From cramped buses to fabulous vistas - visiting the Pangwa language area

The darkness was just beginning to lift as I left home at 5.30am to head to the bus stand. Despite the equator running through nearby Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbour to the north, it’s far enough away to create a noticeable difference to daylight hours. When I have the same early start in the middle of the year it is still pitch black, not beginning to grey until nearly an hour later. It doesn’t make the early start any easier though! I dozed on and off for the first couple of hours of the bus journey before settling down with a good book to read on my phone. We arrived at Makambako nearly 4 hours later, where we were allowed a ten minute food and toilet break. I wandered around the bus stand to stretch my legs before coming to wait near our bus so that I’d be ready to hop back on as soon as our time was up. I enjoyed watching the food vendors, with bowls of snacks (such as packets of crisps, banana chips and biscuits) or fruit balanced on their heads or carrying buckets of finger foods (such as hard boiled eggs, bajia and mandazi), as they touted their wares to travellers leaning out the bus windows – a colourful, bustling scene.

Less than an hour and a half later we arrived at Njombe’s big out-of-town bus stand, where I expected to meet up with my colleagues and find another bus for the next leg of the journey. Bernard saw me as soon as I got off the bus – a welcoming, smiling face amidst all the strangers milling around. Bernard is one of the translators working on translating the New Testament into the Pangwa language, and we were on our way to hold a workshop in the small town of Mlangali in the Pangwa language area. His family live in Makambako, so he had spent the weekend there before coming to meet me at Njombe. A third colleague, Frank, was also on his way. Frank is in the literacy/Scripture engagement team with me, and he is particularly involved in supervising literacy/SE work in the Pangwa language area. He and Bernard together would be leading the literacy elements of the workshop (i.e. equipping participants to read their language and be able to teach others to do the same) while I would be facilitating the times of Bible study and teaching on Paul’s letter to Titus, for which we’d be using the Pangwa and Swahili Scriptures side-by-side. The Pangwa New Testament translation is nearly complete and should be ready for launching in a couple of years’ time, so the goal of the workshop was to build on what we’ve already done in the Pangwa language area over many years, by strengthening the ability of a select number of individuals from across the Pangwa language community to be confident readers of their language and able to prepare people with the literacy skills needed to read the New Testament when it arrives. They would also be given solar powered audio devices loaded with Pangwa Scriptures to use at home and in church ministry. We hope that the workshop participants will become strong advocates for using the Pangwa Scriptures and able to help facilitate their distribution.

Bernard had already reserved seats for us on a small bus that would shortly be leaving for Mlangali. With five people squeezed into the four seats on each row, there was no room to do more than wiggle your toes. Halfway into the journey I began to struggle with a desperate need to move my legs, which was virtually impossible! I had my laptop bag filling the space between my legs, a mother with a child on her knee filling up more than her share of the seat on one side, and a lady with two big bags on her lap and a 5-litre tub of oil jammed between her feet and mine on my other side. We finally arrived in Mlangali at about 3.30pm. A motorbike took our luggage to the guesthouse while we followed on foot.

Beautiful views around Mlangali

After washing my face, tidying up my tousled hair, putting my feet up, drinking a lot of water and taking some time to pray, I felt more myself, and set out for a walk. Mlangali is in the hills, at about the same altitude as Mbeya, and the surrounding landscape is beautiful. As I walked along the bright red dirt road, my eyes soaked it all up: rolling hills, tall eucalyptus trees providing shade along the path, reeds waving around some wetland, clay brick kilns, carefully stacked planks of wood and open views. I returned to Mlangali to find Bernard walking slowly along the road with one of the workshop participants who had arrived early. We strolled together towards the Anglican church where the workshop would be held, met with the pastor there, and looked around to see how things could be set up. The pastor told us about how he feeds and teaches 200 children every weekend as part of a Compassion programme – he clearly has a real heart for children.

Views on walk around Mlangali

On the way back to the guesthouse we stopped for dinner at a creatively decorated café. I ordered rice, greens and fried beef. The greens were one of my favourite varieties – pumpkin leaves, cooked with ground peanuts. The rice was also very tasty – it was yellow, presumably from the use of turmeric, and flavoured with cardamon, which I have never encountered before in Tanzania, usually it’s just plain white rice. Despite Tanzania being a land rich in agriculture and spices being easily available, food usually lacks any seasoning other than salt. Ginger may be added to some dishes, but that’s about it, though sometimes a plate of chillis is provided to add some heat for those who want it. There were two Chinese men in the restaurant, which came as something of a surprise in this fairly remote town. I found out later that the Chinese are involved in some local factories; it seems they have a finger in many pies in Tanzania.

