A (mostly) Waterless Saturday

Today started out like any normal day. The only difference was that I was awake first. Erika had gotten up at 2:30 am to watch the WLC ladies basketball game, so she slept in a bit longer than usual. I was up around 8:30 and just read my book and made some oatmeal. I would have taken a shower right away but alas, no water. The problem still has not been fixed. Anne left a big bucket of water outside our door though, so she said we can use that for showering. We weren’t brave enough to try and assumed the water would get fixed soon. However, I should have realized that this is Africa and who were we kidding? So we’ve had a stinky, lazy Saturday so far. J We’ve alternated between, reading, sunbathing, eating, and watching Seinfeld. We also got a game of Bananagrams in too. This also might be too much information, but this is Africa so why sugar-coat things? Since there’s no water, we haven’t been able to flush the toilets. However, since I experienced water outages quite frequently in my childhood, I remembered some old tricks. I used the water Anne had brought us in the bucket to fill up the tank of the toilet, and then voila, it flushed!

Anne came over around 1:30pm and said the water was back, so hurry and shower! I got right on that and took a nice cold shower. I feel 1,000 times better now! I’ll probably take advantage of the water and do laundry in a little while.

Erika and I also spent a little time trying to think of things we want to do sight-seeing wise. The main issue is trying to coordinate dates with possible rides we can get. We want to do South Luangwa in early May since it’ll be closer to the dry season then. We’re even thinking of taking a little plane and flying right into Mfuwe—which would be so awesome, and very convenient!

In March we want to do Victoria Falls, so we’re trying to coordinate a possible stay at the Hartmanns, who live about an hour away. And then when we have those two weeks off in April we’re thinking taking one of those weeks and going to Malawi. Here’s the difficult part: I know tons of things we could do in Malawi. The Lake, Dedza, Zomba, Mt. Mulanje, and the tea estates, not to mention all the old familiar things in Blantyre like my house, old school, and the town. It’s going to be hard, but we’ll have to prioritize. J

Around 5, we heard some commotion outside, so we went out and saw everyone playing kickball. It was nice to be around people, since we’ve been here by ourselves in the guest house most of the day. We dropped off our schedule at Pastor Phiri’s office and got caught in a pretty hard rain fall. A group of about 6 kids were following us the whole time, so we waited out the rain under some trees and then eventually the chapel porch. We also saw a double rainbow. It was cool because even though it was raining, half the sky was still blue and gorgeous. We took the opportunity to take a few pictures of the kids and just enjoyed spending some time with them.

We had supper—PB&J again and some yoghurt. To really make things exciting, the power went out too. Good thing we can still be online and go on our computers. I hope it comes on again soon because I’ve got a load of laundry that I just put into the dryer.