Half way through

Lucy - Well, it’s Sunday night, Esther is asleep, Hitesh is reading and so it’s now about time for me to catch up a bit with our blog. Things here now kind of feel as if they’re settling into a bit of a routine, which is nice, and a bit weird! We’ve now been in our little house for coming up to 3 weeks and are beginning to feel pretty settled here. At first all the bugs and things were a bit off-putting, but that concern has been reduced considerably since Hitesh installed a wooden baton across the front of both our back and our front door (along the bottom). This has greatly reduced the bugs that can now get into the house in the evening – which I, for one, am very pleased about! Although, as I write this, every few seconds a very small fly drops on me from the ceiling. These are lake flies, they’re tiny, harmless, but there are an awful lot of them! They can fit between the gaps in the mozi screens over the windows and there are thousands of them swarming around the light at the moment.

As I haven’t written for a couple of weeks now this blog will pick up the goings-on for the last 2 weeks. In general life has continued much the same as described in the “African Musings” blog, but here are some of the highlights. Last week after praying about wanting to get to know the locals better the following happened (copied from my diary): –

What a humbling experience. I have just come back from spending about an hour at the neighbours. We sat outside. Most people sitting on the ground, but me on a chair which is the custom for guests. I tried to speak Swahili, they laughed at me. I managed to tell them that I am going to Mwanza tomorrow (our nearest big town), and that Becky has 6 kids – and that was about all! Baseki counted to 10 in English and I did the same in Swahili (but then I did have it written down in front of me!). They then asked me to join them for some food. They came out with a bowl of ugali (an African staple of maize flour and water, resembling a very dense type of bread, but not as tasty). The ugali was in a small pan which was to feed 5 adults and 2 kids. Baseki then cut off about 1/2 of it to give to me!! I got her to cut it in half and then in half again by saying “Kidogo” lots – which means little. They then brought out a bowl and jug and poured out some water for me to wash my hands. Made the Westerner mistake of washing both my hands in the water. They will only ever eat with their right hand (the left is used for ‘dirty’ work) and so therefore will only wash their right hand. They then gave me my own bowl of ugali, brought over a plastic tub to serve as a table for me, and put on it a whole bowl of dagar (small fish) for me to dip my ugali into. There was only really 2 ½ bowls of fish for everyone, and so I ate very little of the fish and gave it back to them. Only once I had got a good way through my food did they begin to eat (after saying grace – to my shame!). The whole experience was so humbling. These people don’t have breakfast and generally eat lunch around 3 o’clock so this was the first meal of the day, after having been working all morning. They have so little and were willing to share so much of it with me. I really couldn’t get over their humility and generosity.

Baseki (far right) and her family

Another amazing thing we’re beginning to learn about our neighbours is their fantastic ability to sing! Three times a week there is choir practice for the local Catholic Church. I have been along a few times now and am blown away by their beautiful singing and fantastic harmonies, all completely unaccompanied. We have asked if we can record them on our video camera. They really want us to, and we have tried but so far failed, due to the different understanding of time that we appear to have. Here the day starts at sunrise, and so does the clock. And so, this means that at 6am is when their day starts and so 7am is 1 o’clock Swahili time. We’re beginning to understand it now but only after turning up yesterday at 3pm to see the choir practise only to discover that the practise had already taken place at 9am! They told us the practice would start at 3 o’clock, which we presumed was 3pm, but was actually 3 o’clock Swahili time, which is 9am. All very confusing!

This week I had the first ‘on-site parent’ pop around for Chai (tea). Her name is Milka and she is from originally Kenya. She speaks brilliant English, and is really nice so I really like talking to her and finding out what I can about life out here. She lived in the house we’re now in for about 4 months before moving to the first completed family house, 3 weeks ago. It was so good to talk to her about her experiences here and it is great learning more about her culture, and also what she has experienced of the Tanzanian culture. The plan is for her to come around every Thursday now. I have also asked Baseki along next week as I think it’ll really help me to be able to get to know Baseki better as Milka can talk to Baseki in Swahili and translate a bit for me.

