A Few Miscellaneous Pics

Over the past several months we have taken a number pictures that have not found their way on-line but, nonetheless, we thought you might find interesting. So, here they are, a couple from England, a few from our recent holiday to the coast and a few from here in Dodoma.

While our time in Bagamoyo was punctuated by me keeling over, it is a beautiful place and in hindsight provided a nice break. The other folks in the pictures are the Hookings family, Alistair, Vicki and their children Emma, Matthew and Jonathan. Vickie is the principal of our school and Alistair does everything else - teaching, building maintenance, substituting, childcare, etc.. Alistair and Vickie, who are from New Zealand, very kindly invited us and another teacher from the school to join them on their holiday. It was great getting to know everyone a little bit better although it was somewhat cramped in the car.

There are two pictures of the railway line as it passes through Dodoma. I included those for the benefit of Mark and Sarah. I am sure that Joe Broadbent, Mark and Sarah’s grandfather, would have ridden on this line when he was here in Tanzania helping to get the trains running. I think that was in the early seventies but I may have the timing wrong. The pictures are of the main line that runs east west through the country. I am anxious to get a picture of an actual passenger train coming into town but I am never around when they come in so as yet I have been unsuccessful on that one.

From time to time we have had incursions of critters from the outside into our digs. About a million ants took a run at us a month or so ago but we made short work of them with some ‘Doom’ spray. The termite-tube in the picture (this is a structure made out of sand by some kind of termite that lives in the ground) appeared over the space of about one day. It just came up through a crack in the floor and there it was. It was easily disposed of with a broom, a dust pan and some ‘Doom’ powder down the little hole in the floor - haven’t seen a termite since. The most recent incursion of critters from the outside has been a number of really big, and I mean big, cockroaches that we have found in the morning. We get up in the morning and there they are, just one or two, and all quite dead. I am now trying to figure out how and why they come into the house. I won’t take a picture - they sort of ‘gross me out’ and I just want to get rid of them when I find them.

We have certainly enjoyed the various blog entries of the last six months. A big thank-you to everyone who has contributed. All the best, Bruce and Gerry.

PS. Re:the cockroaches - It turns out that at night they were coming up the shower drain in our bathroom. I guess they live under the ground and after wandering around our unit during the night, dry out and die. I have devised a little plug for the shower drain so, problem solved - no more cockroaches.

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