Day zero: Wednesday, 050511.

Over my morning coffee I have some thinking to do. Yesterday night I phoned Jeremia. The news was that repairing the broken wagon was given up and a start was made transshipping the cargo to another one.
Who told you, Jeremia?
Mr. Daniel.
Who told Mr. Daniel?
Mr. Hamadi.
Who told Mr. Hamadi?
The cargo agent of that TSC office South Mwanza (Tanzania Railroad Corporation).
Though news from the place of the accident reaches that office through an endless chain of liars of the sort of Hamadi, Daniel, and, let's be strict, Jeremia, they are for me closest to the source. Since this was day zero and the deadline was at stake I decided to do a cross check.in that afternoon. After this conversation and decision I went to a school that had made an orderly impression to me for a meeting with the Kiswahili teacher to agree on two hours a day of conversation. We decided to start this very afternoon at three o'clock.. Then I called Jeremia to ask where to collect him for the cross-check at TSC office South Mwanza. He was at the Yacht Club, mounting mirrors in the new washrooms.
Hai Jeremia, you have not yet finished the job?
Not yet.
OK we have another hour. But then we have to go, otherwise I will be to late to return in time for my Kiswahili teacher.
After an hour, Jeremia was not yet finished. He proposed to go tomorrow.
I proposed to go quickly and then take him back to finish his job.
Jeremia agreed..
Sitting in the office of TSC office South Mwanza, Jeremia's translation of the account given was so vague that I ventured to ask some questions myself. But the answers made clear that the officials were not ready to be specific about their thoughts. What we got out was this:

	There had been an accident
	The locomotive was OK, but another locomotive was needed to pull the train to Mwanza
	Hamadi's wagon is OK, but it needs repair. It can be pulled to Mwanza and repaired on arrival. No transshipping takes place.
	Two wagons had remained on the site of the accident, not Hamadi's wagon.
	The rest of the train is now at Marampaka, North of Shinyanga.
	The train may arrive in Mwanza tomorrow.

If apart from transshipping there is any continuity in the stories, the "site of the accident" is Isaka. A second point of stagnation somewhere shortly before Shinyanga, and now a third point, North of Shinyanga. This if there is any continuity. It could also be that the official of the day is in charge of forging a new story. My digital Index of World Geographic Names gives every name of every group of three of four houses on the globe that has been given a name. Isaka was there, Shinyanga was there, but Marampaka has not made it into the listing. Despite that, I do not seriously doubt it exists. I seriously doubt the whole rest. Should I simply, as I promised, go to Hamadi, collect my money advance? It seems both Daniel and Jeremia believe there is wood being overloaded. I tell Jeremia I postpone the deadline until Friday.
I drive back with Jeremia and a fatigue I was feeling in the morning sets through.
Half way my first Kiswahili conversation lesson I know this is malaria and take the so called loading dose, 6 pills of a common drug. Half an hour before the end of that lesson my brain stops working and we end the conversation. I lie down.
On the next day, Thursday, day one after the deadline, I wake up with a temperature of 39.5 ^o C and no progress. This is not the normal result. I call Kees. His wife and her brother take me to the hospital of Dr. Mushi. Dr. Mushi either has a defective thermometer or there was a miracle, because he measures no fever (on calibration later my thermometer turned out to be perfect). On top of this, Dr. Mushi detects my heart irregularity and recommends a thorough investigation.
Sweating like a horse I assumed the job to diplomatically convince him that these were the remains of a period in which I had atrium fibrillations, that this was thoroughly investigated by a team of specialists in The Netherlands with advanced instruments and that a permanent slight dose of beta blocker was since five years proving to hold the process far enough from fibrillation, that I knew that fever could cause quite strange effects, that I was very experienced in feeling whether my heart was in fibrillation or simply a bit irregular and knew that now the rhythm was not all that good due to my fever, but this was unavoidable, and at normal times I was quite a fit long distance runner, so the heart is OK...
Dr. Mushi bursts into laughter.
So did I, realizing the absurdity of my conclusion. The heart is not OK, I went on laughing, but it is a fact of life.
Mushi resigned and had my blood tested. 
The concentration of the parasite in my blood was seriously high. I was told to stop the drug I had taken because this variant of the parasite does not get blocked by it, I was admitted to the hospital to receive 6 infusions each with 2 centiliter of quinine in half a liter of glucose, preceded by half a liter of intravenous nutrition and accompanied by painkillers for the side effects and monitoring of the blood pressure. Dr. Mushi is also a prominent member and ex-commodore of the Yacht Club so he instructed Kees' wife what to say there about how to secure my car. Kees' wife made me soup and porridge in thermos bottles, for which I was grateful, though I could not even think of touching them. I had to pause twice while climbing the stairs to my clean private room at the first stock. Bed with mosquito net,. TV, telephone, plenty of staff, only, I was warned, a fair chance of intruders hunting for the patients' valuables. With cell phone, wallet en watch under my pillow I started to sleep and soak the sheets with my sweat.

