Wheels

   Wheels

Mbise wasn’t keen on being our night guard and we weren’t fussed on having one, we hadn’t had one in two years at Sanawari, so why should we need one now? We were working in my usual environmental role, but this time under the auspices of a church outfit, DME. The house and farm it sat on belonged to DME, Mbise was an employee of DME and it was DME’s policy to guard their property. So we acquiesced, and so did Mbise, although he had less choice than we did. He wasn’t keen because the previous Kiwi couple had caused a lot of trouble for him, for DME and for the secondary school, who were close neighbours. He didn’t want another round of trouble or ugomvi, bad feeling!

Our setup was going to be a bit different to his previous experience. Mbise hadn’t been paid for a year, in fact none of his fellow farm workers had. It was just three years since the end of an internal war, a real fair dinkum war with killing and property burning that the army was sent quell. DME barely had two bob to rub together, running pretty much on empty, so the farm workers were at the bottom of the pay-list. There was no allowance for security in my project funds so I couldn’t pay Mbise for night guard duties either, but I could pay him as a nursery worker, which amounted to more than he’d receive if DME were paying anyway. So after a few weeks he became our night guard and during the day, a main-stay nursery worker.

At first though, Mbise was disgruntled so he had a few demands before he would start his night guarding duties. I had the distinct impression he was testing my mettle. He wanted a filimbi, a word that I hadn’t heard before, so with him peering over my shoulder, I checked the dictionary. It said a flute or a whistle, and I realised he meant one of those policeman’s whistles I had seen in the market. I’d carved many a whistle with willow sticks at home, so using my secateurs and a sharp knife, I made one out a stick of hibiscus. I was hoping the bark would come off intact like willow, and it did! It made a shrill sound and Mbise seemed gobsmacked, he didn’t expect me to produce such a thing and at short notice. He wanted a pair of gumboots so I gave him a pair of Red Bands that I brought over from home. I hadn’t used them since I’d arrived anyway. He was expecting a shiny new pair so was disappointed with the half-worn-out pair and surprised that I had them on hand, but they fitted purpose, and he was getting the message. He also wanted a bow and a few arrows for protection. I had seen them at the Maasai markets. Cheap-shod things!  As for protection, we had an archery competition on the lawn and neither of us could hit a barn door, let alone fling an arrow with enough force to stick one in! I also bought him a torch and kept him in batteries; a set didn’t last him a week!

The Kiwi guy before us had rigged lights outside to deter bandits and Mbise wanted me to rehabilitate them. It was dud bulbs mainly, but I rigged the wiring so he had the switch outside, making him able to turn the lights on and off as he pleased. But really! Any baddie worth his salt would’ve waited for the next powercut, because half the time there was no electricity!  From the start, we gave Mbise the same meal as ours. We didn’t eat it together, just supplied it to him when he arrived for his evening duty, but as time went on, I often sat with him while he ate, yarning. We also gave him a Thermos of tea or coffee with milk and sugar. The other bloke didn’t want Mbise to go to sleep, so supplied him with a Thermos of black, sugarless coffee, so strong that his gums receded! He wasn’t supplied food either.

Mbise’s home place was high up the mountain over roads that were little more than tracks, and from time to time I drove him up there, never able to get out of second gear. It took forty five minutes. We met his family and steadily a warm relationship grew. There was another route. By following a track across to the Nkoaranga road, which was a tarred road, and following it up to the hospital and then taking another track on towards Mbise’s, but there must have been a spring there because it was a treacherous, mucky area and I preferred not to take it unless there were no other options.    

My co-worker scored a new pikipiki, motorbike! A little Honda step-through job. Mo and Jo noticed the need and applied for the funds, which was lucky Loti and our project! But when Mbise saw it the hints came thick and fast, however when he reduced his wish list to a bicycle we became more amenable. I had checked them out and knew we would be up for about Tsh 30 000/-, which was affordable for us, but you don’t jump to it on the first request. Mbise too had been to check bikes out, so one day I surprised him by taking him into the Arusha main market, where there was a big bicycle shop. They were mostly Chinese bikes, about 1950’s Western models. I was still dubious, because for our water projects, ordinary one inch Chinese brass taps are half the price of British taps, but the Chinese ones failed very quickly. Anyway we bought a top-of-the-range, double-barred bike for Mbise and had to pay extra for a bike pump. Mbise was over the moon!

