Have you told them about?

We have now been working here for 10 weeks. I can't work out whether I think it's been a long 10 weeks or a short 10 weeks. All I know is that we have 3.5 months left to go.

In the time that we've been here I've noticed us slowly getting used to the differences between here and home, to the point that I don't really notice them. If you had asked me directly if I was missing things from the blog then I probably could think of a few things but not many. However, I would have been wrong - Abraham pointed it out.

Last week he said to me - I suppose you've told everyone at home about this and that and the other. And I realised that I hadn't, so I thought I'd do that now.

The linking factor in all of this is maintenance and the maintenance department.

When we moved into Katho 2 we noticed that the light fitting in the bedroom was a little dodgy but decided to ignore it. In the living area there was no light fitting but one of the visiting groups had a spare one and I wired that in myself - this, I thought, would probably be faster than waiting for someone else to come. A couple of weeks in we had a night with no power - so we sat in the dark. The following night all the lights were working except the bedroom lamp. Geoff grabbed the metal light shade and tilted the light up to see what the problem was. There was a massive bang, a spark, and darkness. The fuse box, it transpires, is next door so there was no hope of fixing it that evening as Hamish was asleep.

When Hamish awoke he discovered that he had no lights and that the fuse wouldn't go back properly! So we reported the fault in the morning. For some reason Hamish judged this not to be 'urgent' on the form, which I knew meant it wouldn't be fixed any time soon. Three days later, after multiple trips to the workshop, it was fixed. I knew it was fixed because the electrician decided to leave all the lights on to make the point. Only one small problem - there was no fitting on the bedroom light. I went back to mention it - 'We don't have any in stock, we need to get one'. This left us with a bit of a dilemma - the old one was probably fine, the wiring was just loose and we'd short circuited it (we were lucky that the wire didn't touch the shade or Geoff would have had a trip across the room) so in theory we could just re-wire it. Except that there are two switches and so it wasn't clear whether the light was on or off. For the better part of 3 weeks we waited with no light in the bed area (annoying if you want to read in bed, tuck your mosquito net in properly, generally see what you are doing). This also made the spider incident worse...

When I mentioned the lighting issues I also pointed out that the electric rings on the oven weren't working. Was I sure? Yes, pretty much, because one is actually snapped. They didn't have any in stock but they would ask procurement if they could authorise a purchase from Katete stores. Weeks have passed. The guy in procurement hasn't been asked (I met him in Pharmacy and he said not). The men in the workshop don't know that I have a single spare ring and have managed to get one of the rings to work, they clearly just assume that I don't need to be able to cook! I'm tempted to tell them that I'm going home with them one evening to eat their dinner...

So, when the door handle started to become a bit tricky I didn't see the point of mentioning it to maintenance. I knew the Dutch girls had to no avail. The door is of two thin pieces of ply and the handle has been reattached many times. So many times that around the lock the door is mostly hole. I had learnt a knack for carefully getting the key to turn in the lock and the door to open. Geoff had not. Last week the handle started to become loose and a bit of brute force and ignorance was used to 'fix' it. On Tuesday afternoon I went to leave the room only to discover that the handle was no longer attached to the shaft - so I was locked in, all the more entertaining when you consider that there are bars on all windows so the only way out is the door. I wasn't locked in for long though - Geoff's multitool proved useful for my escape and later I removed both sides of the handle and reattached them. I was pleased with my work, which Geoff has managed to break some of already...

Right back at the beginning I wrote a little bit about what I missed from home [people excluded] and I thought I would go over the list again to see if it has changed at all.

Things I miss

• Washing machine - this is still top of the list by a long way. There is nothing fun about doing laundry by hand and I don't think there ever was! When we get back the washer dryer will be working very hard to try and get the stains and dust out of the clothes we have brought here. And I shall always be grateful that in 3 hours I can have clean dry clothes with minimal effort on my part!
• Electricity - we've stopped talking about the power cuts but they happen nearly every day. Seemingly more so in the week, often at dinner times, and we sit in darkness for 5-10 minutes before the generator kicks in [The Mess is on the generator, the houses are not]. I could never really understand why one of the Kiwis sat with his headtorch on his head all the time until he was first off the mark one night whilst I was still fumbling around my water cup! On Geoff's birthday he had asked specifically for boiled eggs for lunch, I had plenty of time so I sat down to read the news a bit, the second I got up to put the eggs on the power went off! Typical. Thankfully it came back just in time so he wasn't late back to OPD. Then one night we had a semi brown out where the 100W lights became as dim as candles but thankfully the wireless router still worked. The fan was rather pathetic too, which was upsetting given how hot it was!
• Water - Turning on the tap to discover that there's no water is getting a little wearing. There does seem to be some pattern to it - works fine until 7.15am then not good until 9am, but it's not an exact science. The other night when Geoff came back late from operating it was working fine, so he got ready to have his shower, only to discover it had stopped working again. So I headed out to the outside tap round the back of our neighbour's house with a torch tucked under my arm. It's hard to carry our wide laundry basin full of water at the best of times but whilst trying to see where you are putting your feet in the night is much more tricky. And to make the point, on the way out (when the bucket was empty) I had completely missed seeing a frog jumping along the path - thankfully I didn't tread on any snakes!!

Things I don't miss

These will make sense more to people that know me very well.

• My car - I don't miss my car. I love my car dearly but there's no where that I need to drive to here that we can't get to relatively easily without owning a car and anyway, it wouldn't survive very long in this weather! I haven't even really missed driving (probably because the roads appear to be covered with very bad drivers!) but expect I'll be rubbish at it when we get back! Abraham, on hearing that I had a car, decided that I should sell it to him. I went through the logistics in my head - its value, cost of shipping, likelihood of it working out here - to determine it wasn't worth it. Only later did I remember that he's paraplegic and couldn't drive it anyway. He assures me that his brother will drive him around and he keeps asking questions about 'my car'. So now he knows what the fuel costs to Chipata and back would be, that it doesn't have a CD player (something thought to be very backward indeed!), that it's only 2 door etc
• My fish - I'm not missing the fish either. I know that they are in very safe hands at home and I have some surrogate pets here. There's the frog in the kitchen, the little lizard in the bathroom (currently AWOL) and the pair of Skinks in the roof. What more could I want?
• The Northern Line at rush hour.