Eighteen years are not long in a lifetime. But they are long enough for a working career especially when that working takes place far far away from home.

Sixty-one-year-old Du Jian has spent 18 years in Tanzania working with TAZARA, a short form standing for the Tanzania-Zambia Railway. Du is a coordinator between the Chinese railway experts and the TAZARA management.

His working career back in China is also related, directly or indirectly, with the same railway.

Ever since the 1,860-km railway started construction in late 1970, Du has come to work in Tanzania on several shifts that accumulate into 18 years so far.

Looking out of the window of his office at the TAZARA headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Du sank into deep thought.

Du is not the only Chinese who has come to work with Tanzanians and Zambians to construct the railway.

Tens of thousands of Chinese railway constructors came to work in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970's.

For short, some of them constructed the railway in east Africa for several years; for long, others have been working with the railway up till right now.

But Du is lucky in that he is still up and around whereas 70 of his countrymen have died while working in Tanzania and Zambia for TAZARA.

In Tanzania, some 100,000 local people also contributed their sweat and blood to the construction of the railway that starts from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania along the Indian Ocean coast to Kapili Mposhi up the landlocked highland of Zambia.

One hundred and fifty-seven Tanzanians lost their lives to the construction of the railway.

Mbeya has also worked for long with TAZARA and he too is retiring from a working career of more than two decades with TAZARA.

It was the likes of Du and Mbeya who have been witnessing and looking after the operation of TAZARA and the transportation of 39. 11 million passengers and 24.35 million tons of cargo between 1976 and 2005.

To both Du and Mbeya, not only trains are running along TAZARA but sweat and blood of Chinese, Tanzanians and Zambians are also running along the railway.

When asked what he would do in retirement, the emotional Tanzanian said that he would rather stay than leave the railway, the construction of which has changed him from a hand-to-mouth peasant to a salary-earning worker and later a train-guard while the operation of which has been improving the livelihood where the railway meanders its way through Tanzania.

"I would stay as close to the railway as possible even in retirement," said Mbeya who is named after his namesake native region in southern Tanzania, "so that I can see it, hear it and feel it every day."

Du shares every bit of Mbeya's hard-to-part-with feeling.

"It's there just outside the window," said the grey-haired Chinese suggesting the rumbling passenger and cargo trains departing from and arriving at the Dar es Salaam station.

"I'm more than willing and ready to come back working with it, should I be called upon."

Source: Xinhua