He was down to Kilala with his bike the next Saturday to the bicycle fundi and arrived back with mudguards front and back. They were shiny black rubber and each had a white-painted logo. On the front was, Maisha ya muda mrefu kwa Baba na Mama and on the back, Asante Baba na Mama. Long life Father and Mother and Thank you Father and Mother. He was sincere about those sentiments and wanted to advertise it.

Over the years he added adornments of coloured reflectors and mirrors, changed the seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars. The bike was his pride and joy. He had to push it all the way home, up those steep hills, but rocketed down via the tarred road at dizzying speeds! He also carried some heavy loads for people, hoping to make some extra money, but nobody paid him and his generous nature didn’t allow him to refuse.

There came a spate of bandit attacks throughout the area, a German pastor near us was invaded and robbed of USD1 000, so the village chairman made the rule that if anyone made the trouble call that woman use, ooowhee, ooowhee, neighbours would be fined if they failed to respond. I happened upon some fancy horns that were designed for bicycles, they had battery operated flashing lights, bells, whistles and sirens, all very loud. We kept one, gave one to the headmaster of the secondary school (which he promptly took home), I gave one to our close friend Mama Fulani. And the last one, I gave to Mbise. I told them all the story of the boy who called ‘wolf’ and that the horn wasn’t a toy.

The danger passed quickly and of course Mbise put his horn on his bike! All the village kids loved it as much as he did and they would signal him to switch it on as he tore past them! He was certainly never lost! We could hear him from miles away! Never in his life did he have a toy, and now he did!

A Role Reversal

A Role Reversal

It’s good to appreciate expertise don’t you think? I’ve recently had three tree fellers or three fellers felling trees here on our property, and undoubtedly they’re experts in their field. One of them was a young bloke who is just one month out of his arborist training, but he’s been well-drilled, especially on safety and all the other modern stuff associated with his profession. The older blokes have years of experience under their belts, and like me, they started off when being safe was a little bit of a sissy thing.

I’ve been planting trees here for the better part of sixty years, so they’re dotted all over our property, it’s my hobby and it’s a good way of control gorse. There was a storm in ’84 that caused the main road to sump and with it the power lines, so as an emergency solution, Brian, the foreman of the power board, asked if a line could temporarily be erected across our paddock to return power to the grid. In the spirit of community, I agreed. By 1987, the government, in its infinite wisdom, was selling off assets and among them, utilities including the electricity supply.  Come the new decade, in an effort to encourage corporates to buy up the electricity network, the government passed legislation to say that wherever power lines stood at the time, that’s where they stay, so we have twenty thousand volts zipping across our property with no signed agreement or formal easement. And just to make life interesting, if I’m ‘negligent’ and somehow cause a power outage, I’m liable.

Trees have a habit of growing and from time to time some of mine endanger the power line, but at least the lines company comes to the party. When I think trees pose a danger to the lines, I call the contractor and he comes along at no cost to me, and cuts them down, which is why they came this time. That’s all good and safe for the network, but I have to clean up the mess, the contractors just knock the trees down! It’s actually a lot easier to fell one tree at a time and clean it up as you go, but, and fair enough, when the contractor comes he wants to put in a day’s work, so although he tries to fall them in a methodical way, it becomes a tangled jumble. This time they cut fifteen trees, last year thirty eight. But to be honest I enjoy the work, I enjoy cutting firewood, and I enjoy watching the experts at work. I have my ropes, pulleys, axe, sledge hammer, wedges and chainsaw and off I go. It’s economic wood because by the time it’s turned to ashes, I’ve had three or four warms off it – cutting, splitting and stacking.

