New house, radiators and a witch doctor

As I briefly touched on before we have found ourselves a house to rent which will be something we can make our home whilst we are here. It was the first house we looked at and decided to go for it as it was a decent house in our budget.

This is the outside of our house and what you will immediately notice is the colour scheme. I'm not sure what is going on, to me it looks like and Christmas tree. You can just see the pink colour in the porch which was the colour used to paint all the inside walls, but now has been changed at our urgent request. The local people like bright bold colours, we asked for the owner to put up mosquito nets on the windows which he agreed to but he decided to put up bright green ones.

We have also started the process of buying furniture which can be a total headache, especially as most stuff is second hand and is likely to break in the near future as our team mates all found out. So far we have found some great stuff which is new, packaged and imported from the UK and is about the same price as the 20 year old dirty ones - in the same shop too.

The building of the school continues to progress and as can be seen above, any visitors we have get dragged along to put in a few days work.

Current state of building with gate and classrooms almost built

After our second stint of language school we decided to get off of the Island for a few days (our second time in 7 months) to buy some things for the house and get some good food. We also decided to by a new radiator for the car we are borrowing as it had died and thought that the big city on the mainland would be the best place to find one at a good price. This adventure meant taking the old one with us and driving around with locals to find one. We asked were we could get a second hand one and shortly arrived at a street with lots of half chopped up cars outside and it didn't take long to find some that matched ours. When we enquired about the prices we were totally shocked to find that second hand ones (which have no guarantee that they would work) were twice the price of new ones. When I asked why this was they told me that it was because the second hand one was 'original' i.e. it was originally in the original car! I told them that their logic was ridiculous and ended up getting a brand new genuine one for half the price back on the island.

The other day we also took part in a local village tour. This was because a friend was starting up his own business and wanted some pictures of westerners enjoying themselves on his tour. He also wanted us as we had a camera too. The tour involved seeing how lots of things are made such as rope from coconuts, pots from clay, etc. We also went to meet a local witch doctor, which was pretty weird but interesting to see.

It was quite a good tour though, amongst other things we got to ride on a cow cart.....

....learn to cook local style...

...and then eat local style. We are eating a mixture of rice cooked with a kind of green lentil rolled in our hand and then dipped in a cocount, octopus sauce. It was pretty good.