Last Loo Update Ever

Our loo is working like a dream.
No smell, no flies.
Clever Charles.
I sense the potential for a patent.
I have finally put on a proper corrugated roof, and added a vent (I used a piece of standard 100mm diameter plastic drain pipe, which has one end in the business end of things, and the other sticking up above the roof slightly.
The top is covered to keep visiting flies out, and resident flies in (they die at the top of the pipe, trying to get out into the light)
I covered this with a piece of mosquito net that I cut quietly from a corner of her Barbie Princess mosquito net that has butterflies Velcro’d to the sides)
Anyway, all systems go her.
Good job all round.



View from the loo

Imagine the life of a fly born at the bottom of my pit latrine.
Once you have got over the poetic beauty and ingeniousness of the design, you have a quick feed (yum), perhaps copulate, lay a few eggs, and then, while regurgitating and sucking up more food, glancing up you a misty white light. You fly up and up, and up further still until you get to the source. The glorious warm golden sunshine. Fields of fresh cow manure await your pleasure.
But you are stuck behind some mosquito net, and after two days of trying to get out, the last thing your tiny little brain registers, is that you have been foiled by a master.

Water Sustainablility

I now know why people go to war over water.
I watch mine like hawk.
I put a padlock on our tank yesterday because the neighbours little four year old played with it and left it open for a couple of minutes.
Everybody was very aplogetic but I wasn't going to risk our water on a pre-schooler.

Other than showering the kids at the lodge once per day we have become entirely self sufficient.

At the moment we have enough water for Sonja and I to each use eight litres to bucket bath, and we get through about 15 litres per day for cooking, drinking, tea and coffee etc, and washing hands and brushing teeth.
Dogs, kittens and chickens use up another 5 litres
We use a further 10 litres or so for cleaning and rinsing the dishes.
So, if I included kids sharing a 20 litre shower, we can get by on 66 litres per day, for a family of five, plus pets.
An average bath is about 200 litres, so 66 litres is pretty good.

If nobody screws with my tank.

Caleb & Mila Update

Caleb and Mila have both slotted into this new lifestyle with absolute ease.
They head off to pre-school each morning where they are the only two English speaking kids.
Mila comes home every day and tells me all about “my courser friends”
She is planning to marry Nti-Nti, Lindile’s son.
Sorry Adam. Such is the fickle hand of fate.
We have gone from a good Jewish boy, to a good Xhosa boy.
Her main concern is that her ring, which she has, will not fit her when she is a “grown up”.

Caleb, a little concerningly, but much to his mothers delight, (she wants her children to be interesting and free spirited) is going to marry a Prince.
Don’t you mean a Princess buddy?
No! I want to marry a prince.
Who knows, I might get to walk three children down the isle.


Their Xhosa is coming on pretty quickly and they are always singing songs in Xhosa and playing with all the nearby village kids.
They have a great time and are always doing something that gets them dirty.
Very happy and carefree children.
They normally get home from pre-school (a good walk in anybodies book) at about 1pm, and we try and enforce a nap, or at least quiet time.
Then they dash off climbing trees, visiting the lodge finding new suckers to read to them, playing cars with the village kids etc.
I have had to rescue Caleb at least once from the top of a tree. His bloody naughty little sister has no fear and he follows her blindly. I often see his little three year old body higher than I would like.



Mila very nonchalantly came to me last week when I was working on my laptop, she strolled across and said, “Um Dada (she has slipped form English Dad into Xhosa dada), Dada, Caleb fell out of a tree, our climbing ship tree, that we were pretending to be dragons in, and he hit his head on a branch when he fell down, and now he is lying on the ground, and dada, I am thirsty.”
True as bob, there he was under the tree on his back.
I had Skye informing me that she held up seven fingers and he said she was holding up three.
And “he said his name is Gerald.”
“Yes, thanks darling” through gritted teethe.
He seems fine though. He still has a big graze on his forehead, and when he sporadicaly gets a lot of bites (ticks and fleas) I tell Sonja that when he takes his shirt off he looks like a little boy covered in the pox from a 17th century Bruegal painting.
Them scratching their head isn’t always lice. A lot of the time it is chicken mites.

