Settling In

Life is settling into a bit of a routine here that includes freaky footbridges and scorpions etc... Each morning and afternoon the kids have to cross a footbridge that was built after the flooding earlier this year wiped out the original bridge (which was built by the dutch...). Unfortunately they didn’t have their best and brightest working on this footbridge. Instead of the lengths of wood on the edges being on the bottom with the slats laying on top, they lengths are on the top with the slats on the bottom and the nails are hammered in the opposite way they should. So truth be known, at any moment a slat could give way... Yikes... Who knows when the new bridge is going to be done. They are actually making the new one bigger than the old one which will be good. But at the moment only one way of traffic can go over the temporary bridge which is slightly better built than the footbridge.

The other day I asked my pembantu to go to the market. So she did and she had bought some potatoes among other things. As I was putting them in a bowl, I noticed something and so I took a closer look... a scorpion was in the bag. Yikes, I have never in my life seen a scorpion in “the wild”. My pembantu took it outside and killed it for me...

We experience a lot of power outages here. On the base, where we live now, it isn’t so bad as they have a big mother of a generator that they will turn on after 15 minutes of no power. However, the power can be off for hours and hours. When we live in our new house we will have to use our generator which due to a lack of funds isn’t all that big. We will only be able to run our fridge, freezer and a couple fans off it... So we are looking forward to living in our own house, but not looking forward to the lack of power....

The heat here can be pretty intense. We have a thermometer in our kitchen. Actually its an electronic alarm clock that we thought would be nice to have in our bedroom. However, whenever the power comes back on after being off, the clock plays a rather annoying, loud tune so for the time being it is in our kitchen... The temperature in our kitchen usually hovers around 30-32 C. When you are out in the blazing sun it is an oven...

For the rest we are doing well. Enjoying small victories such as finding bell peppers at the grocery store a half hour away, or making beautiful looking buns, or getting test equipment working properly or riding bikes without falling...