Every day, every meal, I seem to be making a remark about the wonderful fruit we’re eating these days. This month has us enjoying absolutely luscious mangoes, exceedingly sweet pineapple, and plums that are a wonderfully nice change. The mangoes that are big come from Tabora or Morogoro, and the smaller ones from Tanga region. Pineapples come from near Dar es Salaam, while the plums arrive from the mountains near Lushoto. You’ll note that none of this fruit comes from Dodoma where we live. This region is normally just too dry for such fruit, and so we get it trucked in from all these other places. There is something so extravagant about the mangoes and pineapples – they are just SO sweet, SO fleshy, SO juicy. I love going to the market and buying these things, interacting with the vendors who spend their day selling fruits, vegetables, rice, beans, everything under the sun. Most of the time I engage a young boy to carry my basket. They are always around asking to carry baskets of the people who are shopping, and so I usually give my basket to one of them who then gets a tip when we finish going around the market. The first time that I did that here after years away I didn’t know how much to give as a tip. I gave him 200/-and was looking for some more to give him when he said thank you and walked away! 200/- is about 15¢ US so I guess that won’t break the bank ….
These days there aren’t a lot of green vegetables like spinach sold in the market because since the rains have begun the native plants have come up and folks go out and pick them to cook for their green vegetable. However, not far from here is a windmill, and there are very small plots of vegetables, mostly spinach, that people grow there near the water source. It’s nice to go there in the evening to buy a couple bundles of spinach and then come home to cook it for dinner.
This week there were several homes destroyed in this section of the city, destroyed by a bulldozer. They were homes of the traditional type, with mud brick walls and either earth roofs or maybe some pieces of aluminum roofing sheets. If they had roofing sheets, those things were taken off first, and then the houses were destroyed. We don’t know the whole story but most folks say that these were houses of folks who had already been compensated for their land and given other land to move to but who hadn’t done that yet. And I don’t know if it was because these plots belong to someone else or if they are to be used for some development purpose. Anyway, two houses very near us were razed, but the people who lived there had another place and had moved the night before the bulldozer came. They’re very philosophical about it, so I suspect that they knew it was inevitable. I just hope justice was done.
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