Hills of Ruarwe #3

We reached the summit of the first tier of hills, that rose precipitously up from the Lakeshore. The land plateaued out and we followed a track into a village. Women sat outside the huts shelling peanuts. One of them offered me a handful of the green kernels, and sliding the wet skin off, I chewed them one by one. Groups of men sat on their haunches, smiled and nodded as we passed. Some were weaving the large baskets used for carrying. I watched as they split springy switches of cane into strips, which were bent and woven into the half made forms. We came to where the hillside fell steeply away. Before us stood a timber frame supported by four tree trunks driven into the hillside. On top stood a man, with his large, dusty feet planted firmly on either side. He was stripped to the waist and wild looking, with muscles that bulged like steel cables through his shiny black skin. Standing adjacent to him on the ground below, was a younger, less heavily built man; his red shirt and white baseball cap standing out in vivid contrast to the backdrop of green-ochre hills. Between them a seven or eight foot saw moved rhythmically up and down. As the man below pulled, the saw cut down in one long continuous stroke, and when the man above pulled, the saw was drawn up ready for the next stroke. As this was done, a perfectly straight line was cut through a log that lay lengthways on top of the frame. At one point they stopped; and to allow the saw to continue to run freely, another man swung himself up onto the frame, and inserted a small wooden peg into the saw cut to wedge it open. It was slow, strenuous work, and I watched in awe at the simple beauty of it.

"The Hills of Ruarwe #2.

The path levelled out through plots of cassava and withered stalks of maize. We came to a group of huts. Alex disappeared to get water while I cooled off in the shade of a mud-brick wall. When he returned I asked him how much further we were going.
“Just up there, and over,” he said, gesturing the way ahead.  We carried on up a steep incline along the edge of a gully, carved out of the hillside by weeks of heavy rain.  A couple were coming down. The man was young, handsome and lean, followed by a beautiful young woman with a baby on her back. Their expressions were serious and, as they passed gave me cause for thought, as to what the matter might be. I wondered if perhaps they had argued earlier in the day and were now on their way to an event of a serious, and/or unpleasant nature, like a funeral they had to attend together, but weren’t relishing the prospect. Or perhaps their child was ill and they were going to the village for help. It was a hard life with only two feet for transport, where there were no doctors, nor medicines, and no schools to speak of, just hills where people eked out a daily living from the land.

The Hills of Ruarwe #1

One day we went up into the hills behind Ruarwe, where planks were being sawn from newly felled trees. Starting in the morning before the sun’s heat intensified, we made our way up a steep, rocky path. Humidity and exhaustion slowed me down and I had to keep stopping. Finally, feeling dizzy and faint, I wasn’t sure if I could go on. Nausea pressed up into my chest and down into my gut. I burped, broke wind, and collapsed down with my head between my knees, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of my neck and forehead. Alex waited patiently, but I felt he was itching to move on, and step-by-step we continued upwards. As we gained height, a view opened up behind us: in the morning stillness, with sun, cooking, burning, evaporating, we paused to look down to where the village lay nestled in trees. From the pale-magenta line of Ruarwe beach, the Lake stretched like a vast shimmering mirror to the faint serrations on the horizon, traced in mauve by the hills of Tanzania.