For our last gathering of 2025, members of the Grand Bay Writers Group prepared a Christmas Memory to share with the rest of the group.
It is a strange thing to listen to Christmas music at the equator. “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” while walking the dirt road to the nearest village, seeking shade under the eucalyptus and banana trees that line the way. “In the Bleak Midwinter” while taking a rest after lunch, waiting for the heat of the day to pass. “See Amid the Winter Snow” while hanging laundry on the clothesline, knowing that with the heat of the sun, it will be dry almost before you finish hanging it up.
My third December in Tanzania, all of the VSO volunteers from all across the country gathered in Bagamoyo for the Christmas Conference. Apparently this had been a thing in the past, but it hadn’t happened in my previous years in-country. For several days, we reveled in the luxury of rooms at a resort, a view of the Indian Ocean with a beach to match, and the opportunity to share experiences, stories, and learnings with one another.
The conference was timed to end on December 22, and most volunteers chose to take advantage of the fact that their travel to and from the coast had been paid for, and they stayed several days longer for a Christmas vacation.
But not those of us from Ndolage. We knew that we wanted to spend Christmas in the place that we loved, and so despite the unreliability of travel in Tanzania, we decided that we were going to try to get home in time. So the morning of December 23, the five of us got on an airplane in Dar es Salaam that would take us to Mwanza. This was one of the times that the “fast ferry” was running across Lake Victoria, so instead of a connecting flight, the VSO office had booked us on the significantly cheaper ferry which would take us 6 hours to get across the lake to Bukoba. 6 hours of a very loud and somewhat confusing Bollywood movie playing on the TV in the sitting area of the boat.
By the late afternoon, we had landed in Bukoba, and made our way to the bus stand where we and our luggage piled ourselves into a daladala – one of those ubiquitous and overcrowded mini buses that go by different names in different corners of the continent. It was slightly past twilight when our journey ended, but we were home in time to celebrate Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, Nicola invited us to her house for supper – carrot and coriander soup with homemade ravioli. Later that evening, Nicola, Annette, Russ, and I went to the hospital chapel for the midnight service that began at 11; while Valerie used the excuse of preparing our Christmas feast to stay home.
After a late night, I was back in church at 9am on Christmas day, and after that went back with one of the nurses to her house as she had asked for help in baking a cake. This was considered to be a mzungu treat, and my expertise was requested. While I can certainly mix a cake batter, as it was being baked on a charcoal stove with more charcoal piled on the lid of the baking pan, I let Krista’s expertise take the lead on that part of the process.
Once her cake was well on its way to being baked, I headed home to open the parcels from Canada that had been collecting in my living room over the past several weeks. A couple of new books. A red fleece jacket for the cool evenings. A chocolate bar that had melted in transit and re-hardened. That was a real treat, despite its misshapen appearance, as most chocolate sold in hot climates is specially formulated not to melt in the heat, and while it might taste like chocolate, it feels more like eating wax than eating chocolate.
Gifts opened, it was time to head over to Valerie’s house, and in the late afternoon we went for a long walk over the open fields, along the edge of the cliff, to work up an appetite. The short rainy season had ended a few weeks earlier, and we were coming in to the heat of the short dry season that would extend from mid-December until late February.
When we got back to Valerie’s, the feast was prepared. One of her chickens and one of her ducks had been sacrificed for our meal, and they had been roasted in pieces in the oven. There were roasted potatoes too, with crunchy outsides and soft fluffy interiors. There were carrots too, and even a few small brussels sprouts, a cold-weather crop carefully cultivated and harvested early before the plant had a chance to bolt. Valerie had tried for years to grow parsnips for our Christmas dinner without success – apparently parsnips need cold weather to develop any sort of root, and while she would get beautiful feathery parsnip greens, the edible roots were never any larger than your pinky finger. There was also a salad, picked from her garden, and a Christmas Pudding from Harrods for dessert. The tradition was that whoever was passing through Heathrow airport at any point between Christmases was to pick up one of their Christmas Puddings. The Harrods in the International Departures part of Heathrow keeps them in stock year-round, specifically for situations like ours!
As we were finishing up dinner, my phone rang and I went outside to answer it. 8pm in Tanzania was noon back in Canada, and my family was gathered around a speaker phone on the dining room table at Dad’s house on Christmas Day. The connection wasn’t great, and our call was short as each minute of an international phone call pushed your monthly phone bill higher, but I could hear all of their voices and we could tell each other, “I love you.”
Back inside Valerie’s house, a movie had been decided on – something James Bond – and had started playing on her TV. Valerie was one of the only people at Ndolage with a TV, and while we watched in her living room, I suspect that there were some people outside in the night watching the movie through her window – she would have invited them in if she knew that they were there, but they kept their presence undetected that night.
My heart full of joy and love and laughter – and a feast of good food – I couldn’t stay awake through the movie and I dozed off, waking up when the end credits were rolling. And then it was a three-minute walk home through the dark night before rolling into my bed – with the mosquito net down, of course – and drifting off to sleep.
And that morning and the night before, we had gathered in the church and sang, “Umati wa Yesu, njooni kwa furaha” (O Come All Ye Faithful). We gathered and we sang, “Usiku, mtakatifu.” (Silent Night). And in every corner of the globe, people paused and celebrated in countless different ways the birth of the Prince of Peace, and recommitted ourselves to a world where love and where joy reign.
One of the views over the hills from Ndolage
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