Wednesday, December 17, 2008

there is no easy way to eat a mango - and stay clean

Fortunately there are zillions of mangoes to keep trying with - with which to keep trying, for the purists :-) They are literally dropping out of trees and are very scrummy. Most people here have gardens but Nikki the Nurse and Fiona are in the converted garage with no garden, therefore no vegetables, no privacy, no phone and therefore no internet (i'm in the hangar at mo) and virtually no furniture!! And as they are never in when the vege seller comes past, if indeed she does, fresh veges don 't feature much!! Hence lots of mangoes and they do raid Justin and George's garden from time to time. Justin is from Shetland via Hamilton and George is from over the border - the Congo. They are both doctors. The established families have very established gardens but i think they tend to forget that the short termers don't! Hopefully tomorrow or Fri we may have a chance to walk to the village and visit the market.

Today I finally met the children - for one reason or another that has taken a couple of days. In the meantime I was very quickly snapped up by Barbara in the office to do some proofreading of the nurses' manual, various minutes etc and print them out. It took ca 3 hours yesterday to transfer the minutes from an antiquated computer that didn't recognise memory sticks - therefore via a 31/2 in floppy - to a laptop in another office that is connected to an elderly printer that periodically sulked! Fortunately there was plenty of entertainment in the form of the 1001 interruptions that make up Barbara's day! I'm still ploughing through the manual - some of the more bizarre instructions include:

The bath water must be changed when it is a)cold or b)dirty......and
When making up the polio vaccine it must not be mixed with other mixtures to form a cocktail !!

The children are delightful - what an amazing life being brought up here. We spent the afternoon making samurai hats and water bombs and reading stories and from tomorrow will do a bit of schoolwork as well - but not too much!!

There's heaps more I could ramble on about but it's dusk and I need to get back to the house before night falls and a mossie or a snake gets me or - more likely - I lose my way!!

1 comment:

Christine said...

Wow, you have arrived!
Great to get the news, keep looking out for those vegies. Glad to hear that you are already being kept busy utilising your talents. Sounds like they will have plenty of work for you. Just remember to take some time out to relax : )