Fame !!

Last year, Esther won a writing competition at school. It was an international competition aimed at young writers. Several children from Esther's school were among the prize winners. 

Their prize? Their stories were to be published in a book! So Esther now has her name in print; an international author at the age of 6! 

A couple of weeks ago we finally received the printed copy of the book:

Of course, grandparents have also received their own copies too! It's been so much fun to read through the stories inside and see how the children have been encouraged in their writing skills from an early age. There are many children's stories, from the UK to far-flung places such as Dodoma, but my favourite story will always be the story on page 19!

Two

There has been great excitement in the Parker home this weekend, with Joel turning TWO!

Of course, a birthday celebration takes a bit of preparation! Joel and his toddler friends from our Dodoma Friday morning Tots + Mums group were getting together in our garden to celebrate Joel's birthday with a Teddy Bear's Picnic. 

Early on Friday morning, after waving Ben and Esther off for school at 7:15, I donned my apron, turned on the computer to "google" Teddy Bear Cake images and then set to work transforming the rectangular cake I'd made on Thursday into a teddy-bear shape.

Being somewhat less than artistic (some may say artistically-challenged!), creating cake shapes and icing them is always a little stressful for me! However, with the help of paper templates, a pencil, scissors, a sharp knife and some very gooey icing, Joel and I managed to follow the below procedure and come up with a teddy-ish cake for his morning picnic!

 

 

 

Joel seemed to like the finished product! We even found some teddy-shaped biscuits to add to the party-picnic!

The picnic, complete with teddies, was fun for all:

Two candles on the teddy-cake were blown out by the birthday boy and the cake was cut...

As I mentioned previously, the icing I'd made was rather gooey! It tasted good, but it seems rather a lot of it ended up on Joel's face, T-shirt and shorts!! But what's a birthday without proof of chocolate indulgence?? 

After food, it was time to play! Joel and his 5 guests certainly enjoyed themselves, getting into the party-picnic spirit on our climbing frame and by the sandpit!

It must be so much fun to be two, if Joel and his friends are anything to go by! (I wish I could remember that far back!!).

Trail Blazer

I am still without a washing machine. There is a new machine in the offing (horray!), but the logistics of physically getting this machine from the shop in Dar es Salaam to our home in Dodoma still need to be worked out.

Meanwhile, the extra work has been piling up quickly.  I have been given lots of help by Pendo to hand-wash much of our laundry. In Tanzania, it is considered very inappropriate- in fact, it is offensive- to ask other people to wash underwear (understandably so!) and so there are many items which I either handwash myself or put by for the times I can use a neighbour's machine. I also prefer to have sheets, towels, tea-towels and dish-cloths machine-washed, along with Andrew's pilot uniform and any new items of clothing we picked up in England, as hand-washing tends to wear clothes out much faster than machine washing.
 The lack of independence to wash dirty laundry quickly when I want to is frustrating. However, I feel terrible complaining about it here in Dodoma, where so many people do not possess and probably never will possess a washing machine.However, having been used to having a machine, it is now difficult to go without!
Friends have been very generous in letting me run many loads through their machines, but I am really looking forward to getting our new machine in my own house to wash towels, sheets etc as and when I need to, without inconveniencing others.

On the plus side, since my machine's insides were fried by the dreadful power surges we regularly experience in Tanzania, the staff at MAF have become very pro-active in ensuring that our MAF compound homes are now equipped with voltage-protectors, to prevent the same disaster from happening again!
So the attack on my machine has not been in vain, as we are now the proud owners of a "fridge guard" surge protector on my super-useful freezer:

...and we have also had a wonderful new voltage protector installed where a machine would be:

 

Now all I need is the new washing machine to plug in!

Good News

It's funny what can cheer me up in Dodoma! A few months ago, I was a little upset when Dodoma's supply of margarine ran out, leaving us with the ever-present "Blue Band" as our only choice of spread. Blue Band does not taste too dreadful, but its ingredients are somewhat suspicious: 70% palm oils, preservatives, "artificial creamy flavours", "colourants" and "more than 3% salt"... And it has a distinctly plastic feel about it once it is spread on my bread, plus an anti-melting agent which is great for storage purposes but not so great on my toast- disappointingly solid rather than melting like butter! Eating Blue Band is rather like eating a bad take-away meal on a long journey: you know it's bad for you, but you eat it anyway as there's not much choice.

It was happy news for me when margarine finally arrived back in Dodoma 2 weeks ago, after the margarine-famine of several months! The bit I like best about "Nawar" margarine is the lovely line, "no cholesterol". I do not spy any such claim on Blue Band's bright yellow + blue exterior! So it's good news for me to be able to have access to something a little healthier! Horray for Nawar!

Other good points over the past couple of weeks have been enjoying Esther's class assembly one Friday:

..and Ben in action as Zacchaeus (climbing up a tree) in his class assembly the following Friday:

I enjoyed the great acting from both of them as well as their class-mates!

It's also good news to have Joel back to full health after a nasty bout of croup left him listless and miserable for a week. What an awful cough he had, but how wonderful to have him back to his smiling, talkative little self.

Yesterday, the children came rushing inside to share their own good news: they had found a chameleon! I'm not so sure that it was such good news for the chameleon, especially as he had been placed on the head of a very excited Esther!

