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Tessa Jowell shuns luxury for an African hut

By Stephen Bevan in Pretoria and Melissa Kite
UK Sunday Telegraph
(Tessa Jowell - British politician - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Minister for the Olympics)

Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 14/01/2007
Tony Blair may have a taste for high life at luxurious holiday locations but his Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, has gone to the opposite extreme.

Tessa Jowell in her hut in Gwalana. Pigs woke her in the morning
She returned last week after four days in a hut with no running water, and just a pit latrine across a field, after working as a volunteer in a remote village in South Africa's poorest province.
While Mr Blair holidayed at the Florida mansion of Bee Gee Robin Gibb, Miss Jowell spent part of her Christmas break in Gwalana — where more than half of the 100 villagers are HIV-positive — near the town of Peddi in the Eastern Cape.
Working for the charity Sports Coaches Outreach, she scrubbed floors, weeded a football pitch and made 500 rounds of sandwiches for children. She also joined in ceremonial dancing wearing full African dress.
Last night Miss Jowell, 59, said she hoped to make other such visits and urged colleagues to do the same. "We all run the risk of a remoteness in government and we have to fight that pressure. I came back inspired by the experience, and by what I learned from the people I stayed with: the strength of their communities, their optimism in circumstances of great poverty and what we might consider hardship.
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"For someone used to her home comforts it was physically hard. But whatever I gave to them, they gave me more."
Miss Jowell slept in a hut with a leaky, corrugated iron roof through which the rain poured. "I was absolutely determined I was not going to wimp out," she said.
The lavatory was a "drop down", a wooden box over a pit in a corrugated iron shed, and she was woken in the morning by the grunting of free-roaming pigs.
Meals consisted of cereals and fresh pineapple, as well as umgqusho — a mixture of samp (boiled starch) and beans — and a porridge of maize meal and amasi (sour milk). The family she stayed with spoke little English, but they communicated by talking about football.
"They asked who my favourite team was and I said Arsenal, and they asked who my favourite player was and I said Thierry Henry. The little boy said, 'Oh, I love him'. Everywhere I went I tried to explain who I was and what I did, and it was difficult, but when I said David Beckham everyone knew who I was talking about."
Miss Jowell, who travelled with one official and no bodyguard, helped to run a sports festival in Peddi and said it was heartbreaking to see hundreds of children who had walked miles to be there just because there would be free food.
"There was amazing raw talent. One boy was a genius shooter at netball but his trainers were falling apart. A lot of the children who came were very hungry.
"I got involved in making packed lunches for 250 children. I made 500 rounds of sandwiches. I weeded the pitch. I cleaned up the stadium afterwards. I did timekeeping for matches."
At night, she joined in with local events, including a party to celebrate a young man's circumcision.
After one of the most difficult years of her career, Miss Jowell could be forgiven for wanting to get away from it all. She was recently spotted house-hunting following the break-up of her 27-year marriage to the lawyer David Mills, who is contesting corruption claims involving his links with the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
If she was looking for somewhere far removed from life in London, she could not have chosen better. The Eastern Cape — birthplace of Nelson Mandela — is a rugged land of green, rolling hills, cattle, winding dirt roads and picturesque villages of round huts with thatched roofs. It also has grinding poverty, Aids and violent crime.
Busiswe Nelson, 34, the daughter of the family with whom Miss Jowell stayed, said their guest had joined in all family activities.
"We ate together. She was comfortable with our African food, she didn't have any fuss, she was very down to earth."
Asked how Miss Jowell had coped with having to use a drop down lavatory, Miss Nelson replied: "She enjoyed the morning walk."
She also commended Miss Jowell on her attempts at traditional dancing. "She learned very well, she got the rhythm very quickly," she said.
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