Mila has a habit of talking at the top of her voice, no volume control ever developed in that one, and when I am showering the three of them down at the lodge, in one 20 litre shower to save water, she always waits until there are other people showering before shouting out
“DADA, DID YOU BRING THE LICE SHAMPOO DOWN, DADA?
“I HAVE GOT BAD LICE DADA”

I have become adept at sneaking in and out when nobody is around.

Skye Update

Skye has written several blog updates that her parents never posted.
She is asleep now, so I still can’t post them. Bugger.
She spends her days doing home schooling and enjoying life here and down at the lodge.
Her day starts at 06h00 when she gets up with the rest of us.
At 07h15 she walks Caleb and Mila to Xolisa’s hut, a bit further up the hill, where they walk to pre-school from.

She has about 1 and a half hours home schooling with Sonja (normally in the morning), and another hour and a half with me in the afternoons.

We are most conscious that the change in lifestyle is most drastic for her.
She moved away from all of her friends and activities and had just started enjoying movies and children’s sleepover parties, school team sports, and hanging out with all of her friends.
We compensate for this poorly, but are very aware we need to make more of an effort.
She is very bright, and makes home schooling pretty easy.
I am teaching her Natural Sciences a full grade (year) ahead of her peers, and her literacy is really good and we are well ahead of where she needs to be.
The biggest challenge is keeping her from getting bored with the work.
There is scope to introduce a lot of proejct work that she can do on her own.
There are not many village kids around of her age group so she spends a lot of time with us and other adults.
This becomes really challenging as a parent as you constantly need to be maintaining a balance between being free spirited and a young adult, and having her understand that some decisions are not hers to take.

She spends a lot of her free time pottering around the lodge or horse riding.
She has cut a deal with the village guides who offer horse riding as an activity that she helps clean the riding gear once each week in exchange for being able to ride one of the horses home after the rides.
Looking down from our hill I will see her riding bareback and completely alone, through the long yellow grass, taking the horse to the homestead a couple of kilometres away.
She loves it.
There are also a surprising number of children that visit the lodge with their parents, so quite often she makes friends for a few days with these families and goes canoeing, fishing or horse-riding with them.
We also make sure we fit in the usual family walks and fishing and swimming in the river.
She is slowly picking up Xhosa and seems much more confident greeting villagers and making simple conversation.
She loves all the farm animals and especially now as there are an abundance of baby lambs, kids and calves.
No baby chickens though!
Another favourite is driving the bakkie (pick-up).
I used to let her sit on my lap and steer, and told her when she could open and close the gates we have to drive through on her own, then I would teach her to drive (they are tricky gates, made of barbed wire and loose poles. No hinges here)
Well of course she did, quickly, and so a couple of weeks ago I put her in the driver’s seat.
After explaining which was the clutch, the brake and the accelerator (no automatic here), she calmly put us into first, did a perfect take off, and drove off beautifully. After a couple of minutes pottering along a 4-wheel drive track in first, I explained to her how to change into second, which she again did beautifully and drove us all the way to the lodge and parked.
She has done this a couple of times now, and I proudly reckon she id one of the only 9 year olds in her class to be able to drive a big, heavy bakkie.
Sonja and I have also taken her with us the few times we have had to go away to meetings.
When I drove to Cape Town she was so excited about having some one-on-one time, and loved little things like over-nighting at a B&B and using their little complimentary soaps, and finding a chocolate on her pillow.
Sonja will take her and Mila with her in a few weeks when she has to fly to JHB for business and Skye is so excited about flying again.
She is a great child and we need to make much more of an effort to make sure this remains a positive experience for her.
We’ll do our best, but definitely sometimes fall asleep knowing you could have done better, or been more patient.

Shelter from the Rain

We can finally sit outside and drink coffee on our veranda when it is raining.
It went up in several easy steps.