Esther was rushing around giving him a lift and showing him off to our lunch guests who had come for a BBQ yesterday. He was soon lifted to the safety of our hedge and the 5 children in our garden were able to enjoy him without endangering him! We had a lovely afternoon with the new MAF family who are now living on Compound B and with 4 of the teachers from Esther and Ben's school. Great company and fun to sit outdoors and enjoy the garden on a slightly overcast day!

This morning, the children were VERY excited with the good news that it had rained all night! Esther and Ben stomped off to the school bus in their wellies, but Joel escaped before I could kit him out in his wellies- and this is where I found him, having a wonderful time and making the most of the marvellous mud!

A Different World

Our time in England already feels like a far-off dream as we now immerse ourselves back into life here in Africa.
Dodoma is so very different from England. Here are a few of the differences that we enjoyed during our UK Home Assignment...

Being close to family
Time with our extended family was a real highlight. It was especially great for the children to enjoy time with their grandparents. During the 8 weeks in England, we shared many family celebrations, including 6 family birthdays and of course Christmas!

Christmas Day itself we celebrated with my parents and brother- with a traditional English Christmas dinner, complete with a fat turkey!

Over the New Year we had a wonderful week with Andrew's parents:

Esther, Ben and Joel loved seeing their cousins in England! The 5 cousins enjoyed the times they had to play together. The boys looked super-smart in their a specially-made Tanzanian shirts which we brought back with us from Dodoma:

Transport
It was fun for all of us to enjoy travelling on trains that were fast, efficient, actually ran on time and which were more frequent than once a week! We had lots of travel to do during the 8 weeks, for various engagements, so it was great to be able to get around by train -a real novelty for the children in particular.

Tube travel in London was also different. The children have used the London tube before but now that they are a bit older, Esther and Ben had many more questions. They were really interested in how the tube works, how the tunnels were built, who travels on them, how fast they go, why we don't have a tube system in Tanzania and why isn't there a buffet carriage on the tube to buy a cup of tea, like on the Virgin Trains??

Escalators are also a novelty when you live in Dodoma!

Time with friends
Time with friends and family is precious when you know you don't get to see each other often. We so appreciated the opportunities we had to see and spend time with many our friends during this trip!

We even got the chance to make new friends... (!!)

 ...which leads me on to another big difference:

The weather!
From the heat and dry of Dodoma to the freezing cold of snowy England! What great timing to be there when snow arrived and to experience England's Winter Wonderland! Although I have to say, Joel was most UNimpressed by the cold, wet stuff that made him so uncomfortable! He just could not believe his eyes- nor the pain in his frozen toes!

Things To Do, Places to Go
We made the most of opportunities to take the children out. There is so much available in England for children and families to visit and to do! A stark contrast to Dodoma, where the culture, the obvious lack of funds, dry and arid location and a different outlook mean that there are no museums, parks, safari parks, water-parks etc. etc.

It was fun to visit some London museums. We met dinosaurs...

...Canadian bears ("watch out, Joel"!!)...

...and the mighty Blue Whale at real-life scale- who made the huge animals we have seen in Tanzania look like midget creatures!

There was also plenty to learn at the Science Museum:

Back up north, the children and I had a great day out with Nana +Grandad at the Museum of Liverpool:

Ben and Joel were big fans of the interactive displays at the museum; it was hard to drag them away!

Cold, wet weather outside meant that Esther, Ben and Joel became big fans of indoor play centres. Southport's "Play Town" was a favourite venue and within walking distance of the lovely flat where we were based for 6 weeks- which brings me to another difference between our UK and Tanzania experiences...

Homes

In Dodoma, we feel very much at home in our single-storey MAF house, where it is nice and cool in a hot climate. Our lounge leads through an archway to the bedrooms and the children rarely need to negotiate stairs. Our windows are all placed high up in the walls to prevent the glaring sun from shining in, which would make the house unbearably hot. This means the children are not tall enough to to see out of our windows, so if they want to know what's going on around outside, they pop outside through our fly-screen door. 

In Southport, where a very kind friend from our church let us stay in her lovely, warm, comfortable and wonderful flat, "home" for 6 weeks looked quite different from home in Africa. Imagine the delight of Esther and Ben when we told them that we would be staying in a flat on the 8th floor and would take a lift to get to the front door! We rarely encounter stairs here, never mind a lift! We had to establish an informal rota so that the children could take turns pressing the buttons to go up or down!

Wow! A lift!

When we got up to the flat, floor-to-ceiling windows meant incredible views across Southport and up along Lord Street:

 
As far as Ben and Joel (and Andrew!!) were concerned, the icing on the cake was the fact that these windows faced a very busy building site with all manner of mighty machines to watch:

And that's not all! Right next to this was the local Fire Station, where fabulous fire engines came and went and practised their weekly drill!! What better view could there be?

It was a boy's paradise, right up in the clouds of the 8th storey! Although the children missed their Dodoma  freedom, where they can run outside whenever they choose and play in the African sunshine on the safety of the MAF compound, they also enjoyed the novelty of staying in a place that was so much fun by virtue of being so very different.

Finally, our 8 weeks in England also meant lots of speaking engagements, meetings and MAF events: a very different type of work from our normal family life in Dodoma. Of course, we made plenty of time for cake at those MAF events- including these amazing cakes created by a very talented friend in Burscough! 

Now it's back to the nitty-gritty of daily work and school in Africa. It is good to be back home again, to see friends here, to no longer be living out of suitcases and to get back into routine, but it's also good to have fantastic, happy memories to look back on of our 8 very different weeks in England.