Pasaka Njema

As you can see we are a long way from home and is strange not to see family or chocolate Easter eggs at this time of year. There is still lots happening in our lives, such as getting super glue in my eye!

These pictures where taken on Prison Island, which is a nearby island which has a prison built on it but as far as I can tell was never used as a prison but as hospital when the island was used for quarantine.

It now has lots of massive tortoises (apparently a gift from the Seychelles!)

This is where I did my first dive, 10m deep and it hurts your ears

On the last blog entry, I mentioned my part time job of catching rats. Since then we have had to deal with fleas outside and inside the house. Thankfully they've all gone now - this is me spraying chemicals to get rid of them.

And as well as that I found this massive spider in our garden! If you are coming to visit, its not really that bad here.

Building work continues to go well, despite it supposedly being rainy season, rain has not stopped work yet and so we have been able to carry on. This is a recent photo of the workshop area, wall is now at full height and is ready for the roof.

The building still takes up most of my time, but I enjoy it and it is good practice speaking to them in Swahili everyday. This is me making a steel frame for the water tank.

I have also had the opportunity to help local communities by providing water when the local water is not working. This involves taking some tanks (sometimes with the trailer) and taking water from a communal collection area to where it is needed.

I mentioned earlier that Easter is quite different here, similar to Christmas not really celebrated, unlike England where Easter eggs have filled the supermarkets since valentines day or earlier. We took the opportunity to have a Easter celebration and invite our friends for a party. For any special occasion the women dress up and get the traditional henna (or hair dye as they tend to use here because it is cheaper) as Paula did.

We invited a few friends and thought we would try and do it according to the local culture. We told people to come at 4.00pm on Saturday. Our first guests turned up at 5.40pm - I guess that is local culture! The women turned up in their Buibui's, (black gowns with head coverings - which all women wear when in public), but when they arrived they changed into their western clothes, short skirts, high heels etc!

These are our friends who turned up. We were planning a traditional celebration but they wanted Bob Marley and rap music and wanted to dance! So we improvised. They asked us to tell them a story which is good because we had planned on that and had previously written one in Swahili. We told them the story of the first Passover and how it related to Easter, this seemed to go down well.

I phoned another of my friends who I had invited to see if he was coming. He then came after telling me that I had told him Sunday not Saturday. This is the problem of not knowing the language that well!

At the party I told this guy that I had a motorbike licence but had never driven one so he took me out, jumping on the back and off we went. It wasn't even his bike!

Meanwhile the girls made the most of the car and had their photo's in front of it!

Easter Sunday we invited the rest of the team around for a team celebration, we sang some songs, read the Easter story, ate left overs from the previous day and the children even had an Easter egg hunt in our garden.