whatnot

Hello all
It has been like a train station here with all the comings and goings of guests and staff alike!
Buji and Lyoness went to Lilongwe to see the doctor (all is well) and got back last night and now Jurie and Dominique and Liinu have gone off on a recce of Zambia (just for 3 days) so that Dominique can get her passport stamped for another 3 months and Juire can see whether the gay cyclists would like that route for their next fund-raising adventure and Liinu went just for the ride.
Our islands are both full and have been for ages and it is lovely that so many people have come and gone, all happy and delighted with the experience. I am always rendered speechless when one person out of a hundred has a bit of "constructive advice" for us! (Once it was that we should paint our boat blue and white not green and white! What?) I am not so good at looking thrilled at such nonsense. We had one night on Domwe with the kids and Lyoness and Zoda - which was really lovely and peaceful, even though we had to be back early the next morning.
So all in all, the days are busy with a million small tasks interspersed with endless requests to draw sabre-toothed tigers or speed boats or tintin or nankappa or whatever is obsessing the minds of the six-year-olds and their three-year-old acolytes at the moment. And of course the boat bringing guests from the island and taking them to it and people wafting in with questions and wanting to rent kayaks and whatnot. (A couple came in for a look at what we do - they live in Blantyre - and I said that Mumbo offered a more African experience than many of the lodges on the beach, and they said, "Oh no! That doesn't sound our sort of thing at all!" I was astonished! They have chosen to live in Africa, what sort of thing is their thing???? Pretending they're in England I suppose, though Africa is pretty insistent so I am not sure how they manage to ignore all its horrors and beauties...)
As I write, two huge trucks are starting up outside - overloaded utterly and completely with hundreds of women off to the centenary of the CCAP church in a village quite a way from here. Jurie lends them his truck and driver as a favour to the village. The ladies came to sing for him and Buj and Java last month to thank him (and brought gifts of a huge bowl of freshly picked rice and nsima). They sang beautifully and swayed in time to the song (I am always useless at that sort of thing and get tearful and have to hide!).
In the same vein, we donate money to an informal orphanage in the village, run by a man appropriately called Vision. He runs a vegetable garden on the outskirts and the orphans help him with it and he feeds and clothes 150 of them out of the goodness of his heart. He can't register his orphanage as the chief then siphons off all the money, so he does it all on our donation and one from Liinu every month. He has been wanting me and Pam to see the project for ages and so last week we went. We were a bit late and when we got to the garden a shout and screams of joy went up - we felt like Madonna! There were all the children - aged from around 2 to 9, each with an old pot or bucket they use to water the veges and dressed in these little faded floral frocks (made from a previous donation) or rags and tatters. They sang a song and we looked around the garden (we buy lettuce and tomatoes and brinjals and peppers from them for the islands) and then we went to see where they have supper in Visions back yard - cooked by his wife and her sisters. All so organised - again I got weepy. The children all live with their extended families, but are fed by Vision once a day. Quite amazing. I'll attach a pic.
And we had a filmmaker and her photographer husband come to take pics of Mumbo for Tatler magazine, which, if you aren't a Paperweight bookshop fan like myself you might not know, is a very upper crust British mag. The journos came last month and distinguished themselves by not asking a single question! Not my idea of how a journo should behave, really! Anyway, the photographers were much nicer and loved everything about it and were the sort pf people one would like as friends. Oh and he is taking a series of photos of redheads as he says they are a dying breed. So I offered him Bush, who was very disconcerted. But though he stared long and hard at my dear husband, (Oh they are naked photos too!), he ended up not having enough time and photographed the ancient fig tree instead. I was rather sad - would have loved to see a really beautiful pic of Bush in the nick! I looked the photographer up on the internet and his work is truly beautiful. And his wife has just made a film starring Keira Knightly. Perhaps we will have the rich and famous descending on us soon. Buy the Tatler in December.
Off now to have one square of my beloved black chocolate, which I eak (how do you spell that??) out like the elixir of life itself, and extract Eddie from Lyoness's house (Ben is practicing smiles whilst hanging on my lap!) so I can read them Green Eggs and Ham.
Toodle Pip dears!

another shopping trip to the Tanzanian ladies

Hello all
Sorry so long since the last letter (or is it? You might be well bored with these missives anyway, but they help me to get it all off my chest and also to remember the good things.)
My office is as neat as a pin - Dan stopped work here yesterday and I am on my own here. A bit apprehensive about it, but he was sometimes more of a hindrance anyway as he'd lost his zest for the job. But now Clive and Jurie and I are holding the base camp fort until Joseph the driver can become an extra office person and we can get a new manager in - probably only the end of August. So things are going to be a bit hectic here - glad we had our moment in the tea fields! (Which my dad corrected me about - they are not fields, but plantations, apparently. One must get one's agricultural terms correct!)
We are happily ensconced in our little reed house, which has grown since we stayed last year and is perfectly sized now for our family. Ben and Eddie sleep with their beds together under a huge net and are very happy with that brotherly togetherness. They still watch Tintin every evening and of course now that consumes me with guilt as I think I should be reading to them! So I have now begun an after-lunch reading session to assuage the guilt - I am so determined that they should grow up to be readers. I think Ben will as he had a lot of input in the early years (his first words every morning used to be "Light! Book!"), but Eddie has had such a different time and maybe I need to put more reading time in with him. Mutter, mutter, motherly musings are boring I am sure. Apologies.
I feel very old in Malawi. I am the only mzungu mother and most other mzungus are single and on the party circuit, as one is in one's twenties after all. With my grey locks, demanding offspring and inability to booze, I am a real pooper and outsider. Thank goodness for Pam, our island host, as she is a gal after my own heart - more sensible and not so eager for the mindless drinking binge as others - but she is on the island most of the time.
She and I (and Liinu who is back from Finland) had another great chitenje mission to Lilongwe on Tues and Wed. Those trips are hectic! Four hours in a dusty car and then Shoprite and the wholesale shops for acres of oil and loo roll and other such interesting stuff. Then overnight in a dodgy backpacker joint (thank god for earplugs!) In the morning, it's off to the Tanzanian ladies in the market maze (always struggle to find them in those alleyways jammed with tiny shops selling everything you could need in this country: maize sacks, string, bicycle parts, nail polish, bath sponges, cockroach poison - if one had to make a list of what you can buy there it would be hundreds of pages long!) Then more last minute shopping (the list gets phoned in) and then on to Dedza another two hours drive away to the vegetable market (which turned out to be only an early morning possibility - so no lettuce for the guests' salad!) and to order more plates from the famous pottery there. That is an amazing place - not very creative pottery, but a huge concern and gorgeous old brick buildings and a great restaurant which made us tea and cheesecake - an unheard of luxury here! We got back at 8pm that night - dusty, sticky and absolutely finished! (Have loved my iPod here - just plugged myself in and lay back - had to block my ears to hear anything on the really rutted bits of road, but could still hear the strains..)
Got fabulous chitenjes though - so worth it all, and you won't believe how exciting it is to wander around Shoprite after months of no shops but Monkey Bay (which I haven't managed to get to for a month and am suffering withdrawals from the lack.)
Must trundle off now to feed kids (fish gujons and chips tonight - I never what a gujon was until I got here and still would never be able to cook one myself!)