Despite the long dry season and the complete lack of rain since last time (whenever that was) many of the trees here, including the one at the front of our house, are recovering from their winter bareness with a fresh coat of flourishing green. We have watched a couple of weaver birds building nests in other trees nearby, and greatly admired their neat craftsmanship (craftsbirdship?) Unfortunately the next time we looked the nests had disappeared, presumably having fallen off the twigs for lack of superglue. Such a pity after all that work and skill, but possibly these are learners of the art as yet – unless these are intended to be mobile homes and are somehow transported elsewhere when we are not looking.
News from the garden, which is a patch 1 metre by 5, plus two pots (the rest is a paved ‘courtyard’) : I have picked the first bush variety bean (note the singular)– and we’ve eaten the first baby spinach leaves mixed in a salad. The tomato plants are bearing flowers and the large brassicas are putting out big leaves for cooking later on. I’ve discovered that chrysanths planted outside shrivel in the heat here, which has been going up to 37.5 deg C some afternoons, but marigolds thrive so we’ve just bought a few more of those. So far we haven’t needed to use the aircon as the house is sideways on to the main direction of the sun, and feels cool when we enter, even though indoors gets up to about 28 deg.
The two-mornings-a-week exercise group formed when I asked a few people if they wanted to join me, is going well. But so far only one man and two women have made it to the evening session, and the second week nobody had turned up by about 10 minutes after the starting time, so I abandoned it. So the evenings have a doubtful future but I’ll give it one more try.
Andy: Last week we enjoyed a brief 2 day visit from our son Rob, who had some work in Johannesburg and took the chance to fly up to Gaborone. Fortunately the airport is only 10 minutes from our house so a lot easier to meet visitors here than in Dodoma which involved the 8 hour drive each way to Dar es Salaam. I did try to take some time off work but it turned out to be a time when I was in particular demand and the phone hardly stopped.
Anyway, we enjoyed a visit to the little local game reserve on the edge of the city. In one hour we saw a fair supply of antelope, ostriches, zebra, warthogs and monkeys. We also had an impromptu picnic in the assigned parking area, and were surprised to learn from the large notice there that failure to pay the extra 60p picnic fee (presumably to pay for the bins to be emptied) could result in 2 years imprisonment. An interesting variation on the idea of making the punishment fit the crime.
Last week we had two unfortunate cases of mercy flights being requested too late for the patient’s life to be saved. In the first instance we got the sad news when the plane had flown about one hour of a two hour flight and were able to advise the pilot to turn back. In the second case the news came through just as the plane landed at the pick-up point. Both of those were daytime flights but to complete our run of unsuccessful sorties we then had a middle-of-the-night flight to an airport two hours away, where the patient was still surviving but plane was unable to land. This was because the official who was needed to open the airport and turn the runway lights on had switched his phone to ‘silent’ (for a meeting earlier in the evening) and couldn’t be contacted. The plane had to divert to another airport, and by that time the pilots’ duty time was up so another operator had to collect the patient the next morning. It remains to be seen whether we can get any compensation for the losses incurred in that instance.
