Nov 1, 2010 (Mon) – 12:48pm (GMT +2)

Well today we have no power so I have a pot of stew I made last night warming up over a charcoal stove that we are burning wood in instead of charcoal. This morning I got woken up by a call from the guy in accounts saying that they needed me to come down right away to help them finish payroll since they were having problems getting the computers to do what they wanted. The rest of my morning I spent talking with Randy about getting some computer training classes going and helping the college tech guy (whose name I can't ever remember) [Edit: Develious (spelling?)] with their network configuration.

Brazil just had their presidential election yesterday and the Diane is not very happy with the results. I'm very annoyed due to the fact that MI did not get me my absentee ballot in time (I sill haven't gotten it) to vote in tomorrow's election. I found that I could have printed an emergency ballot but I didn't discover that till it was to late to mail it back to the states anyway. I don't see why they American embassy doesn't just have it set up for people to come there to vote, it seems to me like that would make a lot more sense.

On Saturday we went to Mount Mulanje again this time with a whole group of people. We met up with a bunch of the volunteers from Blantyre and made for quite the dense group of white people. As always the falls felt really good to swim in after the hike up. On the way back down it started to dump rain and some hail on us so by the time we were all loaded into vehicles everyone was drenched and muddy. I bought a chess set at the shops by the entrance gate. I haggled the guy down from 8500 Kwatcha to 2300 Kwatcha (about 14 dollars). Of course then I managed to leave it in the truck I road back in but Alex is in Blantyre today so he is going to try and grab it for me.

White people overload

Having fun in the water

Exploring the Falls

Our Muddy Trek Down

Tea Fields

Tea fields are everywhere here. Our resident Brit says that it is *almost* as good as British tea (I'm pretty sure this is where they import their tea from). Compared to how all pervasive tea fields are here we only have a few scattered stalks of corn in Michigan. Most of the fields are owned by large plantations, you can tell when the ones that aren't since they don't look as nice.

Oct 17, 2010 (Sun) – 9:48pm (GMT +2) - Moving, New People and ICU

Last Friday Anthony and I moved to the guest house so that Elisa's brother's family can move into the house we were in when they get here this Wednesday. Dr. Fam flew out early this morning for a vacation in Malaysia before going to work in Nigeria. This last week a new girl came who is a physical therapist from Brazil. Now there are four of us living in the guest house, the new girl (Diane – pronounced kind of like “journey”), Anthony, Hannah and I. I made bread by myself for the first time tonight and it looks like it came out well, we'll see how it tastes tomorrow. The squid proxy is up and running as of today so now I get to have lots of people complaining to me about what they can't do on the internet. The next thing I need to work on is configuring squid so that I can route https connections through it. I found a tutorial online that looks promising, I just need to go through it and see if it actually pans out. We were going to watch Moonraker tonight but Hannah got back from the hospital quite late and we all have early mornings tomorrow. Yesterday we walked out to the dam after potluck and I discovered that the water system control building is quite good for climbing on.

Last Wednesday I went into BAH with Wes, Alex and Pelica where we spent a long day working on the new ICU. It turns out that we are going to have to completely redo the wiring since the “electricians” that were hired to do it did a completely crap job. It wasn't even just incompetence, he also stole wire or else it just magically disappeared all on its own. There were several places where 6 or 8 wires would be coming down on both ends like they were supposed to but if you went up into the attic all the wires were attached to a single wire that was run across the length of the attic then attached to more wires to go back down. I'm not sure how they thought they would ever get away with it, it's not like we wouldn't notice when things didn't work.