We had to make this picture quickly: my fever already got hold of my friend's sleeves (true photo: Kees wife)

With the first bottle, most parasites are dead and the fever gone, so any bad feelings during the remaining five bottles stem from the quinine. Those are limited, at least compared to what you feel when the parasites have got their way for two days. I call Jeremia. The news is that the train might come Saturday, day three after the deadline.
Friday I took bottle 3, 4 and 5. My ears started to sing, but this seems normal with this dose of quinine in your chest. Jeremia came to see me. The eyes were still on Saturday.
On Saturday morning, day three after the deadline, I got my bill, 55 euros, and after finishing my last bottle and waiting the obligatory hour, Dr. Mushi discharged me on the condition that I would take a taxi to the Yacht Club (this was inconsistent with the day before when his desire to boost my blood sugar made him so eager to have me eat a big pizza that I bribed my way out of the hospital with the infusion tube in my veins, and with the promise to eat one and to come back). Once on the Yacht Club, after some dizziness and equilibrium problems, I recovered amazingly quick.. In the evening everything was back to normal. No phone from Jeremia.
Sunday. Jeremia calls to say he starts thinking it would be good to travel to Marampaka, four hours driving from Mwanza, half of the road maram, or molem as they call it here. We agree to meet in the evening. The news is that the day before at Marampaka, which now turns out to be written Malampaka (there are no rules to distinguish r and l in spoken Kiswahili, hence the question "with l or with r?" is also fruitless), at Malampaka therefore, two more wagons with damaged coupling have been left behind. One of them is ours.
This means the wagon was now out of the zone of central railway concern. We might have to add the weight of our presence there. On longer term stealing would become a real risk, though the wagons stood at a cargo station. The wood surveillance at Tabora had become significantly stricter lately. The town price of mninga was up 13%. Recovering the wagon would save us a lot of trouble and money. We agreed that at no show the next day Monday, day five after the deadline, we would head for Malampaka with my car Tuesday morning before dawn. Malampaka was in my Index of World Geographic Names. A romantic cowboy action with railroad wagons in the bush seemed to lay ahead. Malampaka is 40 km from the Serengeti plain, so teethy visitors were not to be excluded. From this Index I put its waypoint in my navigation map.  

The next day I received no phone but when in the evening I called Jeremia, the rumor was that our wagon had arrived in Mwanza Town Railway Station and the wood would be offloaded and transported to the yard the next morning.

Wood?

YES, WOOD!!!!

Hamadi needed another advance of TSh 0.5 M to bribe his way out of the railway compound. I resigned and paid. Then, on Monday, after bringing a quarter of the logs to the yard's saw-mill the lorry broke down. But is was repaired quickly: two days later, on Wednesday morning. The last logs arrived at the saw-mill at Wednesday night. The quality of the mninga is excellent. It suffices for hull, deck, floors and rudder, that is, to finish the dhow. All we need is screws, and Daniel has sworn - whatever that may mean in Africa - that now he had taken over my screw business, the work on my dhow would never get halted for lack of screws...The atmosphere of excitement among everyone, not only Jeremia, but also Daniel and the saw-miller, made clear to me that I am with people not only interested in money, but also in seeing good wood and the prospect of making something nice with it.

WOOD!

.