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In l957, my husband Jobst was building a boarding school at the small settlement of Chimala on the Great North road between Iringa and Mbeya.   At the time we lived in Tukuyu, the Headquarters of Rungwe District and about 70 miles from Chimala over a mountainous, rather hair-raising road, which dropped down from the heights of the Poroto Mountains at over 7000 feet to the Usangu plains at around 3000 feet.   Jobst sometimes had to spend two or three days at a time at Chimala. Friends of ours, the Cormack family, ran a small hotel in Chimala, mostly catering for passing Great North road traffic. I...

My uncle Alec Roberts’s accident is well documented in both the Lancet and in our family history records. In those days when cattle were long horned, they had to be dipped every week against East Coast Fever, a deadly parasitic disease for which there was no inoculation.

A cattle dipping tank is a long narrow deep concrete structure, which is filled with water and into which they add a chemical mixture to kill ticks that carry the East Coast Fever. The cattle plunge into the tank and swim to the other end, by which time the chemical has affected any ticks. Once the cattle are out of the tank, there are concrete paths at angles from the tank, with strong upright poles and beams in which the cattle stand giving time for the dip mixture...

The world was at war in 1942, the year I was born. Allied forces were fighting to suppress a dominating dictator and to defend America against foreign forces. During this time of turbulence, I, Betty Elaine, was born to a young preacher’s family, joining my older brother Calvin in Middeboro, Massachussetts. Rev. George ‘Hap’ Oliver Donner and his dear wife Elizabeth Helen (Brown) Donner were high school sweethearts with a vision to serve God for their lifetime on the continent of Africa.

My father was the son of a prestigious bank president, and my mom was a humble farmer’s daughter. Back in the 1930s...

My 2 January blog talked about the arrival of Jewish people in Kenya. One of the earliest, Sammy Jacobs, was a real entrepreneur. He started ‘The Dustpan’ store in Nairobi, where you could buy almost anything. This is what the magazine African World said about his shop on 31 October 1913:

‘Where but a few brief years ago the lion made the plains ring with his roar, and the hippopotamus lumbered his way down to Nairobi rivers to slake his thirst, now stand numbers of elegant, handsomely appointed shops and stores.  Situated right in the very heart of Nairobi’s commercial activities...