On Tuesday I woke to a beautiful, blue-skied morning, making the red roads look even redder on my short morning walk. About 25 people turned up for the workshop, out of the 35 or so who had been invited. Other than getting a bit behind schedule, the day seemed to go well and there generally seemed to be a good atmosphere in the group. While Frank dealt with people’s travel fares and food allowances at the end of the day, I was able to help a few people get the Pangwa Bible app on their phones and also got to enjoy listening to one of the church’s five choirs sing the song they were practising for Sunday’s service.

Frank helping participants develop their Pangwa literacy skills

After dumping my bag back at the guesthouse, I met up with one of the participants so that he could show me the way to the Catholic church on the hill – its tower is quite a landmark, visible for some distance and standing separate from the church, and I hoped to get some good views of the area. My companion was able to explain what I could see and map out the boundaries of the region. As we walked back, the sun had already set behind the hills and the sky was painted in soft shades of orange and pink, with streaks of blue and yellow. Breathtaking. Back in the town my companion insisted I greet almost everyone we met to showcase my very limited (about three words) of Pangwa! It turned out that my Pangwa was purer than that of some of the people we spoke to as because Mlangali is a town on a significant road there are many non-Pangwa people there and the local Pangwa has become mixed with other neighbouring languages and with Swahili.

The next day, I left my key with the guesthouse manager* so that my room could be cleaned, before heading off to the workshop. (*I’m not sure if ‘manager’ is the right word to use – this person usually lives in and looks after the guesthouse on behalf of the owner. In Swahili we call them the mhudumu, which literally means service-giver and can also be applied to other service-givers such as a waitress in a café.) I led the first session in which we continued our studies in Titus, and then Frank and Bernard took over to focus on reading and writing Pangwa. At lunchtime I decided to return to my room to eat (I had my usual rice cakes, peanut butter, carrots, cucumber and fruit with me for one light meal a day), so I made the just-under-ten-minute walk to the guesthouse only to find that the manager was nowhere to be found so I couldn’t get into my room. Often a phone number is pinned up somewhere to contact the manager, so before allowing myself to get into a fluster I looked around and, sure enough, two phone numbers were written with a black marker pen onto the door of the guesthouse. Thankfully the manager picked up the phone! She told me that she’d gone out to get food but that she’d left my key in a small bag hanging behind a curtain in reception. With relief, I retrieved my key and had lunch.

We finished the day promptly at 4pm, as the church has a service at that time on a Wednesday, but then I was spontaneously invited to speak at said service! I tried to persuade someone else to do it, so that they could teach in Pangwa, but he pointed out that not everyone in the congregation would be Pangwa. Having therefore failed to find a good excuse to not teach, I took a few moments on a bench outside to try and compose my thoughts, before joining the service and engaging them in a study on the temptation of Jesus. I chose this story as an opportunity to emphasise the importance of knowing God's Word and teaching it to our children, so that it can help us to stand firm in the faith. One lady was so touched by the study that she gave me some money to buy myself some food!

Selling Pangwa books to people after the service

We were invited to the pastor’s house for dinner in the evening. I took him a couple of small pineapples I’d found in one of the many small shops lining the sides of the road, as it is normal to take a gift of food when visiting someone’s home. Neither Bernard nor Frank had thought to do that, so maybe the gift-giving doesn’t apply when you are away from home. I enjoyed a good pile of boiled potatoes, which isn’t something you’d find in a café where the options are usually just rice or ugali. It was a good taste of home, as I grew up eating potatoes almost every day. Viazi viringo (round potatoes, as opposed to viazi vitamu – sweet potatoes) thrive in the highlands of Tanzania, if the soil is right. Despite this they wouldn’t be considered a staple here; they are more often eaten for breakfast (boiled) or served as chips, which are just considered a snack. As well as potatoes, there was rice, greens and chicken, all thoughtfully prepared without the addition of onion for my sake. I was asked to pray a blessing on the home before we left, but as my Swahili was starting to get a bit jumbled, which happens if I’m tired or talking about topics where I have limited Swahili vocabulary, I prayed in English. However, by halfway through I wished I’d used Swahili – there’s something about being surrounded by Tanzanians and using Swahili all day that just makes it feel awkward using English!

In the middle of the night I was startled awake by a loud rumble and my bed shaking. In the morning an alert on my phone told me there had been an earthquake, with the epicentre being about 14 miles away. More loud rumbles woke me too early in the morning, this time lorries. Daylight soon came and I set off for a brisk walk, exploring new roads and enjoying the slight chill in the air due to the cloudy skies. Any children I passed were keen to greet me, with some making the surprisingly common mistake of calling me Mchina (Chinese)! This seems to result from the fact that the lighter-skinned people they most commonly see are Chinese, and so they assume that I am too, even though to my eyes there isn’t even the faintest resemblance. However, to children who rarely see someone who isn’t Tanzanian, we obviously look somewhat similar.

