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.

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.

More Building

A lot of photos of the building work this time I'm afraid, but this is what I've mainly been up to. It has been a very interesting time and great practice for learning the language although all my vocab is mainly construction terms.

There is also the usual amount of fun stories that have happened such as our hunt for a new beach on saturday. After driving for about an hour supposedly on a road we came to a village that seemed to be the end of the road but we were determined not to get beaten and weaved our way around trees, rocks and houses all with about 300 children following and watching us. Soon we had to abort mission as it was impossible to get through and we obtained a burst tyre for not quite missing one of the rocks.

I wanted to get a photo of the 300 plus kids watching (and probably laughing at) us but as soon as we got the camera they fled like I had pointed a gun at them.

This is the best picture we could get showing some of the kids.

This is a photo taken out of the car window of some of the roadworks that they are doing here. Here they are installing drainage under the main Airport Road.

I would like to draw your attention to some aspects of this photo as an engineer. Firstly note the 'barrier system' between the live traffic and the sheer drop. Also note that this photo was taken about 1 week before the rains which destroy most roads and I think will cause a bit of mayhem to the banks of this excavation. These guys where all wearing safety helmets which is quite impresive but they were all bare foot as well!

So the building work. This has been going well and it is very interesting to see how things are different. For example to make glue they pour petrol on polystyrene and, as this picture shows the hazards are quite different.

This guy is continued with his hammer and chisel for a another week or so.

These are the pillars for the workshop which should give you a bit of an idea of the height. It is useful that Health and Safety is not like that in England and that everyone here knows how to climb a coconut tree.

All five pillars up and straight!

Hans and I 'supervising' the work

Monday morning briefing

Paula getting the hang of laying blocks

This last photo shows another of my pastimes here - catching rats. I have lots more photos but I think some of you would not like to see them.

Thanks Jo for the T-shirt!

New nephew, new house and more building

I thought that there would not be much to say in this blog entry but when I think about it a fair bit has been going on. There has been many stories, such as another running in with a cop, this time I was at fault driving the wrong side of an island however after 20 mins I managed to convince him that he was a nice guy and we were friends and he let me go.

Some very exciting news is that we have another nephew. His name is Eli and was born on the 27th of Feburary and I can't wait to see him.

Jon and Eli

I mentioned last month that we were about to move house. This we did.

This is our new house, familier to some of you as it is our team mates house, Alex and Julie's, as is the pink car we have inheritted which is a blessing in light of our car troubles back in England.

Inside: this is our lounge. Notice the IKEA chairs which are the best chairs on the island - brought from England of course.

And yes, a dog. This also came with the house and has probably been the biggest sacrifice I have made considering my love (or lack of it) for animals - especially dogs. This one is called Pumba and is a little crazy although we are getting used to it. Our previous mlinzi (guard) said that it is better to have a dog than a mlinzi because they won't just sleep all night.

Most of my time this past month has been at the site where progress is happening with the building work.

This picture was taken 10 days ago...

...and this was taken this afternoon.

This is the workshop area which we are building first in the hope that we can get a roof on before the rainy season.

This poor guy has been digging this whole for about 3 days with a hammer and chisel as the ground is mainly rock. It is for the pillars supporting the workshop roof. No steel toe caps-just bare feet!

This is also quite cool, a guy making pretty good quality scaffold boards from a
coconut tree using a chainsaw.

Paula also got her hands dirty with some blockwork which I think she enjoyed.

Today we managed to get some cheddar cheese after about 3 months of searching for some-I originally didn't want to pay £9/kg from the guy down an alley who disappears off somewhere and comes back with a warm soft yellow lump, but after giving up finding some elsewhere I went back only to find the price had gone up and they would only sell me a 2.5kg lump and they didn't actually have any. I eventually got 2.5kg of fairly naff mild cheddar from a shop with a fridge for £22 but am very happy to have it. I don't want to think of the amazing cheese I could get in England for that!

Paula getting to grips with windsurfing

This is our local beach which we can walk to and is very refreshing

after a hot days work on the site.