British teacher leaves home for life with African tribesman

A British teacher is giving up her life in Southampton to live in a hut in a remote African village, after falling in love with a tribal elder.

Carole Woolgar, 51, said she immediately fell for Amri Shimata, a Porgoro tribal elder, when she visited Tanzania in 2003.

Having visited Shimata regularly over the past five years, Woolgar is set to swap her comfortable home for a tin-roof hut and no electricity or running water. The village's only lavatory is a "long drop", which is nothing more than a hole in the ground, and all the cooking is done on an open fire or a charcoal stove.

She said: "Since meeting Amri for the first time I have been back to the village two or three times a year - and our romance just blossomed. It had just become harder and harder to say goodbye to Amri when I came to leave so I decided I had to do something. I have no kids to worry about so that made the decision easier."

Miss Woolgar, who has never been married, has been taking lessons in Swahili so she can fit in with the close-knit community, but says the hardest thing will be giving up her "creature comforts". She said: "The village is tiny but the people are so friendly. They have absolutely nothing - you go to a house and people are sleeping on an old mat with a few plastic plates and cups to eat and drink from. They get up as soon as it is light, work in the fields and then go to sleep when it gets dark - but they are so, so welcoming. The thing I'm going to miss the most is my washing machine. The women have to walk to fetch water in buckets and then wash everything by hand. I have been trying to learn Swahili but luckily Amri speaks very good English - he even beats me at Scrabble when we play. He's a very intelligent man."