Happy Christmas and New Year

I trust you all had a happy Christmas and New Year. We have had a good few days however they were very different to what we are used to. The culture here carried on as normal as Christmas isn't celebrated here. We have continued to settle in and have had many adventures such as taking a few thousand litres of water in a trailer to some friends the other side of town as the local pump was broken. I wish I had some photos as this was another great experience especially when the empty 2000 litre tank fell out of the trailer at full speed along the road!

We have good news regarding the project, the Memorandum Of Understanding between us and the college we are partnering with has been signed. (This took 1 year!) So we plan to start on the building work soon, this is very exciting and I am looking forward to being involved with some of the building work which will be a bit different than in England - No machines, no pointless paperwork, no safety!

This my language helper/gardener/day guard, Im not sure what his job is really but it is great to have a friend that I can talk to and help me with the language. Here he has just climbed our coconut tree so we could drink the fresh coconut juice! In our garden we also have bananas, passion fruit, papya, sugar cane, lemon grass, advocado, and more which I dont know what they are.

Roast dinner on Christmas eve with Alex and Julie. Windows were shut and air conditioning was put on all day and by the evening it felt a little cool which felt a little bit like an English Christmas. (Although I guess the first Christmas was probably hot without any snow)

Christmas day on the beach, with Paulas home made mince pies.

Christmas Dinner - Not bad. All the trimmings such as stuffing and bread sauce all made from scratch by my amazing wife. (You cant just get packets of stuff like that)

Team Girls - Roxanne, Paula, Julie, Doro. Kids - Annikah, Analie, Romy, Nasia

This was Boxing day with the team, Its good to have our team

leader (Hans) and his family back on the Island

And the boys with the meat - Jason, Alex, Hans, Me

New Year
This was spent on the best beach on the island, which was amazing beautuful white
sandy beach, swimming under the stars, nice food etc.

Looking into the year ahead, January will be a busy month for us and will bring a bit more structure to our days as we start language school on Monday. I am again looking forward to this as we want to learn the language quickly and so far we have just learnt a lot of vocab so would be good to understand some of the grammar.