Domesticity. Davy owns the only sharp knife but luckily he will lend it to the cook. For breakfast, which is on the table now, we eat fruit salad of papaya, banana, watermelon and orange (which is green) with yogurt and oats. For all our other meals we eat tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines, onions, garlic, ginger, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, lentils, spinach, rice, avocado, pasta, bread and eggs in various combinations. All of these things are piled high in the market where I yet again failed to bargain yesterday, but still came home with a weeks worth of veg for three people for ten euro.


We had one amazing beef stew made with meat bought from a road side butcher shop which I had parked beside when doing a home visit. Being a meat eater I had been eyeing up these shops which are just a tiny open room with a counter to the street and maybe only one animal carcass hanging up in the open heat but I had never been brave enough to make a purchase. This time when I come back to the car with Roger, the butcher asked Roger if I wanted to buy some meat and I took the plunge. For seven thousand Tanzanian shillings (about €3.00) he sold me a kilo of meat which he cut in a way that seemed completely random from his hanging side of meat. Stewed for six hours with tomatoes it was sublime. We can get mince in the supermarket and Talipea fish but my hankering for stew is going to force me to brave the road side meat again.


Standing at the tank in the garden and ladling cool warm water into various plastic basins and with large amounts of suds Phylis washes our clothes. She hangs them on the line where they will be dry by night time. We must iron everything to kill the eggs of the mango fly which mistakes wet clothes for mangoes (duh!) and leaves its eggs to turn to grubs and burrow into human skin if that is all that's available. Phylis also washes the kitchen and all the floors in the house three days a week and makes our beds with clean bed clothes on Friday and Monday which seemed excessive at first but bed can be a battlefield of tossing and turning and sweat and itching and fighting the net which encroaches all night long and leaves our toes and elbows vulnerable to bites, so it is very nice to have fresh sheets.


The sound of the neighbourhood is part of our domestic life; the cock crowing at 4 am and all day long, the Mosque in the distance at 5am and Joseph sweeping the yard wordlessly before daylight so although it's still dark you know it is morning dark and not night time dark. The dogs bark in the darkness or howl and answering howls come multiplied over all the gardens.  Subdued conversation comes from the road or from over the hedge and over the hedge again; more intimate in the close dark. And once a month our neighbour (I don't know which one) shouts at the moon. With the daylight the children's voices come, on the way to school and later back again – always in a group and always chatting.  Birds and birds and birds and insects too all have their time of day and in the evenings, weddings which drive around the roads with a brass band on the back of a lorry playing mightily as they go.  Then dark and time to fight the net again.


We have visitors; Davy has just been in to tell me about a tiny fluffy tailed creature, which I hope was a squirrel and not a rat, disappearing through the ventilation block in the sitting room and there are always lizards of every colour and size demonstrating the heat of the walls and many insects which I would prefer not to mention and yesterday morning at daybreak four large immigration men who were perfectly polite if a little worrying but didn't stay too long in the end. None of us are tea drinkers here so we couldn't make them tea but we gave them chairs to sit on while they mildly bullied us. In the end we all drove in convoy down town where we photocopied our passports and documents for them feeling glad we still had them. Difficult to know quite what was going on but all of us knowing that a stranger would fare no better in our country.


And another week is done.