Friday, 30 March 2018

Breakfast in Liwonde


Eating breakfast in the lodge at Liwonde can be a hazardous thing. Here is the anti-monkey patrol armed with water cannon

... and here is the planning committee working on a flanking movement

Perils of life

  

Er... there are crocodiles in this river. And all for scraping a living.

Wednesday, 21 March 2018

District work

Special facilities at a district hospital in Mangochi.
New bicycles for village workers (and an old bed frame).

Isolation facilities for examining suspected cholera cases

Official advice


Maternity ward

More or less potholes

Two posts below, I discussed the state of the roads. I am happy to provide an update, and even happier that there are fewer potholes to report on. (I know the title should be fewer, but it's a pun...)
I am hoping that this will be the final episode of a trilogy and not part of a quartet.
Not elegant but effective now they have bedded down a bit.

Much better!
Grit on top of mud. When spread out it looks OK but hasn't been rolled and has cut the road to one car width instead of two. We'll see what happens when it rains.

Saturday, 17 March 2018

An inflationary tale



Slow punctures are common here; mostly nails in the tread that are fixed by Kwik-Fit for about £1.80 a go. When I filled-up with petrol at Zomba, an hour from Blantyre, the front left was looking a bit floppy but not too bad. The Puma garage didn't have a working airline but they did have a boy with a stirrup pump, a bit of hose-pipe and a plastic bag to make a seal. He gave the pump some wellie while his friend held the pipe on the valve and the tyre reinflated to some unknown pressure.
He then pronounced that the valve was leaking and dribbled some water on it to prove the point; I was a bit dubious and decided to head for Liwonde and then Mangochi where there might be air-lines and pressure gauges.
All was well when I arrived and so I felt justified and parked-up for the night.
Next morning was another story; one clearly deflated tyre too soft to drive on. I was with colleagues and decided to do our work before coming back to change the wheel and get the valve replaced in the afternoon. But at noon, when we came back to change the wheel, behold there was a fully-inflated tyre!
A university driver emerged from under a mango tree where he had been waiting for someone, and claimed the credit. His car had an air pump powered from a car cigarette lighter, and he had seen the problem and decided to deal with it. 
Now, if I'd believed the man in Zomba, I'd have missed the low of deflation and the subsequent greater high of reinflation. Discuss.