A Pemba day

Today is a day in Pemba, it is quite unlike our life at Mareja.  Perhaps that is obvious, it is not the wild interior but it not quite like other towns (and far from a Cotswold village.)  When here we seem to have two modes, flying around in the Toyota buying all manner of stores, frantically trying to get the dial-up web connection to work in the dark house OR suddenly doing very little to...nothing, because the shops are closed for lunch, the internet down and the heat and humidity weighing so heavily that being stationary is the only way.  And nothing ever goes to plan, not even vaguely and after a while you try to forget you even had a plan.

We were going to be here for one night and a day of restocking – now four days later we are still here (and I am not feeling very well and hoping it will pass).  A flavour of activities... the water pump broke in the house and gave Dominik a 240v shock and I didn’t hear his exclamation as I was buried in the hot office - after lying down and feeling peculiar for a while he thankfully improved.  (Running water was one of the few good things about being here!)

We have tried a lot to track down our TNT parcel, of Timberland sponsored boots, with no joy. We spent 3 hours in the post office in town watching 6 people opened 4 bags (1 person opened, 1 wrote things, 1 picked up the bags, 3 did nothing) and also visited the port depot twice - here we finally found an inventory, and worked hard at remaining level spirited with the highly disinterested man but there was no record of our parcels.  (According to TNT tracking website it is in a storehouse in Zambia, I had thought this an error but perhaps not? And perhaps it will eventually leave the storeroom - am still going to keep hoping, for now.)

We also had an important impromptu meeting with Jemuce (Unilurio), Rebecca and Nelson (Park), which led to two further meetings and we have agreed a final Memorandum of Understanding for research work at Mareja, a great success and worth a dedicated blog entry.  The document is currently in Nampula being signed, finger’s crossed.

 Also stocked up on tinned food, dried fish for the community, rice, stationary, nails and ‘lima’ metal files.  Bought Trisa some boots from a second hand store and some children’s shorts and a ladies dark green waisted top, so he has something reassembling a uniform now – am most pleased.  Satisfaction sapped a bit by returning to car to find an odd array of things stolen...soap, pestle and mortar, mosquito spray and special fizzy drink, the small back window was left ajar.

Anyway...if you would like you would like to know more about Pemba I am going to try to create a picture in my next entry.  Please read on!