I have just read Jerry Barr's account of hiring "domestic help." What a trip! And so it went, with variations, for us all. TEA had told us that this would be expected of us: not to go local, not to shrink the job market, to put our energies into teaching. And so our alarm clock became the scraping of overdone toast, butane-broiled by loyal Josiah. Like Jerry we shuddered at the term "houseboy" and refused to refer to Josiah as anything but a cook or mpishi, though of course he did keep house without ever being asked. Had his own lamb's-wool bottomed sandals to skate around in to polish floors and must have done some repairs because he once asked me for a "sapana" which I never did find in my Swahili dictionary, but ultimately decoded - as the Bantuized form of the British word for monkey-wrench - long after he had borrowed one somewhere and done the necessary.

Oh yes, and he was a great cook, replete with secrets from the previous memsaab. We thought of him as a friend, though to the extent that he realized it, it embarrassed him; not the colonial way, that. Well, it is what it is, and even the despised word "boy" arose when he informed us that we should not bring him stew meat (level 2 in the meat hierarchy, below fileti), but boy meat - chewier, presumably more satisfying, and a step up from cat meat. Poor Falstaff the dog got level 5; maybe that's why we could never teach him to stop barking at students who came by. Our gardener ("shambaboy" - how did they think these things up; and why?) was younger, more assertive, the new generation. I wish them both well and, as I write, feel a pang of regret that we never kept in touch after parting.