Welcome to Petauke

I apologize that you haven’t heard anything from me since we arrived in Lusaka.  After I posted my last entry, I was informed that the internet bandwidth where we were staying was so limited that we should only check our email once a day – NO other webpages.  So the blog had to wait.  After we arrived at Covenant College, the satellite dish for the internet was still broken and we had to wait for the technician to finally come out and fix it.  Unfortunately even now the fixed internet is still not 100% and I have to plug my computer into the modem in Phil’s office in order to get a strong enough connection to update my blog!  So I am writing blog posts in Word while offline, and then posting them all at once when I have the opportunity and the internet will cooperate.

So, on the 18^th of February, we drove from Lusaka to our new home at Covenant College.  Well, I say we “drove” but actually we rode with Phil, the Farm Manager at the College.  It was a beautiful day to travel and the five hours went by quite quickly.  I am delighted to inform you that I saw my first African wildlife on this trip!!  We saw several baboons on the side of the road as we approached the Luangwa River.   Yes, as unbelievable as it may seem, I never saw a single wild animal during my 3 months in Uganda in 2008, and was bitterly disappointed, so the opportunity to see baboons before I even arrived in Petauke was exhilarating!

Anyway, we arrived at Covenant College around 3pm and moved our 4 trunks into our new home.  There are welcoming flower beds at the front of the house with marigolds, canna lilies and other pretty plants.  It is a small but adequate house, with one bedroom, a living area, kitchen, toilet, shower, mudroom/laundry area, and an extra room/bedroom at the other end of the house.  When we arrived we quickly realized that the ceiling over the kitchen was inhabited by a colony of bats!  They were making their presence known not only by the huge racket overhead (it sounded like a couple hundred mice running back and forth) but also by the large amount of droppings all over my kitchen counters, sink, floor, everything.

We had just enough time to scope out the situation, set up Elijah’s travel cot, find the things we would need that night and familiarize ourselves slightly with our surroundings before we went for dinner at the Molenaars’ at 5pm.  The whole team was there: the Molenaars (Cees, Mirjam, Joas, Rhoda, Obed, and Moses), the Zwemstras (Heinrich, Jacomien, Cobus, Nelrie, and Anel), Phil, Marjanne, Mark, and two other Dutch NGO girls, Annika and Janet.  Only ourselves and Phil are native English speakers!  Cees and Heinrich are the other lecturers, Phil manages the farm, Marjanne heads up the Christian Education Ministry, and Mark is the tutor for Joas and Rhoda Molenaar.  It was an enjoyable dinner gathering and for me, it was good to finally put faces with names!  We received a warm welcome from our new colleagues and it has been fun getting to know them.

Our first full day in the house was spent in “clean and fix” mode.  The top priority was screening the windows and doors with mosquito netting, and David spent the whole day finding ingenious ways to rig the netting up until he had made the whole house livable.  I was scrubbing the bat dung out of my kitchen so that I could unpack my pots and pans into clean kitchen cabinets.

Now that we are unpacked and have done some fixing-up and organization of the house, it is starting to feel like home.  I hope to be able to post some photos soon, but there is no way to know whether the internet will be good enough to upload anything. It is a struggle just to get it to update my blog!