Off topic for a mo, the contractor will soon be out of a job. The new broom in the corporate office of the lines company, wants to centralise their arborist activity. Join forces with other lines companies to have one big outfit that lines companies can do business with. It doesn’t matter that last year the lines company demanded that the contractor upgrade to new, super-compliant equipment. It doesn’t matter that the contractor has a good working relationship with the district’s landowners. It doesn’t matter that it will put three people out of work. And the scheme won’t be cost-efficient, bigger is just a bean-counter’s way wielding more influence. Funny how some corporates contract people to wield the axe on behalf of the shareholders, glorified bean-counters who close branches, create redundancies and believe a healthy bottom line is the panacea to life without any regard to a social conscience. 

Ahem, (spit) ahem again! There, that’s cleared it off my chest!  When the contractors turn up for a day’s work, I spend the day with them, mostly standing around hands on hips, watching, but when it will help, I pull a few ropes or carry some gear, but basically, I watch. Inevitably there’s the odd woopsie! The strong wind pushed a tree off course this time, Johnny and I were pulling for all we were worth on a rope attached high up, but it sailed down landing less than a metre from the house!  Nevertheless these guys are competent and do a very good job. Watching them work is sort of therapeutic for me, because when I think about it, it’s a complete role reversal!

Back in the good old forestry days, we experienced the severe ’75 gale, which left about two hundred acres of windthrown forest that needed to be salvaged. When it comes to logging, salvage logging can be as dangerous as it gets, but those damaged trees were too valuable to leave to rot. Laurie, the big noise from Invercargill asked me if our own crew could do the job and if so, I was to calculate the cost of doing the job. I asked my team first, if they wanted to tackle the new challenge under my tutelage because none of them had ever done any logging before. I told them that job would be dangerous. They were keen to take it on, so I made my calculations.

  

When I told Laurie the unit price, he nodded and told me to knock ten percent off. Bloody big noises! Expecting raw recruits to work like professionals from day one! That’s how accidents happen! The danger in logging windthrow is that the trees are under tension caused by the bent trees piled on top of each other, making the placement of tension tricky to predict. A single action can cause a chain reaction of moving logs or trees.  When an uprooted tree is cut off at the stump, the root-mass may suddenly flop back into the hole. Luckily, the during two years we were salvage logging, we were accident-free and by the end we were managing to achieve Laurie’s ten percent cut.

We were using a D6c dozer with a logging arch and I took on the role of breaker-out – hooking the logs onto the winch-rope. I was lugging the winch-rope out and the strops, which allowed me to keep tabs on the whole operation and stick to some sort of an orderly pattern. Whenever any of my team had a tree they weren’t confident to process, they would call me over. Hang-ups were the worst, nobody was allowed to work under one, but the helpful thing was having Mick on the dozer and using the rope to mitigate the worst of the difficulty. In the interests of safety, the rest of the guys would stop work and watch me work on the awkward tree.

That’s why I enjoyed watching the arborists doing their work, someone else sweating and someone else taking the responsibility.

Under the Acacia Trees

Under the Acacia Trees

When he was asked to visit the church at Valeska, Henry didn’t even know where to find it and Loti wasn’t too sure either. The pastor had asked them to go there to advise his parishioners about the environment and the tree planting method that would afford the best chance of tree survival. After some rudimentary directions, they made their way there but unfortunately, a funeral in the village, curtailed their plans at the church, so Henry suggested they visit the local primary school.

They hadn’t realised, but they had passed the school on the way through the village, it had looked to them like a vacant, barren and dusty part of the village. There was a one roomed, clay brick building of which about a quarter of the bricks had collapsed inwards. They thought it to be vacant too, but when they stopped, a man who turned out to be the head teacher, came out, curious about who was in the vehicle. The fallen down building was the teachers’ office, inside was his table and a couple of chairs. Henry sat on some of the fallen bricks, not feeling altogether safe inside as he gazed at some loose-looking bricks on top of the wall beside him.

The head teacher led a very good bunch of teachers, Henry had seen many and he liked what he saw in the head teacher! There were two large, wide Acacia trees, which served as classrooms, each ‘housed’ two classes and there were two concrete block classrooms that had been built several years previously. Henry was told the two classrooms were built on the site where the new school was proposed to be built and during their walk around, the head teacher threw out hint after hint about the new school to be completed and the need for money. He kept looking directly at Henry for a reaction. Henry remained poker-faced and replied that they were there to plant trees and encourage students and village folk to care for their environment.

