Cheese and wine

4^th December

 

Okay. Apologies for not posting yesterday. The simple truth was that all of yesterday was spent in one of three positions. 1 – lying down in bed. 2 – sitting on the toilet. 3 – kneeling down in front of the toilet. Yes it has finally come around and got me. The good Doctor has diagnosed it as viral gastroenteritis, to you and me it is plain old D&V. So yeah yesterday was fun. I am still off work today but having managed 6 chips and a piece of bread at dinner yesterday I have moved on to the heady heights of toast today. Checkazee me! I won’t be posting any photos of yesterday you’ll be glad to know.

 

2^nd December

 

Another one bites the dust. This week saw the last remaining volunteer leave the construction department. I am on my own in that office now, well the only mzungu, the others work at the children centre. It was sad as Malcolm has put a lot of effort into the projects and will be missed. So on Tuesday we went out for a leaving meal to a very nice pub called the Village Green where we sat outside in the evening heat and eat and drank. Then on Thursday night one of the expats who he had helped invited us round for dinner, where the starter was a cheese course. Now you may think this strange, but let me tell you good cheese, I mean proper cheese is hard to come by out here and expensive. Man was that a treat for us!

 

 

Saturday we had another braai for one of our friends here. Some twenty or so Malawians descended on us for beef  burgers and chicken kebabs.

Pam also managed to retrieve from the post office her birthday parcel from our friend lisa in the UK. It has only taken two and a half months and the woman in the post office asked why we had taken so long to collect it! We only found out that day but it had been in the post office for 10. The cheek of it. But due to the magazines we are all up to date with the gossip as it was two months ago!

 

Two more skype firsts for us. My brother, Simon and his wife Alison and their gorgeous little boy Sebastian tuned in for a chat. He has grown so much since we left it is untrue. And then Pam’s Dad and Helen called us Sunday to tells all about planting garlic and the hazards of an untidy garage.

 

Christmas has come. We went to a carol concert on Sunday by the Blantyre Musical Society. Some very lovely singing, amazing harmonies, and some unbelievable high notes hit, but enough about my participation! No seriously they were very good and lovely. The orchestra was a little bit more hit and miss, mostly hit. The young musicians were, well they were very enthusiastic and energetic.

We have even put up our Christmas tree. Yes it is a baobab and yes some of the decorations are coke bottle tops. I only hope that the Royal Mail forwarding service includes telling Santa where to go too...ho ho ho.

 

 

One of the funniest things to happen is an incident with Pam. So for a bit of context because people don’t have cars here they wave at you to stop for them to give them a lift somewhere. If you have a very big truck you can get up to, oh I’d say around 200 Malawians in the back of one, well at least they think so. So when Pam stopped at the top of our road to plug the iPod in she couldn’t really blame the guy who jumped in next to her for thinking she had stopped for him. He asked her was she was going to Blantyre, to which she replied ‘er yeah sure,’ and gave the man a lift!

 

We have also invented the new game of flip flop golf. It is a very simple game. Select a hole, we used the porch of the main house. Choose the boundaries of the fairway, trees and paths are usually good. Then see how many ‘wangs’ technical term here please, it takes to kick your flip flops onto the hole. I won by the way, 20 strokes to Pam’s 21, but the bigger issue was the 6 year old Yammie who didn’t fully understand the game or have total control over his pink trainers. We had to spend the next 30 minutes and two guards combing the garden in the dark to find one of his shoes.

 

Here's a big moth.

 

Oh I am a genius as well! So our milk keeps going off because we only really use it for Pam’s tea. What a problem, there must be a solution I hear you cry..........Well there is! Milk cubes. Yes you pour the milk into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then when Pam wants a cup of tea badda bing.

 

STATMAN

 

Hours this week without water – 24 hours

Hours this week without power – 32 hours

Books read so far – 21 (between the pair of us)

Colour of the pool – brown see item number two ( the filter pump ain’t work)

Number of flying ants in the lounge – 8

Number of flying ants killed by a swot wielding pam – 8 (African flying ants mind you, I reckon their wings could break your arm!)

Number of milk cubes required for the perfect cup of tea – 2