Wednesday 23 March 2016

A news update and a feature on two crazies

Greetings from the Zambezi Valley,

Well the last week and a bit has been rather busy and interesting.

So, I have not yet met with any serious damage, much to the surprise of us and many others. Well, there was that one morning where I managed to electrocute myself on a plug point, getting put on my ass after flipping over the back of the chair, great fun, not! No damage done, just the ego mostly.
Oh, and having just been reminded there was that incident where I fell through the counter top, just missing the crate of empty bottles and the other pile of fishing tackle. That could have ended in a spot of disaster! But just a sore arm and time to learn to build a new kitchen counter.


 On a more business like note, the business of working is going well. The kitchen stores have been repaired and painted, looking good now. Starting to unpack all the stores now. The office has been fully painted and scrubbed clean, feels good to work in a brighter, cleaner environment. Several months of sitting undisturbed allows all sorts of things to grow big and make homes in dark places. My nerves were shattered, waiting for a large gecko to run out over my hand or such as I pulled files and boxes out of dark storage areas. Some of them are huge here!


One of the funniest was how the Madam, has already become the local painting guru. Guys still walk past staring as Karen is busy painting. Even her paint brush, roller and tray are known as the Madams brush! Bwahaha!



We have had some good rains over the last week, good soaking rain. Does not help the work rate, but it has cooled everything down to a manageable temperature. Sadly this does not really help us with the river levels here, for that we need really good rains in Angola and the western part of Zambia to feed into the upper Zambezi, to fill the floodplains, to fill the dams, to allow the hydro electric station to let water come down the river. Sorry, going all teacher on you again!

On the animal front, regretfully no fantastic sightings yet. Even the trails camera is only getting a very tatty hippo at night, a few impala, baboons and the odd elephant. We have been hearing the lions calling for the last few nights, they seem to be hanging around at the moment. Also hearing the Southern Ground Hornbills in the early morning, I think we have a group living just to the east of us.

Whilst on the subject of animals, one of the animals we are not going to be seeing here is a rhino. They have all been poached out many years ago. With this in mind, can I take a moment to ask you to take a few minutes to click on this link: Bradley Rhino  and like the page. Two of our good friends, Bradley and Greg are going to be running the Great Wall of China Marathon and the Comrades Marathon in rhino suits to raise funds for Rhino Conservation in the form of Save the Rhino.org. Please become one in a million and donate what you can to these two crazies in there efforts. You can donate at: https://www.justgiving.com/Running-Rhino-s/ . The longer story can be read in a PDF, which I cannot work out how to inset here, if you would like a copy, please give me a shout.





















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