ABSTRACT
Trilingualism is common amongst ordinary people in Tanzania. Swahili is the regional language of East Africa, but many people will have a local language as a first language. The Tanzania trip vanquished to author’s depression. The blazing light, the pot-boiling heat and heavy humidity in some way catalysed author's body, reset its temperature controls and circadian rhythms. The Northern winter dark was no less dark and cold, but the scale of light and dark was recalibrated. Tourists and aid workers in poor countries must all, to a certain extent, have had similar encounters with poverty, but reactions vary from regarding poverty as part of the picturesque landscape to a deep offence that such conditions exist. The co-ordinator of the Rukwa project returned to Tanzania in 2007–2008, ten years after he had left, to interview people who had been involved in the project.
