A new car for Mr and Mrs O

Given our perception of life in Africa being very slow and very laid back, sometimes things can happen with astonishing speed. We often joke that Africans are relaxed about time until you put them behind the wheel of a car or dala dala (mini bus/death trap!) and then suddenly it’s all about ‘time is money!’ This speed with which things can happen has been our recent experience with buying a car here.
After our pre-Christmas experience of being robbed by the man who ‘bought’ our car from us, and nine months of waiting, we know now that we will never see the money from our dear old Landy and actually just need to get on with getting our own vehicle here.
Now bear in mind that there’s no auto trader here. The way it works is that you put the word out that you are looking for a car and they just turn up at your house. Bizarre, but that’s how it is. Well we hadn’t quite gotten to the point of putting the word out, so our team leaders worker/guard decided to take matters into his own hands. We had never spoken to him about our desire to begin the process, he just decided that enough was enough and we should get our act together (plus he will probably get some sort of fee for organising the deal!).
So on Tuesday I headed off into town early to do the shopping and banking and bits and bobs like that. I was just finishing when Rich called to inform me that some men had turned up with a car for us and could I come and have a look at it. So off I went back to inspect the car.
What awaited me was a Honda CRV (silver for all the rest of the girls out there – that was my first question!) in very good condition and way out of our price range. However, after some fierce negotiating the price of the car was reduced to well within our price range and a deal was made. Shocking. Unbelievable. I had not had the slightest thoughts of buying a car when I had woken up that morning, but there you go. That’s how it can be here sometimes and you just have to go with it.
Now we have to go to the cash point every day in order to withdraw the money for the car. No such thing as cheque or bank transfer here. Just cash. So in about two weeks time we should have been able to withdraw enough money and we may once again be car owners.
Our whole car saga over the last few months has taught us a lot about trusting that God is ultimately in control of all these things and that if he wants us to have a car he will provide the car and the means of buying it. We are so thankful for this and so many other ways he has blessed us since arriving on this Island.

Eating my words.

The general rule whilst driving here seems to be, every driver for themselves. This is particularly the case by the market in town where the daytime traffic and driving is unbelievable. Any side of the road will do as long as there is space, there are about a million bicycles, piki piki (scooters) and pedestrians at any one time and there's none of the politeness (ahem....) that we are used to on the roads back home.
I made this point to Rich this morning on our way down into town. I particularly emphasized the 'no give way' rule that seems to operate here. You just don't do it. If you want a chance to join the flow of traffic and get where you are going, you just don't give way because no one will give way to you (plus the fact that the traffic behind you will just go around you anyway so there's normally not much point in the exercise!).... or so I thought. Not half an hour after I had expressed this opinion I was forced to eat my words as a man very kindly let us out of a junction right in the middle of the chaos of traffic next to the market. I doubt it will change our 'every driver for themselves' attitude, but we were grateful to be let out!
(By the way, I told you it wouldn't take long for me to take over the blog...)

Apologies and a nagging wife...

First of all, let me begin by apologising for our slackness in updating our blog recently. We could give all sorts of excuses such as moving house and pants internet connections, but we are basically just slackers when it comes down to it. Sorry.

We do have lots of news and pictures to update the blog with. Some of the smart ones amongst you may have noticed that the usual author of this blog is not writing these words. In an effort not to be a nagging wife, I have instead offered my services in updating the blog occasionally. We shall see how long it takes me to take it over entirely...

Some of you may know that we finally moved into our own place about a week ago. It is so good to finally be able to settle a bit and know that we won’t be moving into another house in a couple of months. This has resulted in us being very busy in trying to get the house equipped and prepared for us to move into. Rich has virtually re-plumbed the whole house as all taps and toilets were dripping (by the way, these were all brand new and had just been installed by a fundi (not sure on the exact translation for this word but it is basically someone who is a ‘skilled’ worker... really??)) and we have given the whole place a good clean out with bleach and hydrochloric acid (pretty much the only cleaning products we can get our hands on here). We feel so blessed to have such a lovely house for us to live in here and God has provided a working fridge-freezer and washing machine which is just brilliant.

Rich under the kitchen sink

Less than a week after we moved into our new place we were visited by some friends from our home church in Winchester. Ed and Alex were on their way to Uganda and thought they would come and visit us and briefly experience some of the delights of this Island on which we live. Needless to say, we quickly got them to work at the school! (Be warned if you intend to come for a visit – you will be put to work!) Alex enjoyed welding on the roof and Ed helped to wire our computer lab, new skills for both of them I believe. Ed also helped Rich with his latest project: building a BBQ in our garden.

Alex using his new welding skills to put the roof up over the workshop area.

Ed helping to wire up the computer lab.

Ed and Rich building a BBQ at our new house.

Rich making a grill for the BBQ.

You will see from the pictures how the building work is progressing. The computer lab is coming on really well and has now had window frames put in, plaster on the walls, wiring put in, a roof and is ready for the floor to be laid next week. It is exciting to see how progress is being made and we are now trying to get to grips with how to go about opening a school and all that involves.

Friday morning chai break in the computer lab.

The walls for the classrooms, reception area and stores are all up to height now and the ceiling is being put in.

We have many exciting things to look forward to over the next couple of months including visits from both sets of parents as well as some friends who are coming to see us. We are so excited about seeing them all and sharing the experience of living in Africa with them all. Plus they have all very kindly offered to bring out supplies of chocolate, teabags and other miscellaneous items that we miss out here!

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.

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.