I had two young men from the village, Wankie and Lindile, helping me cast the concrete.
When we returned from a half our break for lunch the wet cement had kitten prints (several tracks in and out), dog prints (with his back legs showing clearly how he drags his nails with each step) village chicken prints (small) broiler chicken prints (large) Caleb’s foot prints. (I was slightly in the dog box for giving him a bollocking and slipping in a half hearted and frustrated whack (we are a non smack household, mostly, sometimes, when we are being good parents and not grumpy adults)

We got rid of Caleb’s prints, but left all the rest as a memento.

It was raining gently the other evening and it was with great pleasure that I sat under the roof and had a quiet whiskey, watching the lagoon and the coastline floating up at me though the mist in the moonlight.

This morning (Sunday) I had coffee with a good book in a light drizzle, and was distracted by a pod of at least 50 dolphins working their way across the bay.

The famous $135.00 egg

We definitely have the best chicken coop in the village.



We built a simple A-Frame structure that we split into two levels.
The top is enclosed and has special laying boxes, and the bottom is fenced.
There is a simple gang plank leading upstairs that can be raised at night.
The sides of the coop open to enable the easy collection of eggs.

We used to have our single $115 dollar egg, and a cowardly rooster.



The eggs situation now reads $135 dollars for minus 2 eggs.
We bought a lot more feed, and in order to stimulate egg-laying, we took three of our store bought eggs and cleverly let them rot over a week in the nesting boxes.
They made a pleasant popping sound when I hurled them out (in a high arc) into the surrounding grassland.
So we are now two eggs down.

At least they know who is in charge.
I lectured them severely one evening when they were all in and promised not to let them out until they had produced and egg. Just one. A single one between them.
I would have lasted longer than the seven days, but two snuck out when I opened the coop to check on the seventh day.
I didn’t give up so much as give in.
In seven days we never saw an egg of theirs.



The women in the village tell me I need to feed them crayfish eggs.
Any idiot knows this will never work.
I have a farming manual that tells me that based on the body shape (very narrow hip, very long legs) I should “Good laying hens should have … wide apart pelvic bones, and a white, large, moist vent. If they have the opposite wring their necks.”

I have heard stories of lonely farmers, typically from New Zealand, and chickens vents and will not examine mine to see if the they are white, large and moist. However, I would wring mines necks if my kids stopped paying attention for a second.
By the way, I didn’t collect the prawns especially for the chickens. Don’t be silly. I am not one of these sandal making new age tie die sorts.
I was going to use them for fishing bait, and when the weather turned bad decided not to waste them.
Quite a few coincidently did have yellow spawn on their tails.

But that was before the week incarceration, and so this didn't work either, and my results remain at minus two.

Apology Two

Dear Mum and Dad stop Sorry we haven’t written for a while stop Please call off the Minty’s and the rest of the family stop We are all well stop It won’t happen again stop Sedgwick still alive stop Still no eggs stop Kids dirty but fine stop Parents tired but well stop Kitten crapped on bed stop Caught a fish stop See you on the 1st stop Please bring lots of wine stop Enough to drink and leave a lot behind stop Crayfish ordered stop Long drop odourless stop Much love stop

Apology One

Dear Urban Legend

Your Nome de gare, Andrew, is singular but I am convinced that you cannot possibly be just one person.
Your vast reservoir of knowledge is too great for a single individual.
I suspect that you are a secret team of Cambridge and Oxford biogas academics (built around a nucleus of St. Stithians Add-Maths protégés).
You know too much.
Your insights and instincts are too chillingly accurate to be the brilliance of only one person.

But what is your secret project?
What is at the bottom of our long drop that you need so badly?
How can I get my hens to lay eggs?
Are you watching me on Google Earth as we speak?
What is a Walvis Peeter?

Will it be silly of me to bucket bath tonight, out in a chilling wind, both my feet in a metal tub, while around me lightning and thunder crack and roar and explode, my hand silhouetted against the flashes of lightning, held up high pouring water over myself with a metal bowl?

Why did we go offline?