “I love you Jack!” she shouted from time to time. Jack was terrified. But after a while, he did see the funny side and ignored my little darling’s amorous advances the rest of the trip, as she sat adoringly at his feet or stalked him, following him wherever he went.

My group of kids were the expert group on forestry, and we went up into the forest to see the difference between indigenous forest and the pine plantations. They’re quite clever here, to protect the vast natural forest from being chopped down for firewood, as it serves as an important watershed, they have planted 4500 hectares of pine and cypress forest all along the perimeter, so that that wood is used for logging and timber, and the natural forest is left intact. There are large elephants living in the natural forest who apparently come down from time to time and destroy the potato and carrot farms along the perimeter of the pine forest. We didn’t see any wildlife, although we did hear hyena in the middle of the night, their distinctive, “Woowee, woowee,” giving you cold shivers. But one of the other expert groups went to a game reserve and to see the impact of game reserves on the environment (all high brow stuff for 10 year olds) and they saw game and a recently killed carcass of a wildebeest. The guide with them must have told them it was probably a cheetah who had done the killing. Of course, this is the kind of thing kids will brag about to other groups, especially children in the group who only saw trees! So, one of the kids in my forestry group came up to me that evening, “Miss Cindy, it’s not fair, the game reserve group saw a cheetah killing a cantelope!” I cracked up. I couldn’t help it. The visual in my mind of a vegetarian cheetah pouncing on a melon trying desperately to roll out of the way was too much!

Apparently, while I was away, Moshi had no power for 24 hours. It came on just before we got home from our camping trip. Sometime in the early hours this morning, it went off again. I have no idea when it will be back on again. So, I might head over to school to see if their generator is on and I can copy this onto my blog. That bloody dog has just started yapping and howling. 9am, should I go and buy a machete?

Siobhan is writing her own songs, and composing music to go along with them on her guitar, making it just as difficult for me to concentrate on my writing as that bloody barking dog does for me, Tony is working hard and enjoying this practicum in the hotel, and Kerri is singing in a jazz bar – here’s the link she sent me, so you can listen to her great voice. She definitely could do something with that voice! Maybe she can sing with Siobhan like the female version of the Jonas Brothers? Here’s the link of Kerri singing in a Chinese jazz club.
Posted by Cindy Vine at 11:57 AM

SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 2010
What a week?

I can’t believe it’s already Sunday! Where has the week gone? Maybe because my week has been so disjointed, it seems to have flown by so much faster. Tuesday my class and I went through to Arusha for pre-camp planning and bonding. The camp is this coming week at West Kilimanjaro. The kids and staff will be staying in tents using the tent toilet which will just be a hole in the ground surrounded by a tent. I was asked by the other teacher organising this whole trip, if I’d prefer to stay in the two bedroomed guest house with bathroom ensuite. Hell yeah! I didn’t even think about it! A nice comfortable bed, proper flush toilet and power so i can watch movies on my laptop at night while everybody else is trying to get comfortable sleeping on the hard ground? hell yeah, i’ll take the guesthouse!
Friday my kids performed some of Roald dahl’s Revolting Rhymes in assembly and then wrote their ISA pre-tests. then break and visual arts. Easy peasy. This week Monday and Tuesday they write their proper ISA exams, then Wednesday through to friday we are camping. Hell, I just love outdoor education.
Saturday, the outdoor pursuits man at school slaughtered his pig and delivered 20kg of meat and fat to me so I can make sausages. Took me a couple of hours, but chopped it all up, and have to sausage like mad this afternoon. I put half of it in my freezer for next weekend. It’s so hot at the moment and sausage making is such hot sweaty work. I’m not really in the mood.
I’ve revamped and redone my website. Hopefully, it’ll look good when I’m finally done tweaking and adding things to it. Enjoyable but hard work, and when you’re doing that, the time just flies as well.
But the big news is, just to let you all know, The case of Billy B is now out and available as a paperback on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Case-Billy-B-Cindy-Vine/dp/1449980414/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264862309&sr=8-5 Celebrated by myself last night, daughter was at a disco when I discovered it was on Amazon. So, raise your glasses and have a drink to The Case of Billy B!
Yippee!
And, have written the first chapter of my next book, provisionally entitled Not Telling. Lordy, lordy, lordy, this writing thing is addictive!
Have a great week ahead!
love
Cindy
xxx