home sweet home

The Village is very pleasant and quite cosy actually, aside from the ever-present mozzies.  There is a bank of filters to make the water drawn from the well drinkable.  When the sun shines, we have power, when it doesn’t shine, we have a generator, though when there is a fuel shortage, we have an early night.  Thankfully, we currently have enough fuel to cover off at least a few more cloudy days.  We also have slow wifi, mostly.

Accommodation is sparse, but functional, besides which I don’t have that much stuff!  To my surprise and delight I found half a box of Tetley’s in the kitchen, so between that and my box of 240 PG Tips, I should make it through the year; breakfast is the only time it is cool enough to take a hot drink.  The Common Room is brightly decorated and full of useful stuff; whiteboard for projecting movies onto, desktop fans for keeping cool, the ubiquitous travellers library of well read books, and a rowing machine (or piece of artisan furniture as I like to think of it).  It has a couple of sofas and some chairs covered in brightly coloured crochet rugs.  mmm… nice and cosy until discussion turns to that fact one of the cats having kittens on it and then the observations that both cats are full of fleas.  I think I’ll stick to the plastic patio chair…

Two lovely ladies come in and cook for us during the week, and they are very creative with limited ingredients, though I think it is best not to always ask about the provenance of meat of the day, suffice to say food miles are low, and I aint seen no cows.

We have 24×7 security which is great, because the guard dogs – Bob and Wycliffe – do more sleeping than guarding.  The cats are Salt and Pepper, though apparently its only Salt that keeps the rodents away.  The chickens don’t have names (which may mean they get to the table at some point).  I have a name for the rooster.

The water from our well is stored atop our 20’ water tower, which not only affords a great view of the surrounding countryside, but provides gravity fed showers.  Although we do have an electric shower, power permitting, I am now (accidentally) following the Wim Hof principle and have a glorious could shower twice daily.  I never thought I would enjoy a cold shower so much, but they are just so refreshing in this heat and humidity!

The compound is probably half an acre and has plenty of ground set aside for growing crops, which even has an irrigation system connected to the web, that’s Alexa for you!  As we are in the Northern Hemisphere it is technically autumn, but I think we just have slightly more or less heat, slightly more or less humidity and more or less rain showers through the year so it is a little more difficult to define ‘seasons’.

And finally, one of the other volunteers has an ‘app’ to confuse the internet into thinking we are in the UK, so we should be catching all the rugby over the coming months.  So in summary I think domestics and down-time will be just fine, and not distract me from the job in hand.