We had a productive weekend.  The vet was supposed to come between 8 and 9am on Saturday morning, to 'spay' our dog Tuppence. But early in the morning a torrential downpour started, and he didn't get here until just before 12 noon as a result.  Our local vet makes house calls using a motorbike!  Poor man came in dripping wet - he was well-equipped with rain gear and wellies, but still soaked to the skin. 

(This is what my laundry looked like during that torrential downpour!  The rain started so quickly, and was so heavy, that I thought, "I'll just leave it - otherwise I'll get soaked, too!  A little rain won't hurt it, right?"  Well, after close to 7 hours of steady bucketing rain, as you can see, my sheets were dragging in the mud AND the mud was splashing up onto the sheets from the force of the raindrops!  They ended up COATED in splattered mud and I had to bring everything straight in and put it right back in the wash!!)

This vet is the same one who performed the neutering procedure on our other dog Merry last year.  On both occasions he has used our dining room table as an operating table!  Here is a photo of Elijah and Ketzia eating their lunch at one end of the table while the vet 'preps' Tuppence for surgery at the other end...

While we were waiting for the vet to arrive, David did a wonderful bit of jerry-rigging.  I bought a Winnie-the-Pooh pop-up play house in Glasgow for £3, which was missing one of the PVC pipes which prop it up, but I figured we could easily find another piece of PVC pipe to substitute.  Well, that particular size of PVC pipe has been impossible to find so far, but David figured out that he could dismantle an old child-size camp chair of Elijah's which was broken, and use the detached chair legs -- which were the exact diameter of the PVC pipe needed, and just long enough, too! So David spent the morning knocking the chair apart and figuring out how to rig up the play house with the substitute pieces.  I'm so glad to have a 'handy' husband!  Not a great photo, but this gives you an idea of the kids playing in it...

In the afternoon we had a Chichewa lesson, which merely assisting in showing us that we need to review a few things...  At least we've now gotten started filling out the flash cards to aid in memorizing vocabulary. 

Today we waged war against the fleas in the garden.  The vet had already applied a flea treatment to the dogs themselves (which seems to have been successful) so today's agenda was to treat the grass and the sandbox where we knew fleas were living in abundance.  I bought a bottle of poison from the vet which they use to treat cows against fleas, etc. which was diluted in water and our gardener, Besek, spent the morning spraying the mixture all over the garden. Meanwhile Nelson obligingly boiled a large amount of water which we poured into the sandbox to kill the fleas there (not wanting to use poison where the children play every day...).  Our hope is that this has wiped out the flea population... and to keep them from coming back, I'm planning to get a few chickens!  They should be fabulous at roaming around the garden and eating lots of undesirable bugs.  The first step will be to buy a few village chickens - the second step will be to train the dogs not to eat them!  Hopefully we won't have too many casualties.  At least chickens are cheap here -- about $2 each!

Now to deal with the swarm of bees that has taken up residence in the roof at the end of our house....

2013

Well, what do you know!  I'm actually posting on this blog.  After months of either having no computer, or no internet access (capable of blogging), OR no time... I finally have all 3!

Let me try to catch up.  We are back home at the College, since the 22nd of January, after 3 months away in Scotland.  A lovely 3 months... seeing so many dear friends and making so many new friends.  It was truly encouraging and refreshing.  But it is good to be home!  Elijah is so, so, so, happy to be back home in Zambia again. He is glad to be back in a familiar place surrounded by familiar people, food, and environment.

Elijah is growing up so fast - he is now 2 years 8 months old... he'll be 3 at the beginning of July.  I can't believe it!  Suddenly my baby boy is walking around the house serenading his sister, building train tracks and having make-believe play with his toy animals.  And Ketzia seems bound and determined to catch up to her brother in everything.  She is 14 months old but so well-developed -- already running at top speeds, totally stable on her feet, and very clever.  She can understand everything I say to her even though she isn't talking yet. 

I had the students ROARING with laughter while I told them stories about Elijah in Scotland...  Like our first week there, when Elijah told me, "Mama, I'm going to buy eggs now." (In Zambia we always walk to the farm and buy fresh eggs there - Elijah gets to help by carrying the money.)  So he walked out of the living room and shut the door, and down the hall and shut the door. He came back about 20 seconds later and said, "Mama, it's too cold to buy eggs!"  Another day I overheard Elijah pretending to talk on the mobile phone (which had notoriously bad reception) -- "Ullo!" he said, "Ullo!  Can you hear me?"  Then with a sigh of disgust he said, "The signal's gone!"  The students absolutely loved hearing of his exploits.

We have about 24 students this year, and the term started smoothly (we're halfway through week 2 at present).  The first month or so David is lecturing every morning, so he's very busy just now but enjoying teaching.  We are glad that our colleague Phil returned from his furlough last week, and look forward to seeing our colleague Marjanne return from her furlough at the end of this week!

We have a new internet set-up here which is (so far) working MUCH better than last year.  It is faster, which means we've even been able to talk to family using ooVoo (like Skype except we've found it works much better than Skype...) a few times which never worked last year!  The internet is still having a few issues, it's not 100% sorted out yet, but we are very encouraged.  Hence, my ability to post on the blog.  Last year I could barely ever get this page to load!  What a blessing!

At the moment I am struggling with a huge flea problem... we came home to find both our dogs happy and healthy and well-fed, but crawling with fleas!  We've given them a couple of flea treatments but nothing has worked yet.  Then we found that the new hut which was built in our garden at the end of last year was SWARMING with fleas - so they were flooded out with loads of boiling water (hopefully they are still gone). But there are still fleas in the grass outside the hut, and now there are fleas in the children's sandbox because I can't keep the dogs from lying in there in the heat of the day!  So poor Elijah and Ketzia have been told that they can't play in the sandbox for the time being (they keep ending up covered in fleas).  I don't really know what to do to get rid of these pests!  And I'm so worried that they will end up in the house and then what am I going to do?!