Bluu hii ipo mahali pamoja tu

Umesimama kwenye ufuo wa mawe ya kijivu kusini magharibi mwa Jamhuri ya Dominika. Karibu hakuna mchanga hapa. Unageuza mawe kwa mguu wako, kama kila mtu anavyofanya, kisha jiwe moja likakusimamisha. Ni bluu. Halikupakwa rangi, si kioo. Bluu tangu ndani hadi nje.

You are standing on a beach of grey stones in the southwest of the Dominican Republic. There is almost no sand here. You turn the pebbles over with your foot, the way everybody does, and then one of them stops you. It is blue. Not painted, not glass. Blue the whole way through.

Jiwe hilo linaitwa larimar, na kuna mahali pamoja tu duniani ambapo hutoka ardhini: kilima kimoja katika milima juu ya pwani hii. Watu wamekuwa wakitafuta mahali pa pili kwa miaka hamsini na hakuna aliyewahi kupata. Wanaume wanaolichimba hufanya kazi kwa zana za mikono na ndoo zilizofungwa kwa kamba, kwa sababu mtambo ungevunja kitu chenyewe walichokuja kutafuta.

The stone is called larimar, and there is exactly one place on Earth where it comes out of the ground: a single hillside in the mountains above this coast. People have searched for a second one for fifty years and nobody has ever found it. The men who dig it out work with hand tools and buckets on ropes, because a machine would smash the very thing they came for.

Jina hilo si la zamani. Mwaka wa elfu moja mia tisa sabini na nne mtu aitwaye Miguel Méndez alifuata mawe ya bluu juu ya mto hadi alipopata yalipokuwa yakianguka, na akalipa jiwe hilo jina la binti yake Larissa pamoja na neno la Kihispania la bahari. Ukinunua moja siku fulani, litazame rangi yake vizuri. Kadiri bluu inavyozidi kuwa nzito, ndivyo mtu alivyolazimika kwenda mbali zaidi chini ya kilima hicho.

The name is not old. In nineteen seventy four a man called Miguel Méndez followed the blue pebbles up a river until he found where they were falling from, and he named the stone after his daughter Larissa and the Spanish word for the sea. If you ever buy one, look hard at the colour. The deeper the blue, the further down that hill somebody had to go.