Family update

Thought it was a while since I’d let you know what the rest of the family are doing, so here you are:

E is enjoying reading all the words she can on signs, cereal packets, everything.  She is rarely herself, but always pretending to be someone or something else.  The latest fad is ballet – she is Angelina Ballerina!

R is enjoying horseriding and finding that that and other things are all easier now she’s reached the magic age of 4.  She has very high expectations of herself but we’re hoping she can vent some of the frustrations at the woodwork classes she’s starting this week!

G is a whirlwind of ideas and inquisitiveness, which is loved at nursery, where he is known for big cuddles and being great at tidying up. We love the cuddles at home, too, but I guess it’s so chaotic here he wouldn’t know where to start – in any case, he contributes well to the family mess!

M is juggling his very busy job with his new duties as my nurse and general assistant  – yup, I’m not feeling so good today…  He’s cancelled a meeting today to bring me hot lemon!

 

Quick update…

Okay, it’s been a bad day, because:

• power cut for 8 hours and we have no generator here
• still suffering those side-effects, but no time to lie down
• had to drive all round the city to soothe younger two to sleep since they were scared and clingy in the dark house
• haven’t been able to eat enough as haven’t been able to cook (it’s gas, but the lighter thing went missing!), so have been snacking
• am up too late

So as not to exacerbate that last point, I will quickly tell you why it’s also been a good day:

• doctor was shocked at current dose and more than halved it – so should be feeling better soon!
• blood tests are now all normal again, mysteriously
• doctor thinks he can treat me successfully here, although he was surprised that I didn’t want to go back to the UK!

Hooray, hooray!  I can stay!  And obviously with the power cut I’ve been thrilled all day about my decision….  :-/  Never mind, all over now.  Back to the doctors on Wednesday, and hopefully then he’ll take me off the yukky drug altogether.  I can hope!

Good night!

 

Medical worries

I have been suffering today with what I now understand to be side-effects of the horrible drug, Methyldopa, that I’ve been put on by my doctor here:  tiredness and muscle weakness, leaving me virtually immobile.  Literally, a walk from one room to the next leaves me reaching for the nearest chair and collapsing with legs shaky and heart racing.  This is especially bad today, I suspect, because I have increased my dose of the awful thing, under doctor’s orders, although maybe he might’ve wished I were a bit more timely in responding to his decisions…

Since I don’t really trust the man (he gave me no information about how to change from my old medicines to the new one, which could’ve decreased the initial side-effects and seems to be quite important with this type of drug; he advised me to get hold of a couple of drugs in South Africa on holiday that the South African doctor was reluctant or refused to prescribe for me; he doesn’t seem to listen and talks to me as if I were an idiot – actually, my brain was so muddled today, that I wondered if he had a point; he wanted to treat the hypertension himself), I have spoken at length to a private doctor in the UK.  She said that it doesn’t sound like I’m receiving high quality medical care, in which case I should return to the UK and even be prepared to stay there – to which my considered response is:  aaaghh!

But she also said that what I need is to be under the care of a hypertension specialist and an obstetrician who deals with high-risk pregnancies – so there’s a get-out clause that could save me from seriously stressing out my entire family.  And I know a woman who has been pregnant six times here, once at least with hypertension, who says her doctor (obstetrician) is great, trained in Germany and has been a doctor for 40 years, is a rarity here in that he actually listens, and referred her to a hypertension specialist in the same hospital when her blood pressure rose.  Hooray!

So I’m going to see him tomorrow.  I hope I’m not foolish pinning my hopes on this visit – I do know that they don’t have access here to the same range of medicines that are available in the UK, so it may still come to that.  But hopefully, for the time being at least, I’ll be able to stay here and keep the family together.  Think of me tomorrow!

 

I ask you – is this fair?

E had small friend round for “playdate” this afternoon.  (Why children can’t just come round to play any more is beyond me, but they seem to have playdates.  Is it the preponderence of Americans here?  Or just the Americanising of our culture?  In which case, I should probably say Americanizing…)  I arranged to drop the boy off afterwards – and had a horrible journey, stuck in a jam for ages, with four under-sixes in the car, for a journey that should have taken 15 minutes tops.  The round trip was close to an hour and a half.  And you know, sometimes children’s voices can be penetrating, in much the same way as needles into the skull.  I had a headache, everyone was thirsty and frustrated and then we hit queues on the way home, too.  Sitting motionless, I decided to call M and have a gripe and see if he was near to coming home and rescuing me.

And M told me that he’d been arrested earlier and had spent the afternoon in jail.

Really!  Just like someone had told me the other day about a bad afternoon she’d had with her kids, phoned her husband, away on a field trip, for some sympathy, and found out that he’d been dealing with a compound break-in at the same time.  When do these men give over giving us a sense of perspective?!

