Showing posts with label 2011. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2011. Show all posts

Friday, 17 January 2014

WHAT IS ETON COLLEGE DOING IN TANZANIA?


I never imagined meeting someone from Eton College.  
It is a place you only hear on the news and movies. They include famous writer, Ian Fleming– creator of James Bond- who died aged 57 in 1964. James Bond is as part of British mist, fog, horses and rain, as is the Queen, Beatles, Spice Girls, Fish and Chips and of course Eton.  The said establishment has on its hit list, 19 Prime Ministers – past and present.

Famous  journalist and author George Orwell  who wrote such masterpieces as Animal Farm and 1984, studied at Eton. Pic from Telegraph Site...

These are the chosen few, upper class, royalty. Cost to enter Eton is in the region of £30,000 per year; more than three times the cost of an average University annual fee, which majority students find hard to foot; and if you heard of the 2010 student- fees riots, you can imagine the colour of money, smell of cash.  Currently many foreign students are looking elsewhere in Asia and Latin America or just local universities to study.
Yup. Eton is something else.
 A boys’ only boarding school; it was founded by King Henry V1 in 1440- a very long time ago, indeed. The school has been referred to as the chief nurse of England’s statesmen, and a saying goes: “the British Empire was built on the playing fields of Eton.”

Saturday, 1 January 2011

2011 AND WHAT MY DOCTOR FRIEND SAID

I have always been around doctors or became friends with them. My own late father, Dr Hosea Macha, was a known local medic; therefore, when I was a kid growing on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, I would hear him wake up late at night to tend patients. It could be someone knocking on our door because his wife or neighbour was having a baby; or an emergency because a farmer had cut himself seriously with a machete or been bitten by a snake. My father was always working.