A Great New Discovery

I saw a beautiful little lizard on Thursday. It was less than 3 inches long. It had a cornflower blue body and a bright yellow head. I asked a couple of the workmen what the lizard was called, but nobody knew the answer. (Either that, or their command of the English language was no better than my command of Kiswahili.)

I can only assume that I have discovered a new species and I have decided to follow in the footsteps of a long line of western explorers and scientists and name it in honour of the gentleman who discovered it. I shall therefore name the lizard Phillips' Yellow-Headed Lizard. I shall await assigning it the appropriate classification until I have reviewed that particular topic in the biology text book. In the meantime, feel free to pencil it in on your lists of African reptiles.

Poem: Olof Palme Orphans Education Centre

This is a poem that is based on some of my travel journal entries, a journal which already consists of 124 ledger-sized pages of hand-written musings.

Olof Palme Orphans Education Centre

The sun hangs high
In a cloudless blue sky,

Drop of amber

In sapphire sea.
For the first time in days
Beads of sweat
Assume formation on my brow.
My newly laundered shirt is dry,
At least, for now.

The fresh bug bites
That scar my wrist
Itch like the devil.
A breeze blows softly
From the east,
Causing the fronds
Of coconut palms
To rustle

And shiver,
As if being kissed
By invisible lips.

For once,
The sounds of songbirds
Overwhelm

The caws of crows
And cackles of hens.
The maize in the field
Behind the school
Is brown

And ready to pick.
Orange trees hang heavy
With sour-sweet fruit,
While pawpaws wait to fall.
Only the bananas
Refuse to offer
Themselves to the cook.

A rooster crows,
Challenged, no doubt,
By the previous lines,
Reclaiming dominance
For domesticated fowl.
Let him crow all he wants,
He’ll soon be on the plate,
Swimming in a sauce
Of fresh coconut milk.

Girls in the classroom
Next to mine
Laugh at something
The teacher does

Or says.
The cock crows again
As I scratch a bite
With absent-minded ardor.
A golden bug
Crawls across my sandal
While in the distance

The tea-time bell rings
Calling the girls

To the dining hall.

The wind picks up,
Then dies,
Ebbing and flowing
Like unseen tides of air.
Goats bleat

With barely heard voices
While outside the door
A student beats
A chalkboard eraser
Against a handy palm tree,
Raising a cloud
Of fine white dust
That settles on her dress.

In the classroom someone coughs,
Then coughs
And coughs again.
Sangu lectures on,
Undisturbed by the tea-time bell.
The air is still,
Then winds swirl
And songbirds trill
And students

Bang erasers
On a tree.

This is Africa.
This is Tanzania.
This is Olof Palme.

(c) J S Phillips

A Dearth of Simians

There is a lot of insect life here, but no monkeys. Where are the monkeys? I was promised monkeys! (Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I was told that the primary reason I needed a rabies vaccination was because of monkey bites.) So far, the only monkeys I have seen have been in the parks in the north country near Arusha, and this is clearly not acceptable. I want monkeys and I want them now!

The Magnificent Beast

One of the advantages of having no set itinerary is that I get to do a variety of different tasks, depending upon what is happening in the classrooms or how I feel or, more often than not, simply identifying what needs to be done. It goes without saying that each day is different. In fact, I have been doing so many things this week that I feel like a milk-giving, cart-pulling, egg-laying, wool-bearing sow.

So far this week I have:

• demonstrated the difference between physical and chemical changes in chemistry class;
• attended physics class to help the girls if they had questions about determining relative density (thankfully, they did not have any questions);


• taught an introductory English lesson on poetry in which I read a number of poems by East African authors;
• spent four hours cleaning up the orphanage's computer, in the process boosting available memory from 4.9 KB to 835 KB, and perfoming maintenance tasks that had not been done in the past year-and-a-half;
• created four reading exercises and corresponding answer keys for some of the books I purchased on Friday;
• washed the blackboards in the three class rooms (another task that does not appear to have been done in ages).

Of the tasks, the poetry class was the most fun and cleaning the blackboards was the hardest. One nice thing about conducting the poetry class is that I was able to become familiar with some absolutely beautiful poems by local poets. If you are into poetry, try to get your hands on any of the following:

• Building the Nation, Henry Barlow
• The Crack, Sheika A. El-Miskery
• Just a Word, Sheika A. El-Miskery
• Kisenyi, John Butler
• Slum Day, Jim Chaplin
• Poem in Four Parts, William Kamera
• Blind, Joseph Kariuki
• The Splash, Yusuf O. Kassam
• The Crucified Thief, John S. Mbiti
• The Town Beauty, Magemeso Namungalu
• The Woman I Married, Edwin Waiyaki
• Kimbe Mines, Timothy Wangusa
• Wild Horse of Serengeti, B. Tejani

The War on Terror - Another Perspective

It was great sadness that I read the news on the CBC website that another Canadian soldier had been killed in Afghanistan. This makes the third soldier to die since I have been in Tanzania and the 57th to die since the mission began. We don't get any Canadian news over here, so I do not know how people are reacting to the losses. I do, however, know that what the men and women of the Canadian Forces are doing over there is important. That is something the local Tanzanians understand.

Last week I visited the National Museum in Dar Es Salaam. Many of the displays were exactly what you would expect from a national museum, but there was one exhibit that caught me completely off guard. In the open courtyard between the various halls of the Museum was a collection of broken metal -- a car, a bike, and other scrap -- that had been salvaged from the scene of the bombing attack of the 1990s.

That is why I am not surprised when some of the Tanzanians I have met speak approvingly of George Bush. Tanzania, like Kenya, experienced the horror of terrorist attacks long before the terrible events of 9/11. They understand what it means to be attacked.

Canada has remained relatively unscathed by the war on terror, and for that I am grateful. I am also grateful that there are men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line to ensure that the people of Afghanistan have a chance to create an alternative way of life to the Taliban regime they had lived under. I just hope that the sacrifices of Afghan, Canadian, and allied service people are not in vain.