Participants practise reading in Pangwa

The third day of the workshop went well, with participants showing a noticeable improvement in their reading ability. After we’d finished, one of the participants (a pastor in his fifties) volunteered to accompany me to the top of a hill with a phone tower on its summit, meaning it must be one of the highest points in the area. We took a motorbike to the foot of the narrow path we would climb, with both of us perched behind the driver as he sped along the rough dirt road, expertly finding the smoothest sections to ride on. It was a good climb up to the phone tower, with the path sometimes winding up through trees, sometimes skirting round small plots of land being prepared for planting crops and other times weaving through scrub. There was also the chance to do a bit of scrumping – we passed both a peach tree and a plum tree and enjoyed their fruit! You can’t normally get plums in Mbeya, and if you do they’ve come from this region, as the altitude provides the right climate for them to grow.

In just under half an hour of brisk walking we had made it to the top, 6706 feet (about 2043 metres) above sea level, while Mlangali is at about 5770 feet (1758 metres). It was definitely worth it. In one direction I could see the familiar outline of the mountains that skirt round the edge of the Kisi language area, while in other directions layer after layer of hills faded into the distance into the Nyakyusa, Kinga and Bena language areas – all places that I have visited as we have been involved in Bible translation in all of these languages. As we skipped back down the trail, the hills looked ever more beautiful as they became silhouetted against the soft sunset sky. We walked all the way back to Mlangali, with the pastor accompanying me to the gate of the guesthouse as it was already dark.

Looking across to the hills of the Kisi language area

The last day of the workshop included a repeat of a little reading test we gave them on the first day, to see if there was any improvement in fluency and speed. A quick scan of the results showed that there was, with most people making less mistakes and reading faster. For some of them a lot of practice is still needed, but the improvement was encouraging. Other highlights of the last day included watching them study and discuss the Scriptures in Pangwa, the beautiful songs they composed based on verses from Titus and the joy one lady expressed over the unity in the workshop between church denominations that wouldn’t usually come together. We finished with the obligatory group photo before everyone started for home, some on foot, some on motorbikes and some (after a long wait) on buses.

Engaging in group Bible studies on Titus 3 in Pangwa

Frank and I went to say goodbye to the pastor of the church we’d used, which was Anglican, and he once again invited us for dinner. This time Frank and Bernard had plans to watch a football match on TV (a Tanzanian team versus a Moroccan team) as they are both big football fans (as are most of my male Tanzanian colleagues), so we declined the invitation. It turned out that one of the reasons the pastor had invited us was because a little girl that he is caring for wanted to see me again! So we passed by his house as we left and took a photo together, for which she’d obviously been and put on one of her favourite dresses.

After sorting out various things, like securing seats near the front of the bus we’d take the next day (not by buying a ticket, as we wouldn’t be able to do that until we were on the bus, but just by a verbal agreement with someone), arranging to meet Frank at the bus stop at 5.45am and dealing with some work issues, I went for a short evening walk before it got dark. Once again I soaked up the beauty all around me and told myself not to get annoyed when children pretended to speak Chinese with me. Instead, I befriended them, explained that I was English, talked to them in Swahili and then let them walk alongside me, pretending that they were my guards and helping me find the way back to the main road. They wanted money at the end, but I just told them I didn’t have any (as I’d conveniently forgotten the note in my pocket that I’d put there to buy myself a bottle of water) and instead we solemnly shook hands and said our goodbyes.

On Saturday morning I met Frank at the appointed time and place – it was a good job we were there early as the bus we’d been told we’d take wasn’t running and instead we were put on a different one that left earlier! I got a seat right near the front next to the pile of luggage stacked up behind the driver. As we drove, the luggage shifted so that I was pinned firmly into my corner, but it was better than being squeezed between lots of people as at least I didn’t have to worry about treading on someone’s foot or prodding someone as I squirmed around to get comfortable! In Njombe, Frank and I went our separate ways (he was meeting someone), though first he made sure I’d got a seat on a bus going to Mbeya. We left just before 9am but the journey took somewhat longer than I anticipated. I gradually got more uncomfortable as it heated up and at some point I also started to need the toilet, knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to get to one for a couple of hours. I eventually made it home at 4.45pm, having switched buses a couple more times on the way into Mbeya town, and had multiple waits at bus stops dragging the ride out even longer. My recovery strategy was to drink lots of water, have a coffee (I’d not had one all week), have a cold shower and get some exercise by walking to the market to stock up on fresh food. The house felt quiet and lonely, as my housemate is in the UK. Although it’s good to be home, I’ll miss all the people interaction and opportunities for different walks and experiences. It always feels like a privilege to work in such beautiful places, but I confess that I selfishly chose the Pangwa language area over the Bungu language area, where other colleagues had gone to conduct the same workshop. I chose the cool of the hills, while they suffered heat and mosquitoes. I thank God for their willingness to go where I did not want to go! May God bless the work of all of our hands, using these workshops to help the Pangwa and Bungu communities read and meditate on the Scriptures in their languages.