And once he’d given me the details, he couldn’t listen to my gripes because he really needed to finalise agreeing his release.

To give him his due, he called back in a couple of minutes, now outside the jail (the story is boring legal manoeuvring, but presumably pretty stressful in the first person), and listened patiently and with some sympathy to my woes…

And to dob him in, he came home in good time, ate a good meal and went to sleep, leaving me to put all the children to bed…  Humph.

 

Singin’ in the rain

Sitting in our favourite garden cafe at the weekend (the one with mist sprays all around to make the heat bearable and give the temporary impression of being in a tropical greenhouse every 3 minutes), we realised the music being played in the background was “Singin’ in the rain.”  Seemed a strange choice for a country which sees so little precipitation, although if you position yourself carefully on a fairly cool day, the mist can feel very slightly like English drizzle (woooonderful!!).

The rains that fell in August and the first days of September are already fading in our memories, although the potholes that appeared here and there in the tarmac while roads were flooded are a reminder.  The unpaved roads were worse affected, obviously, becoming mudslides and traps for unwary non-4×4 vehicles, best avoided.  But they have been easy to level off again and are as smooth as stony, unsurfaced roads can be expected to be.  (Avoid areas outside rich people’s houses, where they wash their cars and their driveways daily and the run-off creates deep runnels in the dirt road outside.)

The nursery that G attends faces is on a square: a large area of dirt with houses all around.  The rains turned it into a muddy swamp, and we parents had to crawl in our cars through the edge of the puddle as we had no idea how deep it would be in the middle.  On the road leading into the square, we had to drive through a puddle because it was all the way across the road and there was no better way into the square – then you just have to wait and watch someone else in a similar car try it first!  Generally there’s someone around who already knows the best route through it.  My car started behaving strangely one day (probably water splashing up into something), so while it was being looked at I had a pick-up truck for a couple of days.  I was a less worried driver on those days!

Once the rains stopped (and we’re talking probably six downpours in this rainy season, each lasting a few hours – but usually they only expect four, so it was a wet summer!), the puddles receded steadily.  The huge one outside the nursery lasted the longest, and as it shrank, it burst into life – green, slimey life to begin with and then grasses and insects and birds.  Now it’s dried out and it’s just a very uneven patch of ground, with no sign of the activity of two weeks ago.

We had a similar experience on a smaller scale with a little puddle outside our back gate, which seemed from a distance to be shimmering.  When we looked more closely, we saw it was absolutely full of fat, wriggling tadpoles.  Daddy and the girls put some into a couple of jamjars so that we could watch them (E had been learning about the life cycle of a frog just that week!), at which point we realised that none of us knew what tadpoles ate.  How on earth had they survived in that puddle?  “Your teacher will know,” I said confidently to E, and we proudly took in the ones that had made it through the night to school the next day.  I’m not sure her teacher (who is also M’s sister) was best pleased with this sudden responsibility, but she is a very good primary teacher and having tried weakly to pass them back to us to look after, took them on bravely.  I haven’t actually heard much about them since.  I wonder what happened to them?

 

I’m back!!! …hello? …hello? Is anyone still there?

Well!  I am very sorry for such a long silence.  When did I last write?  June?  Goodness me.  A small attempt at an explanation…  July was our holiday in the UK (and neighbouring countries), so I never was intending to write then.  We returned here in August, to a new house (much nicer than the old one – no rats, for one thing).  It took a couple of weeks to unpack everything – and then I realised that our computer had not made it to the new house.  What has happened to it is still a mystery – I expect foul play which M says is very unlikely.  The office don’t seem to take it seriously (they are the ones who moved our stuff while we were away) and so I, ridiculously, go on from day to day hoping it will turn up somewhere.  I must do something more – the silly thing is that it was pretty old and fairly useless, so we’ve bought a new one.  But in the usual way, M has commandeered the new one to be used in the office; I have finally been given an older one to use instead and even that one may be taken away from me again in a couple of days to be used in the office.  My life is always somewhat less important than the office – and what with all that noble work they do, the comparison is a little absurd: my convenience versus the co-ordination of projects saving and improving the lives of hundreds.  Hmmm…

So, for a few days, at least, I have a computer.  Other news: I am pregnant.  Yes, this is the fourth and yes, I will be taking some or all drastic measures available to ensure it doesn’t happen again after this one!  Very annoyingly, I am struggling with this one, big time – which is mainly annoying because it’s just what most of my friends and family thought would happen and just what I was equally convinced was highly unlikely.  So now I am in the hands of doctors I’m not sure I trust, with limited medicines available to treat my symptoms.  And I have been desperately low in energy for three or four weeks now – sleeping lots, needing to lie down or at least sit every five minutes or so – which nobody medical seems to be interested in.

So, that’s me at the moment.  Oh, just back from a good holiday in South Africa (and Swaziland and Mozambique – plenty of time to sleep in the car…) – a nice week, shame about the flights there and back, but that’s always the problem here.

