eggplant. and life.

I was doing so well updating my blog every other day or so.  Ah well, time to gather up the slack again. 

 the driveway leading past the College buildings to our house

 

In the market today, I bought an eggplant as big as Elijah's head!  I've never before cooked with eggplant.  It had always scared me, as a vegetable, because I knew that if it wasn't cooked or prepared correctly it could be a real, total, complete, inedible flop. So I've always been a bit wary of eggplant. But last week, there were no other vegetables to be found in the market.  No green beans, no green peppers, no carrots, no nothin'.  Piles and piles of eggplant everywhere. So I looked at the eggplant, and maybe the eggplant looked at me, and I decided that would have to be our vegetable for the week.  So I took it home, and did some reading, and didn't find too many interesting looking recipes - but the week before, our College cook, Nelson, had made a very tasty dish of eggplant to accompany the nshima and beans at lunch. So I asked him how he cooked it.  Nelson's cooking instructions are never very detailed, but I managed to come pretty close to replicating this time... and added a bit of garam masala for flavor... and it was nice! We've had it a couple times more since then and this week I couldn't resist buying the eggplant that was as big as Elijah's head.

 daddy reading to Elijah and Ketzia

I'm happy to report that we are all much healthier than the last time I wrote.  It's been a month of much bleh-ness which seemed to affect all 4 of us differently, but thankfully now it seems to be passing and we are all regaining our bouncy good health again.

 Elijah with a few of our students who came for dinner

The main problem with keeping up anything online-related recently, be it email or blog or whatever, is that the electricity has not been good.  We are regularly without power for an entire day, about 3 times a week.  On the days when the power is on, it's often too weak to run the internet.  So... the brief periods when the internet is actually working have generally been spent dealing with whatever is quite urgent, but not quite having enough time to catch up on everything!  Oh, wow, yet another part of our life which is dealt with by "crisis management"!

 Elijah was reading aloud to Ketzia - as soon as I got the camera out, he got embarrassed!

The kids are doing fabulously.  Elijah, now that he has fully recovered from the chest infection or whatever it was that had laid him low for more than a week, is back to being his normal "cheeky" self as they would say in Scotland.  He is full of energy and zest for living.  He loves the students, he loves his friends, he has never ever ever met a fellow human being he didn't like.  His vocabulary is literally expanding every day.  Some of his new words this week have been "hiya" (genuine 'weegie!  I'm so proud...), "go" (said firmly to the dog), "dog", "eye", "guava" etc.  He is making a marvelous attempt to say his own name AND.... we are so proud of this... he is also trying to say "zekomo kwam biri" which is "thank you very much" in Nyanja!  Wow!  Elijah has also just moved into his very own "big boy" bed.  We ordered a bed made for him at the carpenter's complete with a bed rail.  He is so excited about it.  I am so happy for him that he has moved out of that tired travel cot which he had completely outgrown!  Now he has a very comfortable place to sleep.  I hope this means his sleep will improve now.  :)

notice Elijah's pose here, completely relaxed in his camp chair leaning his head against the table!

Things are right busy around here, as they always are, but we are finishing up the final preparations for the Trust meeting next week.  Our Scottish house guests arrive tomorrow -- in fact, as I write this, David is in Lusaka overnight and will be bringing them home with him tomorrow sometime.  So I am on my own with the two children overnight, I think for the first time since Ketzia was born!  It's amazing how rather lonely the College feels when you realize that your husband is away overnight, the students are all gone for the weekend, Marjanne has been in Lusaka for a few days on business, and suddenly it's just me and my children in our house, and across the way Phil in his house, and on the other corner Jackson in his house (his wife and kids are away in Lusaka until tomorrow, too).  And we're the only ones here. And it's quiet.  It's a bit sad.  But I'm happy there's still men around to provide a feeling of security to the place.

P.S. Did you notice our new sofas and armchairs in these photos??  Yes, the very ones that we spent 4 weeks trying to obtain!  They're HERE!  And we're so thankful to finally have adequate seating in our living room... especially since we're about to have a houseful of people for quite a while!