New birth and other beginnings

Great excitement. On Monday Stepheni the gardener told us our chicken, Jet, had succeeded in hatching the eggs she had so carefully been sitting on for most of the last month. We are now the proud “grandparents” of two tiny chicks, beautifully soft and cute, but mottled brown and white rather than yellow. She is a very protective mother and won’t let the other hens, or us, anywhere near the chicks without a fight. It is lovely to watch her taking the food from the bowl and breaking it up into smaller parts for the chicks to eat, they rarely stray more than 20 cms away from her and nestle under her wings when she sits down. In addition there have been 6 eggs so the average cost per egg is now about £1.50 (28 eggs for £43) less the value of 2 chicks.

Irene’s Tanzanian name is Mama Davidi (Mother david - being our eldest son). She draws the line, however, at being called Bibi Cuku (Grandmother chicken)

Stepheni and Mama Asante were fascinated to see some photos of our grandson that Malcolm had been sent for Father’s Day. Particularly those taken at the zoo with exotic animals. In a country with elephants, monkeys, snakes, large spiders, multi coloured birds etc (all of which can be seen in this area now or in recent years) they were amazed to see……..Guinea Pigs. Still, they are native to South America rather than Europe which makes them quite exotic I suppose.

The rest of the week has passed pretty quietly. Malcolm went to Dodoma on Wednesday to discus the hospital’s repayments of debt owing to NSSF (about 100 million shillings!!! - enough to run the whole Hospital for 2 months. NSSF is similar to National Insurance. He wasn’t looking forward to it as he had just had a difficult telephone conversation with the area manager he was meeting, when she threatened to take him / the Hospital back to court. Fortunately the finances of the Hospital are slowly improving which means they managed to come to a reasonably amicable agreement (mainly that we agree that in a few weeks time we will agree the timescales for beginning to repay the debt, and pay something off in the meantime) and he still remains out of Tanzanian prison!

It is also almost the start of the beginning of a new financial year which means that he will need to carry out stock takes and prepare to finalise the accounts. The new accountant should join the Hospital on 1^st July so there will be a few months to hand over the work.

Building work is being completed at the Hospital. The new Nursery for premature babies has just been opened – the technology is simple with babies kept in baby baths rather than incubators, and the tiled room kept warm by a simple heater.. but it is a big improvement on the previous room which was unhygienic with mould on the walls because of the humidity. In addition a covered walkway is being built between the labour and maternity wards. Not so important at this time of year, but in the summer when the heavy monsoon rains come the last thing a woman in labour needs is a drowning as she is trolleyed between the wards!!!!!!! Talk about waters breaking! – more like the flood!!

Irene has returned to the filing office. Her ‘mission’ is to get additional shelving so that by the time we leave she will at least know there is enough space to store files for the foreseeable future – a mission she failed to achieve last year.

In the coming week:

- we meet with church leaders to distribute the second month’s ‘Hunger Fund;

- the new accountant starts on Wednesday

- stock taking and other end of year fun