Guava

I didn’t sleep well on my first night in Songea. There was a loud nightclub nearby and then when that finally wound down, I was awoken at 4am by what sounded like an incessant loudspeaker-at-a-rally type of noise. I then had a dream in which I was stabbed by a coked up lunatic who saw me on a train and followed me to mug me for my expensive watch. I don’t even wear a watch.

Apparently, perturbing dreams were not limited to the stress of my old job.

Sleep deprived, my visiting colleague and I decided we needed some physical exercise after a week inside a car. We had an invigorating walk towards the centre of Songea in the city’s subtropical highland climate. June is cooler and drier than most other months, and the stomp got blood in our limbs circulating.

We had a day of field visits. It began at the office of one of the Wildlife Management Area committees in the Niassa-Selous Corridor. These bodies can generate income through whatever means they can organise: game hunting, beekeeping, or other enterprises. We sampled some honey produced by stingless bees, and it tasted very medicinal. A hive was prised open for display purposes by a man wearing a Holiday Inn staff t-shirt.

We also visited another community managing a ‘Village Land Forest Reserve’ very successfully, earning thousands of dollars from the sustainable harvest of timber. Their forest was in robust health, we concluded as we stood around in it and posed for a photo as a group.

The final appointment was at a conservation training college deep in the bush, managed by a principal called Jane. Interestingly, the college buildings occupy a space established in the 1980s to house refugees from Mozambique. When that facility was no longer needed, the Tanzanian government found another use for the complex, and opened a college specialising in ranger training and guiding courses. It’s a great place although has issues with wildlife conflict. A baboon had smashed a pane of glass on the newly renovated library building, and an elephant had crumpled a window frame that was now hanging loose on a new assembly hall. Par for the course for the formidable Jane.

Jane also gifted me a bowl full of guava fruits. These were nightmarish to eat in front of others when I needed to express gratitude for the kindness. Guavas straight from the tree require such strong mouth action that they really flared up the jaw pain that has never gone away since March.