Missive from parts of Africa

A light hearted and sometimes serious look at moving 6000km into a place in Africa: April 2007. Promoted back to South Africa, the missive will continue to track my foray's into deepest Africa as and when I get there.

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Location: Joburg, Africa, South Africa

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Mid Week Blog

And here we have a mid week blog, coming about as I am rather proud of the amount of work I have clicked under my belt so far this week.

So as the lads from Ghana Telkom fix the satellite system (not bad considering the cards popped on the 14th Jan), I can take some time out from been an input clerk to tell all 20 (yes you read right 20!!!) people about the comings and goings of the Africa Refugee.

Since I have come back, the Tarkwa council has had a problem (once again) with their water supply. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have a 5000 liter storage tank for the top house and a 5000 liter tank for the bottom house. Ergo, when the water does not flow, due to the fact there is no-one currently staying in the bottom house, I toddle downstairs for a shower. One three occasions now, our local fire department has filled the tanks for the princely sum of GHC 400.000 (R300). For around 5000 l that’s a fair wack of money. I cannot wait to see the January council water bill and see if it has gone down or not.

Last night was power failure night. Now I must admit the power supply has been very reliable since I have got here, and this is possibly only the second or third time that the power has gone, but because it is so infrequent, I am not even close to been prepared. So I ended up sitting in the dark, tapping away on the computer until it came on around 20 minutes later.

That said, it went off again around 2am, as I woke up at around 2:30 sweating like a pig as the aircon was not blowing its normal dose of cold air. I slept badly for the rest of the night and when I left home this morning the power still had not returned. I but hold thumbs that it is back by the time I get home as the TV is good tonite.

Sunday was the cricket, and it does take a bit of getting used to when the game starts at 8am and the first innings is almost over before you can have your first beer. Because the workshop is not that busy at the moment, they were not working on Sunday, which gave all of us the opportunity to have a day off. As mentioned previously, when the month end weekend arrives, it co-incides with the month end reports, so taking that weekend off is not an option.

I decided I needed some good old home cooking (my way!) and invited all the lads over to watch the cricket, sup some beer and have lunch. We got 2 really nice fillets (around 4kg at GHC 22.000 per kg (R15.00 which is a steal when you consider for the same stuff in JHB your would be paying R60.00 per kilo at best), some potatoes (2kg for GHC20.000 – R15.00), and salad stuff consisting of some really scary lettuce, cabbage, onions, carrots and cucumber (GHC 100.000 – R70.00), and had a Tony roast fillet (with loads of garlic), roast tatties and salad. Some bread and garlic butter completed the meal.

It was great to have food that I am used to and the lads seemed to enjoy. A few beers – no-one really seemed to drink too much – and they left around 5. I then enjoyed my afternoon nap before a night of TV.

Have not done too much travel this week, as my management team is well in place and I am pretty much office bound doing the accounting stuff. That said I do have a visit to Wassa planned tomorrow – wed, and Obuasi on Thursday.

One thing which has become scarily apparent is the fact that I am smoking like a chimney. A while back that was not an issue as I was fairly active, but now that I lead a fairly sedentary life, I am starting to feel the effects. There are two solutions to this. The most obvious one is to stop smoking, but as that is not really an option for numerous reasons (killing people is frowned up here and I get really ratty when I do not smoke, and I already have an expanding waist line which when I do give up smoking means I eat more then a horse in training), the only other option available to me is to exercise.

As sex is non existent, doing my favorite form of raising a sweat is not an option, and let’s be honest, masturbation does not really raise a sweat, I need to find another way of getting some exercise. Jogging – as much as I hate it – is difficult at best as when I wake up it is dark and when I get home it is dark. I also get hellishly bored doing sit ups and such. I did notice Albert had a treadmill at his house which has been broken for a while, so moves are afoot to have it repaired and placed in my house, where I can watch TV and use it at the same time. All I need for motivation is to look at my rapidly expanding belly!

Right – the lads have replaced the sat goody

1 Comments:

Blogger Esther said...

I'm suitably impressed !!

7:09 PM  

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