Bodies and bara bara mbaya sana

bara bara mbaya sana = very bad road. I spent 7 hours sitting in or driving our Hilux today.

Task #1:

Starting at 8am I picked up our local friend Nolasco to take him and a couple of other elderly gentlemen to the morgue. His wife's father had died a few days earlier and today was funeral day. After a quick stop to get the copious amounts of mud blasted off the ute we arrived at the morgue. Today was a Monday, and the morgue is closed on a Sunday, and people are dying in greater numbers than ever before. So it was organised chaos for several hours before the coffin was finally slid into the back of the now bougainvillea and ribbon covered Hilux.

With choir in full song and hazard lights flashing the procession of ten utes and old minivans crawled through town, through the Unga slum, down the bumpy coffin bouncing road to where Babu was to be laid to rest.

By now it was midday and being only 1km from home I removed the adornments and sped home for a quick belly full of lunch.

Task #2:

Property boundaries in these parts are invariably marked by sisal plants - aloe vera looking plants with great long trunks that rise up out of the middle. During the recent maize planting season one of the sisal plants marking our property was knocked down and moved further inside our actual boundary line. To replace the sisal is not a matter of moving it back into the straight line that made the boundary, but rather is a discussion between all interested parties, past and present and their families. So today I drove to Njiro to collect one of those parties (which is only 1km over the river but requires an enormous loop through town - or a you could take the short-cut that I tried today, but will refrain from doing so again in future. As Homer Simpson would say - let us never speak of the shortcut again.

Going through town means bitumen road, bridges and a bit of traffic. Taking the shortcut through some slums means a more direct route, dodging pull-carts, bicycles, pregnant dogs, goats, and Tanzanians who choose not to move out of the way of an approaching car. After some narrow lanes, deep potholes and swiftly flowing river crossing I thought I was through the worst of it when we arrived at the bitumen road in Njiro. Not so. The bitumen continued for 500 metres before the car started shuddering and rattling again on a corrugated, potholed, heavily eroded dirt road. Nothing new, just take it slow and pick the smoothest route, dodging oncoming trucks and vans that want to take the same smoothest route. Gradually the road got worse and worse, finally becoming a sandy bog that required me to shift down to low-range (thank heavens for the 4WD). When the road vanished but was visible across a swampy marsh I had no choice but to plough ahead keeping momentum up. Barely making it across I thought that I was through the bad bit and (according to my companion - Joseph) there was a better route that I could take coming home. This is was around when the now dry road became quite steep. Steep going up and down, and steep sides with a large and growing chasm in the middle of the road. With each side of the chasm too narrow to drive on, I was forced to drive with a wheel on each side - gradually it got wider and wider as I moved along. With all four wheels teetering on the edge of the great gully beneath the car it would have taken a slightly wrong ling for the car to slip and drop sideways into the canyon. Luckily the road evened out and I was again convinced that the worst was over. To some degree it was, but the threat of being bogged or slipping into bottomless puddles continued until we found ourselves on the hardest, widest, flattest dirt road I've ever seen. Within moments we found our man, and all his drunk old mates. They all climbed in the back and we headed home, dropping them off along the way. As we neared home the funeral was attracting a growing crowd and I ended up with a cohort of mamas in the back of the ute. After dropping them at the funeral and squeezing perilously close past the cars parked haphazardly in the narrow dirt road I made it home and am now a bit Africa'd out for the day. Back at the site tomorrow to do some more roof making and slab laying.