Fluency, Friends, Fish and Falling Houses

Since our last blog entry we have been busy back at school doing the intermediate course, which, like the beginners was useful but hard work. We now feel like we understand the language and just need to keep practicing and pick up more words.
Building work continues to progress and it actually seems that they work quicker without me. Apparently they prefer Hans giving them them the work because I am too harsh and make them do too much! I think this is a good trait to have when dealing with African minded workers.

Looking down on the classrooms a few days ago and below is the current stage with half of the roof over the workshop area. Many people have been impressed with some of the designs and building techniques we have used and want to use them themselves which is encouraging.

We continue to have the opportunity to meet local people through many different ways such as being invited to a children's birthday party last week. As we don't have any of our own kids we had to borrow some from our team mates who were very happy for us to take them off their hands for a few hours.

This birthday party we went to involved an hour and a half of dancing to some R&B in a small hot room followed by food, cake and presents. Paula was good at the dancing part whilst I though the more culturally appropriate thing for men to do is sit and do nothing.

This past week we have also had friends from our Church in Winchester visit us which has been very nice as they are the first of our friends to come out and they treated us to lots of lovely meals.

I enjoyed this perch and have quite enjoyed fish contrary to what I thought before

we came. This one below I saw in this morning in the fish market, the picture

quality is not great but it's a shark!

Other news is that I think we have a house to live in from July when we move out of our current residence as our team mates will be returning. We are looking forward to finally getting into a place of our own and feeling a bit more settled here. We have not yet signed the contract but will hopefully do in the next week. The house is very nice and an absolute bargain and we are very pleased. It has been recently renovated and the guy seems like he knows what he is doing which is important when you see some of the houses aren't maintained too well. (See below).

These houses just fell down a couple of weeks ago

Finally my niece deserves a mention having broken her leg falling 5cm off of a scooter and now has a ridiculously massive pink plaster cast which goes well with the red wheelchair provided!

Purple chickens

To start off with what is this all about? Purple chickens?

I saw these outside a friends house. Apparently they belong to a neighbour who painted them so they wouldn't be attacked by crows!

We continue to have many adventures such as towing Paula out of the mud (The owners of the car who may view this blog need not be worried, no damage was done). This is the road to our friends house and some helpful people put a load of dirt down just before the rains came to try and level it out... bad idea. The car slid sideways and Paula had to abandon it until I could come and pull her out...

...and it seems that she was not the only one who struggled with the mud caused by the rains. This was the bride turning up for her wedding that I was at and we ended up towing them too.

Both Paula and I have had the opportunity of attending a number of weddings recently which has been a great privilege and opportunity to understand the culture better and we have another one this weekend. We rarely know the people who are getting married, such as the son of a government minister last week, but it seems that having a white person at your wedding is a good thing.

This is Paula and her friend about to head off for a wedding.

Paulas bit:

I was invited to a wedding by one of my local friends. We arrived at the brides family's house where there were people singing and shrieking, playing drums and dancing. I dreaded the moment when I would be told to dance... white people can't really dance you know.

Anyway, it was over without to great a trauma and we watched the bride leave and then headed onto the next venue. All the women were ushered into a house where we sat on the floor and were served with big plates of pilau to share. I asked where the men were and was told that they had already eaten. (Everything is done separately here. The bride and groom don't even see each other until after the wedding!)

We headed to the next house (with about 12 people in the car) where a group of guys did all sorts of frightening acrobatic things, made all the more frightening by the simple fact that this is Africa.

After the performance we headed home without seeing either bride or groom again.

We have had three lads staying with us for the past week or so who are taking time out travelling on their way to South Africa so we put them to work to earn their keep at the site which continues to progress well.

This is one of the guys learning the new skill of welding 6m up.

The guys also helped out with the brick laying with the locals

The walls of the southern side of the site have been completed and awaits installation of the roof. (See Below).

The roof is a little bit tricky without a cherry picker or scaffold towers. They do have a system which they use for scaffolding but I'm not sure it would pass health and safety standards in the UK. This is a video of us putting up the roof with me welding bolts in position whilst lying on top of a ladder and Jason using the local 'scaffold' as his means of support.