perspectives

A bit out of order but this blog is from our trip at Christmas and never got posted!

 

I expect that we all get different things from our road trip. The doc is relaxed, enjoying the open road, adventure and family time away from a busy job. Our eldest (aged 4) was impressed by lions and the waterfall and has spent the hols asking lots of questions but was particularly excited by the child size shopping trollies in the Lusaka branch of Spar where incidentally they also sell green & blacks chocolate! Our youngest finds the travelling more unsettling but has enjoyed having us altogether and has kept up with her big sister the whole trip.

 

And me, I enjoy being away and always pretend to be more adventurous than I really am. I would have been quite happy with a few nights at Ntchisi and some at the lake. Victoria Falls were worth the journey but I do find travelling quite tiring. We think that we drove 3,500 KM (about 8 days driving between 5 and 9 hours per day) I spent the journeys doing entertainment and some navigating and some more entertaining.

this week

I have done six days of my two week solo parenting.

 

We are doing ok. My tolerance levels are not too low, helped by three mornings of school and not too much work so that I can keep on top of everything. On Tuesday we made pink play-dough and paper boats and had another six children playing with us at various points in the afternoon!

 

I have had lots of social invites which is lovely and I have only managed to watch a couple of episodes of Brideshead Revisted. We are going away for the weekend to some friends who live just out of town which will be a nice easy weekend. The doc is busy with meetings and travelling from one end of the country to the other, to fit in visits to family. He gives his paper next week at the conference and also has a long shopping list of essential items!

Mulanje pt1

Three amazing days walking up Mount Mulanje with 2 other mums and a granny!
We had to change our plans at the start as the river was too high to cross
so we took a detour which added one and half hours. The porters suggested a
direct route up to Chisepo Hut, direct was the right word! We started off
gently and then after about five hours we started really climbing, the
contour lines are so close together on the map they have to miss some out!
The photo shows two of our porters coming up the vertical section. The wet
weather and stream coming down the path made this all the more exciting.

There was a huge sense of achievement at the top, but then we were told
there was another one hours walking and it wasn't down. We briefly saw our
destination then we turned a corner and came across a beautiful waterfall
which was refreshing when we paddled through. Our hut was simple but we had
it to ourselves and after a delicious meal of salad and spaghetti bolognaise
we turned in for an early night. A substantial breakfast set us up for the
day (I am always surprised by how much I eat when walking) and we had a
leisurely start.

The porters are amazing they carry most of our kit, leaving us to take our
lunch, waterproofs and water. They know the routes and gave us a hand over
tricky parts. You get to know the porters quite well over a few days and by
the end we all smell the same!

waking up

Three days up Mulanje Mountain - amazing! This was the view we woke to on
Saturday morning. More to follow ...

making it up

Most parenting feels like you’re making it up as you go along. Here when there are less friends with kids at the same stage, I feel like we really do improvise, with few guidelines. This may make us more relaxed but sometimes I feel like I could do with advice or friends to reassure me that my kids are not brats! We’ve had a tough few weeks with our 2 year old, she does it in style often starting and ending the day with tantrums and I don’t want to fight every battle. However, the nice thing about living here is that we do have much more family time. I had a lovely morning with our youngest on Fri, painting and doing jigsaws and we’ve had a quiet weekend doing very little apart from watching the girls play.

sunny day

After two days continuous rain the sky is looking brighter. I have made tremendous progress with my work and had an enjoyable morning with our youngest, who turned on the charm!

 

Life here is very up and down, some aspects are difficult or complicated which means that the little things can appear big. Generally a power cut is just part of life but after a day of getting nothing done it can be so frustrating. Although lots of these things make us take life a bit slower and the only thing to do in a power cut is to open a bottle of wine and eat crisps or if there’s enough battery watch a dvd!

 

 

Another goodbye this afternoon for a friend who is leaving Blantyre to head back to the UK for a few months to have her third child. We will miss them. And here comes the rain, again.

fed up

There is a general feeling of things not going to (our) plan. The doc is preparing for his UK trip, where he is a keynote speaker at a national conference and the star of a short film about tropical haematology, but wants to finish recruiting patients for his study and see them all before he goes. The girls are still recovering from coughs but now have enough energy to annoy each other. The staff are accusing one another of theft and false accusations and I seem to be spending a lot of time managing them. Friends were subject to rather nasty break in and we discovered that our security alarm has not been working for some-time!  I am editing a document that has been so badly written I can’t believe that anyone has been paid to write it! And I am working with my team to a really tight deadline for the exhibition project. And we have lots of lovely social invites and all I want to do is go to bed early and be grumpy!

 

All I really want to do is lie back and take in the view!