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7 quick takes
- Good morning! How are you? Did you have a good
weekend? Nice plans for the week? We are fine. Hartmut is at work and the girls
are crafting. They are making ‘the best house ever’ out of cardboard, but I am
not allowed to see what they are doing, so I think I found the perfect gap to
write a blog.
- That ‘house building’ sounds more peaceful than
it is. They desperately want to work together but since they each have unique, but also completely opposite ideas of what ‘the best house ever’ should
look like, they are having a hard time to agree on the exact design. Combine
that with a skill level that doesn’t exactly match expectations and a tension
between ‘Let me do that because I can do it better’ and ‘Why don’t you do
anything and let me do everything alone’ on both sides and I can assure you
that there will be a few outbreaks of crying and less-than-kind-words before
the house is finished. But once we’ll be there, they’ll be very proud of what they
have made, and they’ll have practised a few communication skills on the way, so
I’ll just let them be.
- We woke up to a sunny sky, which is really nice
after a long rainy stretch. Last week’s flooding wasn’t the end, but rather the
beginning, turning the country in a disaster
zone. More reports of flooding, broken houses and washed-away roads came in
every day. Most things can’t be repaired when it is still raining, so a few dry
days are very welcome.
- ‘Life in Malawi’ seems synonymous with ‘try to
live with ants’, and rainy season is always particularly bad. We have
learned over the years that ants do not only like sweet food, or food in general,
but that they can attack anything they like. You can wake up in the morning and find that a
complete ant-army has moved into your bookcase, your backpack, or in a device.
The latter resulted in a broken laptop in our first year here. It may be that
my tolerance for ants has gone down, or that this house is built on an
ant-colony, or perhaps a bit of both, but it seems like here we have reached an
ant-pinnacle. I have had multiple nights
disturbed by ants in my bed. You first try to ignore them until you can’t, and then you have to wake up and deal with them. There are ants on the deodorant, in the living room, in the kitchen. And when you try to deal with them, they’ll just
find new creative places to make your life a little harder.
- It’s not just ants that like to make our home
their home. As soon as it starts raining, the frogs come in too. It doesn’t really
matter how many holes we try to close, they always find a way in. The little
green ones are pretty cute to look at, but I do prefer them outside. The bigger
brownish ones are not cute at all, and especially not in the night, when you
have no idea that they are there, and you get out of bed for a quick visit to
the bathroom, and you step on one of them with your bare foot. I can tell you from
experience that they are definitely not cute in that case.
- And while we worry about frogs, ants and cardboard
houses, Hartmut is working very hard at the second solar farm. Despite the rain
and all the flooding, things are progressing well. They hope to achieve ‘commercial
operation date’ this week, which gives him a few more weeks to make sure everything
runs smoothly before he leaves. I am so proud of his dedication and hard work.
- ‘Project perfect house’ is on a break as the
two contractors decided that it was better if they would not work together for
a little. Contractor one has decided that she wants to do maths and grammar,
while contractor two has moved on to a new Lego project. It’s probably for the
best for the time being. They will find each other again when they are ready. I
wish you a great, and peaceful ;-) week.
