Lucy Carter has taken a sabbatical from her job as a management consultant in London to spend several months helping in a primary school for deaf children in Tanzania. She is working as a teacher and a project manager.

Here is a description of a day in Lucy's new life.  If you'd like to read more, log on to Lucy's blog at www.puffandpapaya.blogspot.com

Day out for the pre-schoolers

Normally, I think of health & safety as a total pain in the arse, meaning that we can’t have kettles and toasters at work in case we burn ourselves because we’ve forgotten how to use them between leaving the house and reaching the office. But now, as with so many of my previous opinions, I have a reluctant respect for it.

This week, we took the pre-schoolers to a Book Day in the centre of Dar. A friend of a friend works for the Tanzanian Book Council and they were putting on a Reading Week, with tents full of different publishers showing their books, wall charts etc. It sounds absolutely deathly dull. But a) there was a promise of free T-shirts and b) the children at the school hardly ever go on trips and so I am simultaneously sad and happy to say that they were squawking with excitement through the whole day.

But how to get nine very young, deaf children safely to and from an event in an open, public place? They can’t speak – so if they run off, they won’t be able to ask for help or say where they live. And there is no school minibus and the daladalas (local fate-tempting, early-death-beckoning buses) are always packed. The former didn’t seem to bother the teachers at all. They thought I was bonkers when I made all the children paper labels saying their name, “I am deaf” and “my teacher’s cell phone number is ….” and then safety-pinned them all on. Here are two of them proudly sporting said crazy-foreigner signs.

And then the headteacher said there’d be plenty of room in the school truck. I thought “aha, obviously there is one I haven’t seen yet, because it can’t possibly be the awful old pick-up!”. But she did actually mean the awful old pick-up. So on the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on – the driving here is appalling – we put nine fragile little bodies with only the open back of a truck to protect them if there was a crash. And my considerably larger body too – yes, I went in the back with them. It was not as stylish as the rather dashing figure I normally cut on my bike around London postal districts SE5 and SE15, especially the scramble in wearing a dress, but it was so sweet to see how happy they were to escape the classroom. I should have been tougher and insisted on getting several taxis, but if I tried to apply normal health and safety rules here the children would just be too hopelessly restricted.

You’ll note in the top photo that I am wearing a sarong thingy - called a kanga here. I am not just being a big suck-up and going native. Absolutely all the women wear them, so if you don’t, people think you look hopelessly boring. Normally no-one ever, ever says I look nice here – not wide enough, clothes too beige - but the day I first wore a kanga, several people told me I looked lovely. And they are surprisingly practical. They stop your clothes getting covered with dust. They keep you clean if you sit on things. They are picnic rugs. They are board rubbers. In the evenings, you wrap your feet in them to protect you from the killer moskweets (local pronunciation of “mosquitoes”). And some people blow their noses on them. Not me.

On the journey I saw a man on a bicycle with over forty huge watermelons. Actually, they were probably just normal size, but then watermelons are pretty big. He had a huge back basket and two side baskets, both packed full. He could barely move the bike but was just about making progress. I didn’t take a photo, because it seemed a bit mean, but I am honestly not fibbing. I can’t believe I used to moan about how hard it was to get my lovely luxury Dulwich delicatessen items home.

At the Book Day, we walked round looking at pictures in books and learning the signs. Every time there was any picture of a white person – man, woman, child, whatever – the children banged their chests and pointed at me. I am the universal Mzungu (European). They charmed everyone because they are so quiet, so small and smile so much. They also say thank you with a hand-motion and a bow, which is heart-twisting even to me still and left most of the publishers wiping away a little tear (bless) and handing out free books and posters (much more useful). They also gave the children promotional sun-visors, which caused disproportionate joy. One little boy is very, very solid: little only in terms of height, age and attention span. People here are astonishingly frank about physical characteristics: the teacher used him to explain the word for “fat” last week, blowing out her cheeks and miming someone eating a lot. His head is so big that he broke visor after visor without ever once seeming to wonder why it was only him with this problem. In the end I put one on his head for him, very gently, but I couldn’t defeat physics and this too broke. Poor Calvin.

These photos are my favourite, Amina, in her sun visor, and the class spelling out vowels with their hands in front of a wall chart. Amina moves me. She tries so hard, loves to get her sums right, and trots along happily beside her father when he comes to pick her up. She has no idea yet that the family cannot afford a hearing aid.

Here we all are in our free T-shirts after our picnic – jam sandwiches, water and fruit juice as a special treat. I gave my T-shirt away to another teacher when I got back to the school, because it was simply not stylish enough. Tsk! Not fitted! Not from Top Shop! But I bet I’ll regret that in a few months, when I have worn every item of my limited wardrobe to death. I look as though I am being affectionate to Big Head Child, but that was an iron grip to make him look in the right direction.

The children are quite small, because most of them are poor – and the T-shirts were a couple of sizes bigger than pre-schoolers would normally wear. So they look like dresses. I thought this was touching. They thought it was extremely amusing. Nearly as funny as when one of the teachers fell over this morning, which induced still greater paroxysms of laughter. And finally – I still feel a bit weepy when I look at this one.

I only wish they had books to read and that they were taught to read for pleasure. This is on my To Do list – along with “start art lessons”, “organise sponsorship programme”, “fix overflowing cess pit” and “buy more plastic cups so they can have one each”… I hope I have time before I come home.

If you would like to make a donation, everyone at Friends of the Deaf of Tanzania - www.fodot.orgwould be delighted and very grateful.  Credit card donations are easier via www.shopireland.net/tanzania  

FoDoT will allocate your money automatically, unless you tell them there's a specific project you want to help. FoDoT has no paid staff and so your money will go direct to helping on the ground

Or you can email Lucy directly on lucymarianne@gmail.com 

Questions, comments and advice all equally welcome.