Mvumi School Trust

Dodoma has changed so fast, from last year when it felt like a small English market town. Now it is a city, largely because of the new universities. Thousands of people have been brought in. Some seem well-paid and have cars, so there is now Real Traffic. Others have arrived as a swarm of new, and seemingly blind, cyclists and lastly the labourers, often with children, mostly from Dar es Salaam. There is evidence of new slums and more street children.

John H, one of our sponsored students, who has had a dramatic and endearing life and which has already been full of little miracles has performed another of his own. While he waits for his O level results, he and his little sisters have to survive in bad conditions in Dodoma with barely any outside help. Jobs are rare as hens' teeth. But John has found one.

The biggest university under construction is on a huge hilly site, funded, they say, by Bill Gates, China and Saudi Arabia. John has a job with one of the construction firms. His area is sealed off with sheets of corrugated iron and his job is to take the names of the workers at the beginning and end of the day. That is it. He has to be there all day with nothing else to do but earns 5,000 Tanzanian shillings (£2) per 12-hour day, six days a week.

I went to see him and the site and it shook me. Whole hills are being dismantled - by hand. One was being peeled like an orange by hundreds of women with babies on their backs in full sun. They dig out the rocks and slowly break them down, using little home-made mallets, into a graded series of piles. Women sit on the piles, legs outstretched, their baby tied on their back and covered with a Kanga. They hammer each rock into pieces, until a truck arrives with men to shovel up the piles and take the rubble to building sites.

Two feelings. It is wonderful to have jobs available. It is Hell On Earth.

I had been handed a village girl, Neema, in Dodoma to bring home to Mvumi. She had a fever which made me pull my hand back in shock. I have never felt heat like that and she could barely get in and out of the car. The parents (both with heavy scarring from local healers' procedures) insisted they did not want to go to hospital. As I passed the VSO Dutch doctor's empty house, I was reminded I was the only European in the village for the weekend. I gave Neema paracetamol and left her in their traditional mud-brick house, hoping they would not decide to give all the pills at once (if two are good, then six must be better). I should have done the chin-to chest test for meningitis. I had not. I had left them with money and pleas for them to go to the hospital. Not a relaxing feeling.

We have had a visitor from Downe House School. After taking her to three shortlisted girls for sponsorship in January, she said they would sponsor all three. It was so exciting I nearly crashed the car. Travelling between villages is slow and can be tiring physically and emotionally. Visitors often find, however well prepared intellectually, that the remoteness and harshness of rural poverty here are very moving.

The twice-scorched soil, (by fire and sun), has been turned over by hand-held hoe or sometimes with hired oxen and plough. Everyone is longing to get on with planting when the rainy season starts but it just gets hotter and hotter, even at night now. The Alsatian I am fostering has a full thick coat and is spread-eagled on my concrete floor most of the day. I have to cook him ugali (maize flour, water and oil) every day, with a sprinkling of tiny dried fish (from far-off lakes) which I soak and sometimes disgusting little worms (or are they tiny leeches?) start a little safari around his bowl, till I scald them with relish. Ouuuuuffff.

There are two projects I am trying to establish in the village, which also will rely on the rainy season. One is a tree-planting project buying saplings from a single women's group in Dodoma and distributing them to individuals and church groups here who will guarantee to look after them. The second is to help one of the primary schools to harvest the water from their roofs to save little children as young as seven having to carry 30 litres each to school as well as all their other work. If you are interested, do let me know.