home sweet home

ours is a 1-storey, 2-bedroom, semi-detached apartment in a 6-house compound. in the other apartments live other teachers from my school. including donato and i, 4 couples and 2 singles.

the garden is huge and we have (or certainly have had at some stages) a thriving vegetable patch. our 2 gardeners, marco and humphrey work hard to grow all things green - we have all kinds of lettuce and cabbage - especially the varieties they like (our staff quite often take home bags full of veg they know we don't eat). we've never had much success with anything red. apart from chillies - more on those later.

when we arrived the house was white-washed inside. the luminescent strip lights and rose-print curtains throughout complemented the hospital touch. after sticking it out for a few months, we decided to repaint and now we only have white walls in the kitchen - something to remind the house of its past and how far it's come.

it took me a while but i eventually got donato to put up some paintings and decorations we bought around town so it's finally looking like a home.

arrival

we arrived in malawi on sunday 8th august after a very long and very boring and very uncomfortable flight. i DO NOT recommend ethiopian airlines' vegetarian dishes OR sitting behind the toilet.

you could tell immediately who my future colleagues were going to be - the ones who looked anxious and like they were wondering whether they'd signed their lives away. donato and i played 'guess the subject' to pass the time. i think we got a few right. PE and art teachers are pretty hard to mistake.

the school minibus brought the school's director, his wife and secretary to meet us at the airport and then droped us all off at our new houses.

It's been too long

i just offered to upload some photos onto my school's charity's blogspot page and realised i'd totally forgotten i'd started this page. actually that's a lie... my very good german friend who has her own blog reminds me quite often to give her the address...but i have quite successfully pushed it to the back of my mind.

today i'm determined to start writing blogs again. i don't know for how long that determination will grace me with its presence. but hey a good intention is better than nothing. so here goes...!

crying

i cried for the first time about leaving on sunday.
actually it wasn't the first time. that was last october when i found out i'd been invited to interview in tucsan, US. i'd had probably my first good lesson with my exam class (i'd been teaching them over a year) and was distraught about leaving them - as we were now finally 'building a relationship'. needless to say that feeling didn't last long and now i feel stupid about ever thinking of staying another year to take them to AS exams!!
so sunday. donato and i were at my auntie's for a bbq. i wasn't even sad, didn't even feel like i was going anywhere. and then i said goodbye to bethany (my cousin's daughter) and the tears flooded. i cried for the rest of the evening, thinking it might be a very long time till i see her and the rest of my family again.
i must not cry at school. that would be sooo embarrassing. especially as everyone knows i can't wait to leave behind the hell that is l****wood. but how can i ensure this when the tears came so easily and without warning last sunday??

packing

i've never ever spent so much money in my life. all donato and i do is shop. every weekend. we leave the house at 11 and return home at 4 (if we're lucky) with bags full of things we may or may not be able to buy in malawi. i heard from the teachers already there that it's impossible to buy most things, and anything you can buy is 4 times the price. and i don't mean the price is quadrupled for foreigners. i mean 4 times the price you can get it for in england.

so now we have just about everything we need for the next 2 years. enough washing powder, cleaning fluids, sunblock, tampons so that all we'll have to buy is food.

the only thing left to do now is to pack it!

i'm a celebrity

i can't tell you how often i've thought "get me out of here" when i've realised i've been in england too long. the country has this suffocating effect on me. i've always known i wasn't supposed to stay there, or anywhere, for too long.
so finally i am leaving... most probably for good. that makes me a little sad, but i can't wait for the adventure that is just around the corner. 3 weeks and 3 days of school left!