Cats, dogs and guinea fowl.

The cats here roam day and night, eating insect and lizards and tiny rodents. They are skinny and swaybacked and have nothing of the complacent indifference of a domesticated cat.

They have a dim light of survival in their eyes that are too dark to reflect the beautiful stars.

At night they meet and fight among themselves, their thin bones scraping at each other with claws and ugly yells and howls and teeth.

The guinea fowl wander all day. They make a noise like a rusty jack lifting a bus, harsh and metallic. The people take their eggs and give them to the hens to hatch. They have heads like turkeys. Guinea fowl are black and white like hounds’ tooth cloth.

The dogs are black or tan, their tails curl a little over their backs. They seem all to be of the same mould apart from the colour, and are lean and fit except for the ones who have mange or distemper. Sometimes they lie in the shade while the fleas are quiet, or they flicker along the roads and paths with a sense of purpose, or prowl the market place near the meat stall looking for scraps.

On the dry sandy road with the deep puddle opposite the school, a small hen with four chicks stops at the side of the road. She waits. When the road is clear she runs, and the chicks follow, all five running across to the shelter of the fence on the other side.

A motorcycle comes by.

Three mango sellers sit by the roadside, talking. They have picked green mangoes. All fruit ripens here.

The oranges are green like wild oranges, with patches of orange. The bananas grow deep green and ripen on the bush. A banana doesn’t grow on a tree, because it isn’t  member of the family of trees. Who cares? It looks like a tree, you can make a waterproof roof with the leaves, and if it isn’t a tree, what on earth is a paw-paw? A long, emaciated stalk with a bad haircut at the top, and little nodules of wonderful fruits underneath.

The roosters, not regulated by an electronic signal from Rugby or Frankfurt, begin crowing at around 4.30am, before the muezzin’s first call of the day. Sunrise is usually around 6am. The sun rises very quickly. It hangs around heating up the ground until about 6pm, when it sets very quickly.

The village is busy from 5am or earlier.

On the sandy street in the square are the buses, the budda-budda bikes, the water seller, the charcoal seller, and the little shops that sell everything, make all the clothes, make the livings.

The water seller has a tricycle with the back platform loaded with ten litre plastic bottles of water; frayed and worn plastic, discoloured by use and ultra violet. A man loads long timbers onto his motorbike. There is music already.

The scene is simple, the gritted street drying in slight breeze and the new sun. There are butterflies everywhere.

TV with mosquitoes

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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Meanwhile, here's a piece of artwork that you will love for its relentlessly scary mis-en-scene.

Power outages

In the office. The fan isn'g going round because there's a power cut.

Power outage - six or seven times since last Wednesday and it's Monday again. Most outages around six or seven hours. The internet copes with near 50kb/s. I've taken a week to download a printer driver, but it's corrupted. So maybe next week.
It rained last night, from about 1am until about 1pm today, without stopping. No breezy showers, breaks in the sky. Rain, steady, wet, moderately warm and saturating. creating puddles.

That gorgeous green open land, palm trees and baobabs. Heat
like a frying pan.

Saturday was a big party. The morning started with student events, and the afternoon went on with a bit of a rest. The evening's highlight was a team competing to drink a tall bottle of Coke and then blow up a balloon until it burst. The music was outstanding, and it was the first beer for a week. Virtuous? Yes, naturally.
Great butterflies here. Flocks that flutter around you and follow each other.
Will go to the village and buy a decent chip for the dongle. Maybe we'll be able to download something.