Our House

It is going to be weird returning to Australia as after 5 weeks here I am starting to feel at home. Our house, which used to be the Nursing Sisters Quarters, feels like home now. I am quite used to having to boil water for my bath/ shower with a jug and have my bath by candlelight since the light switch broke a couple of weeks ago. I am also getting good at tucking in my mosquito net and then crawling in for the night, checking the corners for mosquitoes before turning off my torch.

I will also miss Judy, our house help, when I leave. She is a good cook and also does our washing, makes our beds and does all the cleaning, as well as leaving a big pot of hot water on the wood stove for my bath. She also makes us fresh juice every day out of passionfruit and a couple of other tropical fruits which I haven’t been able to identify.

The house is just inside the hospital grounds, which has a barbed wire fence around it and only a couple of gates. There is a guard, armed with a bow and poison tipped arrow at the gate closest to our house, and if we come back late at night from visiting the Kleins we sometimes have to wait for him to unlock the gate.  He must remember us now as lately the gate has always been open when we get back. I came back from one of my evening walks down the airstrip with my camera out and the guard saw it and asked me to take a picture of him and of course I agreed (I had wanted a picture but wasn’t sure how to ask him) and he rushed back inside and got his bow and arrow, and then knelt down with the bow drawn and ready to shoot.  It made a great photo and I certainly wouldn’t want to be in his sights if he was serious about shooting