Sept 25, 2010 (Sat) – 11:48am (GMT +2)

Last Wednesday the guys from Loma Linda got here rather later than they were planing due to the fact that they missed their flight in Johannesburg and ended up taking another flight up to Lilongwe and then back down to Blantyre. There luggage was supposed to come in yesterday and Jere went with Elisa to pick it up but I haven't heard yet whether that was successful. They were also going to be picking up some more switches and Ethernet cable for the network we are working on setting up for the Hospital. While they were gone yesterday the other two guys and I ran cables to the cashier's desk as well as a cable to the general ward and one to pediatrics. The distance of some of the other wards and especially the Annex is going to make running a single Ethernet cable impossible due to signal degradation. For some of the closer ones we are going to just put up switches to act as signal amplifiers but for the Annex we would like to do fibre optic but the cost may be prohibitive. (Side note: The Annex is what we call the private in-patient area where, if you have the money, you can get a private room and catered meals and the like. Whereas in the general area a family member has to stay with the patient at all times and provide things like meals.) We are going to have to figure out how to get power to the switches we want to hang in the hallway to extend cable range. There is a power conduit running the length of the hall that is for lighting but we traced it out and one switch controls several hundred meters with dozens of lights so we decided that would not be a reliable source of power.

On Tuesday Dr. Fam moved in with Anthony and I and will be staying here for awhile before he heads to Nigeria. This next week a new family is coming who will be using the house he vacated. He brought with him enough food to feed a small country so we should be good on that front for awhile, my only concern is that it will go bad before we can get through it. One item he brought was a bunch of mangoes so I have been learning how to cut up and eat a mango. They are not one of the easier fruits when it comes to separating the edible from the inedible but once accomplished fresh mango makes for a very enjoyable breakfast.

September 18, 2010 (Sat) – 1:42pm (GMT +2)

In a few minutes we are going to start eating haystacks which I'm quite looking forward to. This morning Anthony and I went for a walk down my the dam and took pictures so when we got back we were quite hot and hungry. Once we got back to the house we made up shredded lettuce and guacamole to take to potluck.

Our worker talked to Anthony a couple days ago to see if we had some more work he could do so yesterday we had him do a thorough cleaning of the kitchen. He worked for about three hours and we paid him 120 Kwatcha (170 Kwatcha to the dollar). I kept having to remind myself that that is a perfectly good wage for here and that I wasn't a terrible person for paying him about 25 cents an hour.
2:37
Ahh... That's better, except I hear there is dessert and I definitely did not leave room for it, lol. I imagine I'll have to stuff myself a bit more. There are several more people here than there has been for the last few weeks. Alex got here Thursday night, Wes had picked him up in Lilongwe and took him along up to Mwami just across the border into Zambia. Kelvin and his family got back from a summer of traveling last week so they are here and they have a little 4 year old girl who, once they got over their initial shyness, Andrew and Keiza have been having fun playing with, sometimes to the detriment of our being able to hear ourselves think. Elisa just got back a few minutes ago with Christi who flew into Blantyre today.

September 15, 2010 (Wed) – 7:30am (GMT +2)

Wes left yesterday for Mwami so I couldn't ride with him into Blantyre to work at BAH. So I am currently squished like a sardine into the Limbe clinic vehicle along with 10 other people in a truck that is clearly not designed for this. I am rather exhausted as I was up till nearly 1:30am last night trying to finish some backups off of one of the hospital computers. I had it booted into Ubuntu and for some reason it kept crashing when I would try to rename this one file. Finally I got the backups finished now I just need to reinstall XP and lock the computer down to try and keep out viruses. Even though the computer had anti-virus software installed it wasn't doing much good since every time it would pop up with a warning they would just click ignore. The workers desperately need some computer training, however I can't help but wonder how much of it would actually stick.

Yesterday I finally got around to putting up the new mosquito net I had bought a week and a half ago. I had our yard worker cut 4 lengths of bamboo that I used to construct a frame to keep the top of the mosquito net spread out. I was quite pleased with the result. Apparently Dr. Fam is going to be moving in with Anthony and I for awhile at least, I think he is going to be going to a hospital in another country soon.

September 10, 2010 (Fri) – 7:32pm (GMT +2)

Well I've been here for over two weeks now and I'm getting used to people driving on the wrong (left) side of the road. Yesterday I spent over 8 hours troubleshooting and getting viruses off of computers, by the time I went home I was feeling rather drained. I decided I felt like reading and took a look at the books that were in the house and found that there was a copy of The Da Vinci Code which I had been wanting to read. I started it at around 9 o'clock in the evening, fell asleep around 1am then finished it during this morning and early afternoon. The ending was a bit different than the movie and it a lot of interesting details that the movie had left out. I would be curious to see a detailed analysis of the book that sourced all the various “facts” put forth by the author.

On Wednesday I tried making lentils that we had a bag of but it turns out that trying to cook a bag of mixed lentils and rice to the correct degree is rather difficult. By the time everything was no longer crunchy there was a nice thick layer of burnt on the bottom of the pan. I tried to save it by putting in lots of spices but eventually I just gave up and threw out the whole thing. Today I made stew and put experimented with putting eggplant in which turned out to be a good deal more successful and quite good. Tuesday I went into town to do some visa stuff and work at BAH and got a fan which has been nice. The white noise has helped drown out all the loud people walking by my house at all hours of the night. But it doesn't do much to drown out the things that crash onto the tin roof of our house. I think there must be a tree that hangs over the house and drops things onto the roof, but I swear it only does it in the middle of the night.

August 31, 2010 (Tue) – 11:55pm (GMT +2)

This morning Chrislyn called to see if I wanted to come over and learn how to make bread. Wes came by the house shortly thereafter and I went with him down to the hospital. We hooked up a printer to the airport router and his Mac worked with it just fine but we couldn't get any other computer to work with it. I started learning about IP/TCP headers and things in preparation for setting up firewall and QoS stuff. For dinner I made spaghetti sauce which came out quite well. After dinner I went back down to the hospital to catch up on internet things. The guard was asleep in a chair when I went through the gate. From what I hear, that is not uncommon for guards around here.