The Tanzanian who took care of me

When it's raining in North Tanzania, you barely move.

Especially by car, especially in the Savanna.

Even if you know all the paths like your pockets, all the rocks, all the sandy areas, when is rainy season, even the most friendly corners become quicksand sucking in a lonely terrible instant half and more of your car leaving you with the all day busy.

Well, I've lived more than three years in the Masai steppe, so I've lived six rainy season, well, five, because the first year was very dry and Tanzania faced a tough shortage of food.

The engineer working in the project was Simon. The most committed and hard worker Tanzanian I've ever met. But of course he was no perfect. Like nobody is, and of course I'm not.

This is not the place to list what I think were Simon's defects, but the first thing he told me, when he met me was: "You are young (same age of him) and inexperienced (more years of experience of him in Cooperation), you cannot go around alone in this area (the Masai and Meru villages). So i'll take care of you    (sighing for the extra nanny work he was facing)".

Of course I was so offended and pissed of that the first thing I did was to take the car and go alone to see all the old projects and find small imperfections to complain later with Simon. Getting lost between acacias and stones.

After three and an half year of this life, we ended up loving each other and we almost cried when saying goodbye.

Anyway, at the beginning he was treating me like a lost puppy.

And once, after a heavy rainy night, we were going to see a spring together, but we were going with two different cars, because later I had a meeting with the District Authorities (I'll tell you then about their offices and charisma) while he was going on with some field works.

Driving along this path, at certain point he stopped the car with no apparent reason, and stayed.

I waited for a while, but he was not moving. So I drove out of the path to flank him and ask him what was wrong.

"Hey Simon"

"Hey"

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing I wanted to warn you not to go out of the path especially in this area because yesterday a truck get stuck all the day"

And so I was.

our working area in the mist