For those of you who are interested in food (and who wouldn’t be) I thought I’d also include a bit on what we’ve been eating whilst we’ve been in our little house. Generally speaking for breakfast we are having oats and milk… reasonably standard breakfast you might think, but not quite. The oats come with number of added extras, namely small little bugs. Not entirely sure what they are but I managed to fish about 10 out of my bowl this morning before adding the milk… which can put you off your breakfast a little. The milk is the ‘straight from a cow’ type, boiled the night before. It is very nice and pretty creamy so I think we’ll have some adjusting to do when we get back home. Esther loves it too – which is good.

In general for lunch we’ll have rice together with some of the vegetables we get from the market every week – generally tomatoes, onions and peppers, with maybe an egg or two thrown in to make egg fried rice.

I don’t think we’ve ever eaten so much fruit and veg as we are at the moment – which is great! However there are a few extra bits of work involved before we can eat the fruit and veg. Every week when I get back from the market I go through the process of filling the sink with water, adding a few grains of Potassium Permanganate to the water, and putting as much of the fruit and veg as I can fit into the sink. This kills of any bugs/germs which may be present. I leave them to soak for 10-15 minutes then let them dry. I won’t miss doing this when we get back home, but I will miss the fantastic fruit and veg they have here. The highlights are the huge avocados, the very red and very tasty tomatoes, and the gorgeous mangoes, pineapples and watermelon. With the avocados costing about 20p each, and being 3 times the size of the ones at home, and a pineapple costing about 50p I’m going to miss the prices too! We haven’t been eating very much meat though. We finally managed to get our fridge working last week, so haven’t had any means of keeping any meat cool. Though we have had fish once – Tilapia from the Lake.

A week's supply of fruit and veg

Dinner tends to be smaller than lunch and sometimes we’ll just have bread and cheese, with some avocados and tomatoes, followed by some fruit. Although I have also made pancakes a few times, based on an American recipe book, so they are very chunky pancakes – and very nice.

Hitesh – I’ve had another busy week, as we’ve been desperately trying to get the drain field completed, mainly trying to battle against the flooding from the heavy rain. Early Monday morning, we had a massive deluge of rain. When we went to look at the drain field on Monday morning, the trenches resembled a swimming pool. If I had trunks, I could have happily swum lengths as the water was at least a couple of feet deep!

We spent Monday morning pumping the water out, and using the tractor plus plough to dig interception drains and trenches to divert the run off from the hills around the drain filed. By the end of the day, we were able to place the sand bedding for the pipes.

What’s been amazing this week, is how blessed we’ve felt with the work we’ve been doing. We’ve really needed dry weather to get the drain field completed, so we prayed that we’d get a dry spell during the rainy season, and it’s been dry! We did have one very small shower one evening, but that wasn’t a problem. We finished the drain field on Friday, and finished making the pipe connections yesterday. Also, the tractor stopped working on Tuesday. It just would not start. So, we prayed for it, that God would fix it, had a go at starting it, and it started! Haven’t had any problems with it since!

Have also spent some time driving the tractor! Wayne let me have a go to backfill the drain field trench after we’d placed the pipe, covering sand, and the “geotextile” (the cement bags!). It was an interesting experience! I had some problems getting the backfill material into the bucket, and often turned up with only half a bucket full! It looked full when I loaded it, but as I dumped it, it looked a bit pathetic, and took rather a long time to get the trench backfilled! The guys that were spreading the stuff out were often just standing around waiting for me to get more stuff!

Have also spent this week dealing with various bugs. As the man of the house, ridding our humble home of any nasty creepy crawlies has fallen to me. We have met quite an array of God’s creation already, so much so that we’ll be doing a “blog special” on bugs and insects very soon. But one bug I’ve had to deal with this week is a funnel web spider! Lucy found one making its home above the front entrance to our house. I’m not sure how they compare to the Australian variety, but as soon as we saw the funnel web, we thought we’d serve an eviction notice. We have this spray here called “Doom”, and it does what it says on the tin and spell doom for all insects. Doom did the job on the spider.

Funnel web spider

Esther – Harrow everyone! I am fine here in ‘Frica. I like our new house and exploring outside, though mummy and daddy don’t let me go too far. I is liking the fruits here, especially the mangoes and watermelon. They is lovely!

Esther after eating mango

Esther and Kate trying out their new hairstyles!