Friday, August 12, 2011

Call me crazy...

Wednesday started out a little earlier than I would have liked with the guy from the bookroom coming by for some more books, but after doing that and getting the watchmen’s trays sorted out for the week (our watchmen change every Wednesday), I finally had time to go home and eat breakfast. A little later that morning Beth, Jackie and I went into Ikelenge to check the mail and poke around the shops a bit. Beth told us that Doug was planning to go to Mwunilunga that afternoon to look for some stuff for the building project, and we came up with the mad idea to go in for him. After a little begging, obtaining a list, and talking to one of the workers about places to possibly find what we are looking for, we squished into the cab of the land cruiser pickup and bumped down the road to ‘town.’

Now, Mwunilunga is where the pavement ends (or begins!), and is the first bit of ‘civilization’ that you reach driving out from here. Now that part of the road has been re-graded and because it’s dry season, you can make it there in about an hour give or take. During the rainy season it can take longer than 2 hours, depending on the puddles. Mwunilunga is a very small town full of hole in the wall shops, people, and dirt. The dirt is very red down there, and already the sides of the road and pretty much everything else is getting a film of red dust.

We drove up and down the main road a few times and finally found a shop that had the pipe we were looking for. To our surprise, we had to go up the road a bit to their ‘warehouse’ to collect it, and then we were faced with the interesting problem of lashing two 6 meter (18 foot) PVC pipes to the pickup. We managed it, and then gingerly went down the road to another shop to see if they had a saw we could use to cut the pipe. Thankfully they did, so with the much more manageable 3 meter pipes secured to the back we headed back to Sakeji. We arrived a little after supper time to find Janette, Phil and Gwen, and Vickie safely back from their trips.

When I took a shower later that evening I was disgusted to see how much dirt I had collected during the day—between the dust from the road and the dirt of Mwunilunga I looked like quite the ruffian I’m sure! It was so nice to be clean again, and enjoy a quiet evening with Beth. Nothing like a little crazy to spice up the week!

No comments:

Post a Comment