The head teacher and his environmental teacher were enthusiastic about planting trees around the school grounds, which resulted in pleasing outcomes. This was the reason Henry took up on the head teacher’s hint. A school isn’t just a school, it’s an integral part of any community, so he advised the head teacher that he would meet the village government, together with the school committee to discuss what was needed for the school. He knew, that they knew, he had helped other schools, so the villagers were bound to have some expectations. He made them no promises but told them building the school would be a village project, so if they worked out exactly what they wanted, and estimate the costs, he would apply for the funds on their behalf and manage the project for them. He wasn’t fazed at the prospect of building projects, he had already done other building projects, including his own house back home. He gave them a maximum ballpark figure he thought he would be able to successfully apply for.

A month later he was given a plan of the work they wanted to do. There was a gap between the two existing classrooms where they wanted to build a teachers’ office and a storeroom, as laid down in their long-term plan. Henry took the plans and the budget home to peruse, and by the look of it he was pretty sure it was all the work of the head teacher, who had written it all out in English. The community were prepared to make the bricks onsite, which was a massive saving and he was pleased to find that the budget was accurate to the point he couldn’t fault it. There was a local builder who would be paid and he would be in charge of the workers conscripted from within the village. They would build a temporary water tank-cum-reservoir that the school kids would keep filled from an irrigation ditch some three hundred metres away.

Henry wrote up the funding application, and it wasn’t long until they were able to start the project. But he was annoyed, more than annoyed! The head teacher had been demoted by the mratibu, the district education coordinator! A shifty-eyed outsider had taken over the head teacher’s role and trust was going to take some time to cement. Happily the old head teacher seemed unaffected by the change, and Henry gradually warmed to the new bloke, though not totally. He was able to transport all the materials using his project Toyota, which reduced the budgeted transport cost to almost zero, and he was able to make further savings through negotiations with suppliers he had already worked with, thereby making considerable savings. 

Henry hadn’t told anyone about the buildup of savings until the official opening of the new work. During the chairman’s speech, and he did go on, he told the audience that many organisations had arrived at the village and while there had been many promises made, this was the first time anything had actually eventuated. In his reply, Henry gave them the news that the project had been completed under budget and he had a proposal for them. There was enough money to supply cement for two additional classrooms. The government were now supplying, free of charge, new roofing iron to schools as long as the classrooms were built up to the window lintel. There were enough funds for timber for the roof trusses and purlins plus the nails. There weren’t enough funds for the builder, but there was now enough experience in the village to do the job. The proposal was accepted, and the builder, a local man, continued to work from time to time anyway.

Once those two classrooms were up and running, and because the government was still supplying free roofing iron, the community rallied, fundraised and carried out more work. Soon the two final classrooms were built, making the school complete! Through what was left of the assistance to the primary schools assistance project, Henry was able to source two hundred desks, not quite enough but a good start. The success of the project was a credit to community spirit and a demoted head teacher.

So Valeska holds its own little space in Henry’s heart. As far as he was concerned, the really special thing is that unless you drive up to the school, you wouldn’t know it was there. The school is invisible because of the trees planted around it! The kids and their teachers have done an excellent job! And for Henry, there was a special little bonus.

Within the village, as the regularly passed by, they had noticed an especially neat, compound. One day towards the end of his time there, they saw three trees seedlings planted with small, elaborate shelters and irrigation set up using empty cooking oil containers, the method Henry had taught at the school. They knew an elderly couple lived there so they called in to visit them, curious to know how they knew about the planting method.  Their granddaughter had given them the trees. Trees that Henry had supplied to the school for senior kids to take and plant at home. Their granddaughter had two siblings who were also allocated trees, so the brilliant kid gave her trees and demonstrated to the elderly couple  how to plant and care for them! A cool thing that, a granddaughter teaching her grandparents! That will be a lasting memory.