So the main purpose of our shopping trip to South Africa was for me to get paint to fix up the house we've moved in to. My friend, Sue, and I traveled together to split the costs of tolls, fuel, accommodation, etc, making the trip a bit more affordable. We decided to take my smaller vehicle to save on fuel costs as the bigger one chugs fuel and often overheats on long trips. However, we did not account for the fact that I'd be bringing back about 100L of paint plus all the weight of the groceries. Once we packed up the car with all of our stuff, we were sitting VE ... Read More »

    Just got back from a quick shopping trip to Louis Trichardt with a friend...had an interesting experience at the ATM...couldn't get my card to work and turned back to tell my friend to tell her it wasn't working. The guy behind us came and took my card telling me I just need to wipe it off...so he pressed some buttons on the machine to distract me and then took my card and swiped it with a little device he had in his hand hidden underneath his wallet which he was holding. Then he wiped the card on his pants and gave it back to me, making it look as if I just needed ... Read More »

     We have a new gardener, Casper, the brother of our old gardener, who came directly out of the African bush and into our garden. Naison, a WONDERFUL gardener, decided that he wanted to move on with his life and get into buying and selling, but he felt bad leaving us in a new house with no gardener. So he said that he would bring his brother onto the property and train him how to run the gardens. Naison went to his home village, couldn't find the brother he had in mind, so grabbed his younger brother, Casper, and said, “Pack your stuff, you're coming with m ... Read More »

    Moving into a new place means there are usually things to fix: we had a leaking deck roof and the maid's roof was leaking, light fixtures or switches weren't working, our phone lines in the house weren't working for over a week, etc. However, this past week we've started to experience water problems at the house. We are entering into “the dry season” in Zimbabwe as the rainy season (Dec-March) has ended. Usually there are a certain amount of water cuts that take place when water is short in the country. However, this week we experienced low water pressure like we' ... Read More »

   We've been debating on whether or not to sell our 1996 Honda CRV and to get another vehicle. The CRV always has something going wrong and our mechanic says that it is at the point where you are going to continually be putting in maintenance work. Currently the head gasket needs changed as the vehicle keeps overheating on long shopping trips across the border and just yesterday we heard a new rattling sound—great! We got to import the vehicle duty free when we first came into the country...however now duty is 65% on luxury vehicles. This means that we purchased the vehicle f ... Read More »

Let me tell you a bit about my week and how everything just seems to go wrong:

Monday: I wake up to find out that our maid up and left over the weekend as we were away!  No warnings, just gone!  So I spend over 2 hours just doing dishes and spend the morning doing some unexpected cleaning.  We had purchased a new faucet in Read More »

When we got Agnes, our maid, we knew she was a good maid who was trustworthy but that she also would bring drama into life.  Many times when things were communicated to her, she'd get so worked up in her head and misunderstand what was said and, as a result, would act brashly.  But we still decided to take her on as a maid since she was overall a good worker and was trustworthy.  When we moved her onto the property of the old house we were living in, she had SO MUCH STUFF!  Truckloads of belongings!  Because we didn't have a gardener living on the property, she was able to occupy both the gardener an ... Read More »