 

A new woman!

I’m back from a week in Ethiopia. Some frustrations in the capital, and a day stuck in a small, hot airport thanks to the national airline, but some very relaxing enjoyable times, too, especially when we escaped the capital, and especially when we stayed for a day (would have been two except for the airport saga) beside a lake, beneath the trees – well, beneath the baboons and colobus monkeys in the trees, at least.

Actually, the baboons were doing their best to prevent relaxation, being more interested in G than I (or he) would have liked. After one encounter, we – or more accurately, the staff – made sure they kept their distance. Poor G was terrified of them! Add to that a bad encounter with a scary dog two days previously which had unnerved all five of us and you’ll understand why G is now very reluctant to be put down somewhere until he’s had a good look round!

Anyway, we had an hour’s horseriding (G and me together, E and R each looking poised on their own white horses) to take our minds off the baboons. We all enjoyed looking at the donkeys and cows and a waterfall that will disappear once the rains come as the five-or-so metre deep bowl it falls into will fill up entirely!

The night before, we’d seen the more impressive side of the local flora and fauna – strange pumice rock-shapes to clamber over and round, and hornbills, pelicans and two hippos who put on a lovely show for us just as we decided it was time to leave!

And in our remaining few hours, we had a lovely time at the beach and an outdoor-educational time walking along a log.  That was when we’d just arrived, and the reason it felt like outdoor ed was that the children were looking around them in bewilderment and fear and saying, “Can we go back inside?” I gave up trying to tempt them to explore all the way to the beach (a good 100m, maybe!) and concentrated on a nearby log, instead. “Come and hold my hand, Mummy,” said five-year-old E, who had initially shyed away because there were ants on it and still didn’t want to touch the thing. After half an hour’s patient encouragement, the three of them were walking, climbing, balancing and jumping and having a great old time. We spend too much time indoors here and only venture out in the car…

Well, maybe that will change – we are moving house: across the river, where rents are cheaper, shops are nearer and the garden already has a treehouse.  J  I am very excited about it!

So, to the title of this post… I have returned refreshed and feeling more energetic than I remember being for two years or more. Yesterday, mains electricity was off between 8am and 4pm (and the generator didn’t work for the first two hours or so – once it did it was just fans in the house, no ACs) and you would’ve thought that would dampen my spirits, but the slight breeze in the garden made it bearable and the pool trip was just wooonnnderful. And instead, I just marvelled at the fact that we had electricity all day today – I had assumed yesterday’s experience was par for the course, so I am feeling fortunate! Naturally, we still went to the pool…

 

A city empties…

I think most people have now left this place. Judging by the emptiness of the cafe this morning (breakfast out as a holiday treat since Daddy is away and can’t make us pancakes!), the expats are not the only ones to have gone.

My students for whom this country is home were all buzzing with plans for the summer in the last week of the semester just as much as the expat students.  Lots of these local ones are heading to London for two months, with their families. I assumed they would be staying with relatives there, but the talk was all of “our house in London” – a reminder of how rich these families are, especially given the centrality of the London locations!

The teaching staff at the school left in two groups – there was a large group which flew out the evening of the last working day (when they found time to pack, I don’t know, although I always look at these things from the perspective of having three small children) and the second group flew out two days later at the end of the week.

And other women and children have been leaving, even if their husbands/fathers have to remain. There are not many of us left. Still, this means that we will have the school pool to ourselves this afternoon, the service at the cafe this morning was not as awful as it sometimes is, and the roads even seem emptier, although that may be because I’m driving around at times of day that I generally wouldn’t. Add to that the five-day holiday that we’re going on next week and, all in all, I’m feeling quite positive about the month that’s left before we too leave, to spend July in the UK and Europe.

 

First day of the rest of my life!

Goodness me, I can’t believe I’m blogging so early in the morning, not to mention so early in the holiday!  Holiday?  Not sure what I mean by that – I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that my new life is that… but it does seem to be very relaxing today. I have a new sense of purpotstgehhjuio. But since Eleanor is sitting on my lap, keen to yhyhi participate in the blohgghinhg hexperiencebb, the sense of relaxation        and puhrpose may dwindle quickly……………….

 

It’s starting to feel real now…

So, here I am:  last day at work!  As of two hours’ time, I shall be unemployed once  more, putting my career on hold to spend more time with the family.  It seemed like a great idea back in January, but I have to say I’m a little nervous about it now.  At the moment, though, my chief emotion is excitement, that we’re at the end of what has been a long and exhausting year.  Enjoyable, too – I am going to miss many of the students (who all said very nice farewells last week) and the staff (many of whom are leaving the school and the country).  Still, I shall still be here and shall stay in touch with some people who aren’t leaving!  And who knows when I might be back to do a bit of supply work?!