Tonight, 14th January 2015, two, or maybe three, mosquitoes watched an episode of Lewis in which a very rich man confined to a wheelchair was found to be responsible for the death of his wife’s mother who was a prostitute, not the wife, the mother.
The mosquitoes whined about the plot, and I gave them a shot of stuff in a brightly coloured aerosol which smells like cauterising fluid.
They stopped whining.
Our water supply has been problematic. There is a large one and a half tonne tank of water on a pedestal that is supposed to be filled by a pump that resides somewhere near the generator, at the head of a borehole. The pump had lost its grunt, and the school administrator has had someone dig a trench to find the pipework for this, in the ‘shamba’ or garden where those lovely bananas are ripening and from which we have a paw-paw, or papaya, for our dessert this evening.
The roots of a cactus (I believe) were found to have strangled the pipe.
Agnes is cooking supper. She comes in every day to clean out the dust and wash the clothes.
The dust is prevalent. When it first rained last week, quite heavily but briefly, on going out to leave a bucket to fill with rain water, the ground was already dry, scatter with the marks of raindrops.
The dust is from a sand which is mostly a sort of quartz type grain, some big, but most of it small, without the gentler profile of beach sand: a bit grittier. If you have sandals that are worn at the point where they hinge most, sand will gather in that patch and help to keep the skin of your feet tender. Which is why I’m wearing shoes today.
Constant power outages since last Wednesday 6th afternoon, mostly because an articulated lorry, foolish enough to brave these roads, had approached the corner a little too loosely and taken out the bottom of the four power cables that hang slack across the road outside the hospital. It turned out that this was the school’s supply cable, and the event took place not long after the beginning of school. The cottage we stay in has a secondary system of solar charged lights, with a dedicated electronic thingie and a battery. It looks quite Maplin, but is very effective.
We listen to the BBC World Service when the power is down. It reminds me of childhood when we listened to Lourenço Marques Radio on shortwave in the 49 metre band so that we could hear Buddy Holly and Elvis. The signal would fade in and out according to the sunspots and we would maybe practise a bit of jive.
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