Who’s in the garden this morning?
- 14 warthogs – inc. Fred, and Ethyl, Little (he stayed for hours), Benny, Henny, Lenny, and Penny
- 11 bushbucks – inc. Chewy and Thick Neck and others
- 1 wildebeest – Broken Horn
- 7 kudus – inc. Little Daddy, Bossy, and Notches
- Frank and The Misses
Now, it’s getting a little tricky without water. We’ve got the toilet flushing covered using pool water to flush. For sponge baths, we use a small bowl of bottled water and a bar of soap. To wash our hands and wash dishes, we use a bowl of hot water with dishwashing soap. But, it’s interesting to see how many times a day we usually use tap water, although we don’t drink it or use it in cooking.
I suppose the most challenging part is not showering. Louise offered Khaya Umdani house for us to go shower. It has a tank with its water supply. But hauling clean clothes and bathing supplies doesn’t appeal to me while still recovering from my recent virus (not Covid). So we’ll keep doing the sponge baths for now.
I’ve changed today’s late afternoon sundowner location with Rita and Gerhard from the river to our veranda. It’s cool, cloudy and by later afternoon, the weather may not be conducive for sitting by the river where it’s cooler. But, they didn’t mind at all. It will be the first time we’ve seen them in 10 days. It will be wonderful to socialize after so long.
We have felt like hermits these past two weeks, staying in, not going out to dinner, and avoiding our friends, not feeling up to it, but not wanting to infect anyone. I am surprised Tom didn’t catch it from me with our constant proximity. But he’s always had a better immune system than me.
Today is a lazy day. We can’t do laundry without water, and cooking is challenging without water. So today, I am making slow-cooked baby back ribs in the oven, seasoned but sauce-free, for tonight’s dinner. Most likely, our sundowner time will end by dark or shortly after that. Then, we’ll have a quiet evening to dine and watch a few shows.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been likely we’d have invited Rita and Gerhard for dinner. But, I am still not feeling 100%, and we don’t have water for doing dishes, we’ll plan that for another day. We’d heard stories in the past about residents in Marloth Park being without water for five days.
When we heard that, we were aghast at the prospect of such a dilemma. But, here we are well into the third day, and the possibility of it going five days is not as unlikely as we perceived in the past. Yesterday, for a short period, we were also without power and WiFi.
As tough and resilient as we may have been in our world travels, with many harrowing situations, I don’t think we’d quickly adapt to no services; no power, no electricity, and no water. That’s not our thing. That would be called “camping,” and we don’t do much of that.
When the power and WiFi returned, it made us appreciate only being without water, after all. A short time ago, Louise sent me a message to inform us that there will be load shedding tonight, from 11:00 pm to 1:30 am. Fortunately, that’s a time of less importance since we are usually just about ready to drift off to sleep.
The fact load shedding is resuming will mean that we’ll be without power and subsequently without WiFi in other more critical hours of the day. They go hand-in-hand. It’s the nature of the beast. This is Africa. The infrastructure is unstable. We knew this “going in” back in 2013, and it hasn’t improved much in the past eight years.
For us, it’s all about trade-offs. Africa is in our blood. We can leave…but it always draws us back in. We choose this life, and we decide to accept the challenges we encounter along the way, in the best ways we can.
Have a fantastic day.
Photo from one year ago today, June 1, 2020:
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| Beautiful flowers grow freely everywhere in Madeira, Portugal. For more, please click here. |