The Christmas Weekend

The Christmas weekend produced pleasant surprises when we made a significant amount of new friends. Christmas Eve we met at a Wycliffe Bible Translation Guest House in Accra where party games and a Christmas bring and share tea took place.



Then on Christmas day we had another invite to a larger gathering for a Christmas Day Party with a "Present Swap" and steal option, hard to explain, but it was fun....here we met another 80+ people, (mainly US and EU citizens working in Ghana, UNHCR, Amnesty Int, NGO's, Schools and others)



And finally yesterday we splashed around until our skins were wrinkled in the private of the company office pool.

On reflection, this Christmas had no peer pressure of what presents the children recieved, no bloated "I ate too much" feelings, in fact we only bought a box of Mars for the sweet part this year and it came with a free mug. It was hard to actually feel it was Christmas, with the temperature at 30+ degs and the humidity still quite high. For many here in Africa Christmas is a big burden since they don't even have the basics and go through the festive season not able to give to their own what they would if they had the means - it's humbling.

Matthew swims his first length......

Happy Christmas to all "liveafrica" readers....
................it's our first African Christmas...

Plane lands at 2.00am - house on fire by 7.00am

Just as dramatic as it sounds, BA had a plane fault which took 4 hours to rectify and then only by swapping planes, so Sarah and Charis arrived in Accra at 2.00am, 1 hour in Immigration and Baggage reclaim and then we made it to a sleepy house by 3.10am....sat and chatted after waking Karen for a few minutes, and that made about 23 hours for my day!!. Sleep atlast..

So then I thought I'll wake at 7am and get to work ready for the management meeting, well at 7am there was this crazy banging noise on our front gate...really frantic and shouting, loud shouting, so with a start and nothing but underpants and T shirt (too much info I know) I ran out and tried still in the twilight zone to understand what the commotion was about...."You're house is on fire!!" ....very quickly I could smell a pungent plastic burning and ran like lightening to the side of the house to find a fuse smouldering black up the side of the wall..... no flames, and the fuse I am advised must have been arcing for a while...

Shoes anyone?

Kumasi in the centre of Ghana has to be the small business centre of the country, everywhere people are trading to make a living and get on....very calm, green and nice change from Accra. The shoes we're over a vast area of the pavement, designed not for pedestrians, but for shoe shoppers....

"Umm, excuse me can I see the TV at the bottom there please, no that one, the one underneath the other 8 TV's, thanks can you get it out for me to look at? ....no it's okay I think I don't like the colour...byeeee...." :)

Meet Mr & Mrs A.....our first Ghana wedding...

Rodney and Sofia, wed this last Saturday at KICC

He's my first Project Manager, so really pleased for both of them.....very hot day to get married.

The Biggest African market - about to happen!

After recent years of rebellion and war, Kabila is now elected and Bemba has accepted the opposition role, the commercial heavy weights are now moving back in!!!. (MTN, Celtel, Vodacom, etc mobile operators) It's the size of western Europe and has only 300miles of road and no national operators for the mobile phone!!

In order to communicate in what effectively is a brand new country where when we consider infrastructure - the people will need phones... 1 + 1 = 10 here.... I hear I will be required to get a DRC visa early next year.... mmm - processing on this.

Life from the roof......

Spent the weekend after travelling to Abidjan last week checking the water tanks on the roof. This is the view of our junction, you can get anything you need at this junction, from car tyres to pineapples.

Water is not getting pumped through the mains to our house, so we have to get it sent in by truck. It could be said of the power aswell, we had another powercut just 48 hours since the last one this morning.

Anyway, life on the domestic front seems to be getting into a kind of routine, order water, turn the generator on, repeat several times a month/week.

The Chinese restaurant opened next door to us last week. "The Palace"...very nice.mmmm. It's the red roof here on the left..