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!