On the khonde

Sunday morning and I was woken by loud African music at about 5.  At first I thought it was coming from one of the other houses here, but then Mari looked out of the window and said it was coming from further away, somewhere across the valley – sound really travels here.  After about half an hour it died away again, and I lay there listening to the other sounds: cockerels crowing, birds gradually beginning to sing, a guard walking quietly past the house on his rounds, and then, a bit later, someone sweeping the khonde (the deck outside the front door).

This all soothed me back to sleep, and suddenly it was nearly 9 o’clock!  Lin came into our room, and we sat around in bed chatting for a while before making a breakfast of egg and toast, and lots of tea.  Much more chat, and as Mari and Lin were spending some time catching up, I came in the bedroom with Mari’s laptop and wrote up the last couple of days, so as not to get behind.  Every so often someone would pop in – Giacomo came by for the car, which is shared – Mari is the keyholder, and has to make sure that people get an equal chance.  A bit later, Mari went down to the kitchen to make bread for tonight’s barbecue, and came back with Linda, and some coffee.  Hurrah!  Caffeine!

I have had a really lazy day.  I did pop down to the big house (where all the volunteers eat together during the week) and help with the preparations for the barbecue, but that was the furthest I went.  We had been asked if we wanted to go to a Malawian wedding, which would have been fascinating, but I decided I needed a quiet day, and not to be rushing from one event to another.  I also like to take a bit of time to arrive somewhere, and absorb my surroundings.  Lin decided she would go with Brian and Sue, so she put on a dress and my white scarf, and tried on a variety of hats, and then went off, looking very respectable!

Mari and I ate cheese sandwiches and salad for lunch and sat around – more chatting!  We sat on the khonde, uploading our blogs and bird-spotting.  There are a lot of very brightly coloured birds here, and Mari seems to have found out most of their names.  We saw a pair of big blue ones, but I can’t remember what they were called now.  Tony, the founder of the Krizevac Foundation, came over to introduce himself, and welcome me to Mitsidi.

There is a massive pile of bricks, as big as a building, on the other side of the stream.  Mari watched them being made when she arrived, and says they don’t seem to have been used that much.  They are a wonderful terracotta colour, and look like some kind of ancient ruin.

I went into the house to phone home, and came back to discover Mari had gone down to the house again,  so I sat watching the sun go down, and the people walking up and down the road to Chilomoni across the valley.  There was a party going on down in the next village; mostly African music, but every now and then an English or American pop song would resound across the valley.

Lin, Sue and Brian came back from the wedding, with lots of lovely photos, and having had a really good time.  We all wandered down to the big house, where the barbecue was on the go, and Tony had laid on two boxes of wine.  We met some of the people from the pub the night before, and all sat around eating and drinking.  Down by the pond the frogs were making an amazing racket.

It was a pleasant evening, but we retired quite early, back to our little house for more chat, and a bit of planning for the next couple of weeks.  You can hear the frogs, even from up here, and every so often all the neighbourhood dogs start barking and howling and the sound spreads out from village to village across the valley.  And of course the wind has started up again, as it’s that time of night.

On the way to bed Lin found a gecko in her room – it sat on the wall looking terrified as we took its photo, but it didn’t run away, and I could hear her talking to it as she got ready for bed.