7 quick takes...

The girls in the village school. It's where we have started to go to church.

1. Good morning!  Hartmut left early for site, Sophie and Doris are playing a game that I don’t understand (what’s new), I don’t have to cook because we are going out for supper with Hartmut’s colleagues and lunch is sorted with yesterday’s left overs (pizza and salad!).  So it means that it’s a perfect moment to write my quick takes.
2. She stares in the distance; seemingly unable to move. We have tried to give her food but she cannot eat. How do we even expect her to, now that her best friends have disappeared? The nights are the worst. Maybe sleep would give some comfort but she cannot sleep. She refuses to go to her room but stays outside, on the lookout for something that might never happen….yup, I just wrote that. About a duck. I wrote last week that we swapped big ducks for ducklings and that the remaining big mama duck seemed to be a bit sad. I would have never expected that ducks have such big feelings but she would hardly eat, she wouldn’t walk around and every night she would just stand on the roof of her house. We started to be scared that she would die of a broken heart so we decided to buy one of our other ducks back. We probably paid the highest price anyone had ever paid for a duck in our village because the people saw how badly we wanted it back (I am sure the village had a good laugh about those silly mzungus) but as soon as mama duck saw her friend they did a type of mating dance and started to move around again. She is finally acting like a normal duck again and we all learned a little more about animals. This week we added some more animals to our farm as one of the stewards on the Ilala had promised us some pigeons. He would only give them if we had a suitable house for them so after getting that together we sent him a picture and on Friday two pairs of pigeons arrived on the ferry.
3. Sophie has been an enthusiastic environmental activist. For two weeks in a row she has been baking and selling muffins and although she sold out, she didn’t make that much money for wwf. Fortunately we shared the story in the Netherlands and with that she raised almost 250 euros for the sea turtles. How cool! It doesn’t seem like she is running out of energy soon because now she is planning a ‘plastic party’. Next Friday she wants to invite the kids from the neighbourhood and together we will read a book about the importance of keeping the lake clean (it’s ‘Chimmy the Chambo’, a really nice locally written book). She has planned that after  that we will pick up trash and make a fish-mosaic from the trash we find (a fish because they will live better lives if we don’t litter the lake) and then we will eat popcorn (first she wanted lollypops but that gives too much plastic waste). I love this girl!
4. At school we are still talking about space. If it was up to me, we would have moved on to the next theme. I have learned everything that I want to know about space in the past weeks. But my astronauts in the making say they haven’t. They still have many questions, many more things they want to know. So space theme it will be, for the next lightyear or so.
5. From the end of this week it will be just the girls and me for over a week. Hartmut is going to China for work and I cannot deny that I am a tiny bit jealous. I have always been fascinated by the country and would love to experience it for myself. Oh well, his trip is not going to be a touristy one as it is jam packed with factory acceptance tests (where they check if the factory made what they wanted them to make before shipping it all to Malawi). Here we will make the most of it which probably means daily baking sessions, lots of play dough and crafts, lots of book readings and sharing a bed at night with the three of us because we don’t like sleeping alone. And we will send Hartmut a shopping list because learning Chinese cooking is one of the goals I set for myself but it’s hard to get the ingredients here.
6. Baking these days feels like gambling. Not because I am not sure whether my recipe will work out but because the electricity situation is very unstable. I have had perfectly risen bread that I could not bake because without power the oven would not work. I have had a cake that was a lot paler than I would have liked it to be because the electricity stopped mid-baking.  I left it in and just hoped that the residual heat would do the trick. It did. Sort of. Malawi has a terrible power shortage and there used to be a load-shedding schedule but right now they seem to be more and more unpredictable. The only thing we can predict is that it’s usually out for at least six hours once it’s gone.. great!
7. Time to leave this laptop and talk about space ships. From the looks of it, it will be a rather normal week without any spectacular plans. That might change though, things always change here which is probably why I like living here. Before we start school I have to take care of our animals. Now that there are nine of them, it’s a job I actually need to make time for. But I don’t mind. There is something nice and peaceful about tending to their needs. Have a great week!

We made 'planets' from wool.

You make a big ball that you dunk in hot water. Then you roll it between your hands until it's a tight small ball (don't take this as a tutorial though, this is the simplified explanation.)

Our universe!

Someone is loving our new ducklings.