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Published: October 6th 2008
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It’s 5:30 in the morning. I seem to be waking up with the dawn every day. Although it means I’m tired later on; I love this time of day. The morning light is different again, it is cool and there is often a gentle breeze and sometimes quite a strong one. The birds start signing and in the distance children are playing as the area around us slowly wakes to the day; cockerels crow and there is a certain peace and quiet before the rest of the house wakes up. The house has been provided by the Zomba Mental Hospital; and as the pictures show it was pretty Spartan when we first moved in and we have had to spend more than we expected to buy the basics. A psychiatrist working at the university college medical school in Blantyre, about an hour away, comes to stay once a week for overnight and we currently have a consultant psychiatrist from Cardiff staying for a month. So on Tuesday mornings the house feels like Clapham junction. Especially since Rob brings his overhead projector and on Monday nights we have introduced Cinema Matawli, when several others volunteers come and we watch a movie together
leaving a certain amount of devastation behind them.
Negotiating the house share is taking some time and there are some teething troubles as we negotiate each others preferences for our way of living. The intermittent water has been very waring; currently the water is on but there is nothing coming from the hot taps and we haven’t yet worked out what is causing those problems. We have largely managed to sort out the electrics, although our living room and dining room lights still don’t work and we have had to change all the plugs on most of our appliances. Having found many of the plugs we originally bought were cheap and of poor quality which means that they have overheated and melted, but we have now mostly changed them to UK standard originals. The multiple adapters which for some reason I seem to call ‘gang planks’ (and the house has now adopted my term) were wired incorrectly and that caused them both to literally melt and burn through the wires. We have been forced to stop using them and have resigned ourselves to using one appliance at any one time which is slightly frustrating since there is only one
socket in each room.
I find that generally the essential stuff of life requires more energy than in the developed world. We need to filter our water and so someone (generally me) has to keep the water filter topped up. Recently with the intermittent water supply we have also had to make sure that we have a sufficient supply of filtered water for coking and drinking and that we are filling buckets so that we can wash or wash up. Buying food requires a visit to several shops and market stalls and then a long and hot trek back home; which of course feels longer and hotter when you are carrying the weight of your provisions. There are small minibuses which fill up as you wait and take us 10 minutes drive up the road from Zomba town centre to the Matawali junction and then it is about 10-15 minutes walk down the road to the house. If scraps of food are left on unwashed plates or in the sink we have an army of small ants marching which appears as if from nowhere. As yet, modelling washing up has not resulted in all of my house mates making this
Chimanwale Girls
Chimanwale is the vilage immiedately behind our house connection. Lonnie, who comes two mornings a week to clean and do our washing and ironing is a godsend, especially since there is a fly which lays its eggs in damp washing and so everything needs to be ironed before wearing again.
When we first arrived we wondered what to do with our rubbish and discovered that of course there is no waste management system set up here, or not to any degree. We had wondered what the pit in the back garden with remnants of a fire were, and soon discovered that we have our very own landfill / incinerator to do the job. We are desperately trying to reduce the amount of plastic containers and bags we are forced to bring into the house, since none of us like the idea of burning that kind of waste. We’ve created an organic waste pit and are hoping that it will decay and decompose before we have a rodent problem.
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