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7 quick takes
- Good morning! How are you? How are you holding out? Things
are good here. It’s wet, but not as wet as can be expected from February, and
very humid. Hartmut is working hard, the girls are writing a book and I take this
gap to write a new blog.
- One of the first things we did this morning was going to the
beach. We wanted to know if the waves were high because from our house they
sounded loud and dangerous. Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as we expected because
tomorrow the girls and I are going to take the ferry to take it to its southernmost
harbour. Hartmut’s current project is coming to an end and the next one that’s
coming up is a little more South which means that we have to move. The girls
and I are going to explore the area where we plan to move, and hopefully we’ll
find a house that we can make our home. Exciting things!
- I’m not the only person in our house who enjoys writing.
Lately, the girls spend long hours creating books. Sometimes whey write their
own stories, but my favourite books are the ones that they work on together.
It’s beautiful to see how they come up with characters, discuss a story line,
divide the tasks and work together to create a book that fills them with pride.
They draw, write, arrange pages, alter story lines and throw away the ones that
don’t fit. It’s a real team effort. The last step is the funniest. They will
line up all the pages in the right order before they stick the book together.
Their latest page turner had 44 pages, so you can imagine that the entire floor
was covered it papers. Apparently it’s a series and while I am writing this,
they are discussing what number 2 and 3 will be about. Number 2 will be called ‘why
the winter lasted forever…’ and with a title like that, it has to be good ;-)
- If I switch on the geyser, I can’t switch on the oven. And
when the oven is on together with a light in the kitchen, I better switch of
the fridge or else the system fails. It’s not like we have ever had a
completely stable electricity situation but the last weeks it’s been terrible.
Two weeks ago it stopped working and after a week of us calling several
times every day (‘Yes ma’am, we’ll come ma’am’, but they never did) and using
way too much fuel for the generator, we connected all the extension leads we
could find, bought some extra cable because it still wasn’t long enough, covered
all the connections with plastic bags, and now we have a connection
between our landlord’s house and ours. It works. It’s amazing! As long as I am
ok with the fact that the lights dim a little when I switch on the water boiler
and as long as I don’t forget that I can’t cook and bake at the same time because that's too much for our system.
- ‘Would you want to take care of a hedgehog?’ Out of all the
unusual questions that Hartmut has asked me, this was probably one of the most
unexpected ones. They had found a baby hedgehog on his site. The mother was
nowhere to be found and a building site with many people and big machines isn’t
exactly a safe place for a lost baby hedgehog, so they gave it to Hartmut. The
girls and I prepared a house, looked up with hedgehogs eat and did everything
we could to get ready before Hartmut came home with the cutest thing we had
ever seen. But the hedgehog was small and weak. He did not want to eat, so we
had to feed him with a syringe. He could not keep himself warm, and I ended
up carrying him skin to skin on my chest, like you do with a premature newborn,
to keep him warm. A vet that I asked for help told me that he was probably already sick, because otherwise he would still be with his mother. We tried everything we could but all of that did not help and
after a few days he died. We buried him on our growing graveyard of chicks that were too weak and ducks that drowned. The lessons from nature are rich but not always easy.
- While we took care of the hedgehog, we learned lots about
them. We now know what they eat, how they live and how they take care of their
babies. We learned about the different kinds and how big they can get. The gardeners taught us his Chichewa name
(chisoni) but also that it is used to make medicine by the traditional healers.
When people find a hedgehog, they will catch it and sell it to the traditional
healers. A few days after the first one, they found another baby hedgehog on Hartmut's site. They
put it in a box and wanted to bring it to us so that we could take care of it. When they wanted to get the box, they found out that it was stolen. We can’t
think of any noble reasons to steal a hedgehog, but we assume that this baby
found its end in the hands of a healer who was going to turn him into medicine
that can’t treat anything. It’s the sad fate for many animals. It’s not only
hedgehogs but also porcupines, pangolins and even rhinos are killed for their
presumed healing powers that based on beliefs, rather than science.
- The girls have agreed on the storyline and are now happily
drawing and writing on their new book. Now and then I need to tell them
how a word is spelled or listen to a joke they came up with. It will probably
keep them busy for the rest of the morning and I think that’s great because I can’t
imagine a better learning experience than one that is fuelled by intrinsic
motivation. I am going to cook for tonight and pack our bags for tomorrow. Take care and find something to be grateful for! (really, do it,
it’s easy to forget about the good things when the world seems gloomy and
without perspective.) Happy new week!
