19th October 2011

We have now employed someone to do the cooking and cleaning and I think this will make life a great deal easier, not just because it will save us a huge amount of time, but also because she knows how the various systems here work. It seems that the household rubbish has to be emptied in a hole in the garden (we all appear to have our own personal rubbish holes) and then this has to be burnt. So I am sitting at my desk enjoying the waft of burning rubbish. The other real advantage is that she also does the shopping. Yes, I know there’s not a great deal to choose from but she gets a much better price for things that we do and also knows where we can find things. Shops aren’t shops in the same way as in the UK. Here, there is a small dark opening in a crooked mud and hay walled building that is the entrance to the ‘shop’. So you have to either know what is being sold or you have to go to every doorway and see if you can spot the item that you want to buy. Since most things seem to be ‘out the back’ it is really quite hard to know what is on offer. Indeed, when I went to the shops with Makaabee yesterday she took me into a meat shop, where behind the counter was what looked like beef hanging amongst the hundreds of flies. Here we bought 4 bottles of beer.

So for lunch today, Makaabee made us a casserole of mixed beans from the market and some cabbage with green beans and onions. We had this with a lovely bread roll that she made yesterday. There’s no waste of food here, so anything not eaten at one meal gets heated up for the next one. A great bonus is the fact that this is a big coffee growing area and we buy fresh coffee beans to roast and then grind. It’s often better to have the coffee black, although you do get used to the powdered milk, even if it is very expensive.

Hmmm, after eating ALL of the mangos off of the tree, this delightlful chap and his hairy friends departed from our veranda, looking for bananas in our trees.