7. You wait! You will see!

Despite the lack of guests, Mr Mbowe had, rather optimistically, employed a ‘hotel consultant’ to improve his hotel’s efficiency and teach its staff the best way of looking after those non-existent customers. She was an old German lady called Frau Christiansen, with a softly lined, birdlike face and a shrewd pair of eyes that peered through small spectacles on the end of her nose. She had been here for a month already, but so far the visible extent of her achievements seemed to have stretched only to typing out several copies of the restaurant’s menu, a fairly redundant measure, considering the limited range of food the hotel had in stock. I was interested to learn another outsider’s impression of the area, but found Frau Christiansen to be somewhat less than enamoured of the local population.
‘Ugh!’ she exclaimed to us, out of earshot of the staff, ‘These Tanzanians! Nothing is organised, nothing is reliable, everything is difficult! You wait! You will see!’ Her complaints against the individuals in the hotel soon extended into such a diatribe against the country as a whole that I began to wonder why she had come here in the first place. It was true that she had to contend with a number of frustrations and inefficiencies, such as problems of supply to the hotel, and the continued perseverance of the hotel manager to systematically disregard every instruction she gave him, but her griping took on such an air of intolerance that it simply served to strengthen my resolve to immerse myself in the culture and community of my new home. I did not expect things to run smoothly, but I hoped I would not be driven to the level of bitterness that Frau Christiansen seemed to have reached.

This apparent aversion of Frau C’s to the indigenous population was not all-inclusive, however, because a genuine friendship had grown up between her and Mrs Mbowe, and they were often to be found chatting away in the luscious hotel grounds. Mrs Mbowe was the second wife of ‘The Man’, the first having died and, in fact, been buried in the hotel grounds. As well as enjoying the status and respect automatically accorded to her by her marriage, she was also a powerful figure in her own right as a successful and influential businesswoman. Unlike her husband, however, Mrs Mbowe did not wear her position and power so heavily as to cloak her humour and personality. An engaging character with a big smile and a quick laugh, she was very welcoming to the two of us, falling in no time for Pat’s charm and wit. In fact, she was the first Tanzanian we had met with a sense of irony, so for once our ice-breaking quips were met with laughter rather than blank stares.

In the evening we accompanied Frau C and Mrs Mbowe on a short walk through the banana plantations. It was that time between bright afternoon and dusky nightfall when the sun eases itself carefully onto the horizon and the lower sky turns through soft, pastel gradations of colour, as a soothing prelude to the stars. The four of us walked along the paths, the banana plants deepening into a rich green around us. There was little talk, except to point out certain plants and insects, and it was a quiet, reflective stroll.
My thoughts were of home and the people I was missing, and of how I could possibly convey to them all we had seen and done in the last two days. The most fertile imagination back in England could not capture the tone of the chirping crickets, the ribbed, smoothed-hessian texture of a banana plant’s torn leaf, the long-necked flapping silhouette of the bird flying home above my head.
It was peculiar to think that only three days ago I was in London, completely unknowing of this place. Having removed myself from the habitual and unquestioned parameters of my life I could feel myself growing smaller and smaller as I contemplated the magnitude of what lay outside it. The vast sky, deepening into twilight above me, seemed to belong to a new world.