Beliefs, beef and blowflies.

We have been back a week and I feel as if I have achieved nothing. Well, Virgos always feel they have achieved nothing even when they are flat out but I seem to have done little, yet again, beyond chasing up repairmen and technicians and overseeing repairs and work.

It is too boring to go into detail but the familiar faces have been here again, my team of electricians, Steve, Andrew, John and Mike and they fell about laughing the other day when I said I thought they were here so much they might as well move in. Or maybe they just liked me! That cracked them up even more.

In that two steps forward and one and nine-tenths steps back of Africa, we finally got the circuit breaker board sorted and fitted with names so we knew what was what, only to find, by me putting one and one or one and ten together, as it feels, that whatever was done to the house electrics has made quite a few of our sockets 'unstable' and as soon as we plug anything in, the circuit breakers are tripped.

There has been a lot of running up and down stairs to flip them back on which while a tad tedious, is, I am sure, good exercise for the body if not the mind.

We found the first of these Monday when plugging in my new laptop, which finally arrived courtesy of Hewlett Packard to replace the one I bought 18 months ago which overheats and has a dodgy hard-drive. Snap went the circuit breakers downstairs as soon as we turned on the power switch.

The laundry fluorescent light was doing the same thing and as I write, despite two attempts at repairs, is still doing the same thing. We are in the process of identifying all the now 'dodgy' power sockets so my merry band of electricians can come back next week to fix them. That at least is the theory.

And it would not be a week in Africa without countless power surges, mornings are worse, which turns off my monitor for 20 seconds and then turns it back on. Luckily I don't lose work but it is, to say the least distracting.

And it would not be a week in Africa without the internet working half the time instead of all of the time or half working most of the time where it gasps to pull up a page and then collapses in a heap. I know that weather plays a part and in the Wet there are more problems both with telephone and internet but I gather one downtime of seven hours was caused by vandalism on the line.

You might think, why would anyone vandalise a server or telephone line and I would say, everything in Africa is either valuable or useful or both and you take what you find where you find it. It's a pretty good bet the vandals don't have internet or telephone so why should they care? I mean that last as comment not criticism. Those of us who do not live with and in poverty have no idea how desperate people can become.

It reminded me to get organised and bring back some clothes, courtesy of friends and family, either for the children of Limited's brother who died or perhaps the orphanage. I really was not sure how old Limited was ... Africans like the Asians don't seem to age as fast as we do, at least in looks if not life.

But Limited told me his dead brother's children are grown up and Limited himself has a 16 year old, 13 year old and the little two-year- old I met when I arrived. He grinned when he said to me that she often talks about meeting the Muzungu!

'We call you foreigners Muzungu,' he explained.

'I know you do,' I replied and he looked slightly embarrassed although I am not sure why. Perhaps the Malawians think we know less than we do and I am sure on many counts they would be right.

I suppose they also know little about us and perhaps think we are not interested. I don't pry too much into their personal lives but then I don't do this with people who work for us in Australia. Maybe it is just me but I keep a distance which I think works better. But I am interested in African belief.

I bought a book when I was in Joburg called The Masque of Africa, Glimpses of African Belief, by V.S. Naipaul and I am looking forward to reading it.

I think the more one knows about the beliefs, traditions and myths of another culture the easier it is to understand. Apart from which it fascinates me. Africa in particular has been, and remains, a traditionally superstitious culture. Despite the overlay of religion, often evangelistic christianity, there is at work a deep and often destructive 'religion' of superstition and myth. Again, this is comment not criticism because some of it is sound and the destructive aspects are no more destructive than the superstition one finds in religions of all kinds.

Other than that it has been a pleasant week with something of a social life because some of Greg's colleagues have been up from Perth and others down from the mine at Karonga. We had a buffet dinner at the Sunbird hotel the other night, with them and some visiting analysts and then had dinner at Kumbali Lodge (see pic below of downstairs deck) on Tuesday night. 

They have a beautiful deck downstairs, overlooking the lawns and we sat on the couches and drank gin and tonic before dinner. Malawi Gin is so aromatic and I love it. I don't think it is quite as strong as some other gins which is good since they seem to serve doubles most of the time.

The sounds of night were drenched in a wonderfully reflective full moon as we sipped our G&T.

It is avocado season and our avocadoes are almost ripe.  We have a bumper crop, and while already huge, they are apparently still growing. Some have fallen from the tree and we have allowed them to ripen but they have a slightly watery taste as opposed to the creamy indulgence of a properly ripened avocado.

Photo: Kumbali Lodge restaurant.

Anyway, Kumbali decided to make the most of avocado season and did a Mexican night. The chilli con carne was much too chilli for me in that numb lips when you eat and wishing something else was numb the next morning, way. But it was tasty even as it was ultimately testing.

They served an entree in a glass with salsa at the bottom, avocado puree on top and finished off with sour cream. Freshly made nachos came with it and it was delicious although a bit on the large side.

Later, someone called us outside to look at the halo around the moon. We stood on the lawn, in the dark cool of night and looked up at the brilliant moon surrounded by a rose-coloured haze.

'Armageddon?' said one guest.

'Who knows,' said another.

'A volcanic explosion somewhere,' I ventured.

'Best place to be if it is Armageddon,' we agreed,  having noted the well stocked bar and comfortable chairs on the verandah.

It wasn't Armageddon of course and the only 'blaze exploding' that night was the chilli in our Mexican dinner.

I made avocado soup last Saturday when my Danish neighbour came over for dinner. She had been on her own for a week and Greg had gone up to the mine so I invited her over.

Luckily I decided not to do the 'generator dance' because I could not be bothered with a repeat of my last dinner where it kept shutting down and we had to keep going out to reboot it. I opted to cook some beef fillet to have cold and to make potato salad. I turned on the oven only to find it did not work. The cooktop did but not the oven.

Why was I not surprised? The electricians had been here while we were away to re-do the circuit breaker board and clearly something had been wrongly wired, not wired, or just forgotten.

I tracked down Manuel who has been doing all this work for us and he said the electricians would come over to fix it. They did, about three hours later and surprise, surprise, they  discovered that they had forgotten to re-wire the oven after they worked on the board. Why was I not surprised?

Photo: One of our avocadoes on the tree in the garden.

We actually get really nice beef fillet here from Foodworths and given that the chickens taste as if they have been soaked in engine oil and there is no lamb, apart from the carcases hanging by the side of the road on the way to the airport, the menu options are limited.

I know some of the Christian missionaries do buy this meat because I have seen them stop on the way back from the airport but they have God on their side. It beats the skinned rats which were sold along the roadside when we lived in Zambia but I am not adventurous enough to buy roadside meat with its 'blowfly coat.'

So beef fillet is a staple for us. I don't know why but it is actually quite inexpensive. Maybe it is buffalo but I don't care. The fillet is also great cold and avoids any cooking issues arising once guests arrive. I made some potato salad and Birgitte brought a salad of mango, apple, walnuts and red lettuce.

The avocado soup I made is so easy. I found the recipe online. Puree avocado with spring onions and garlic and a little lemon juice and then add chicken stock, salt and pepper, some cumin powder and thin with a little ice water. You could also add fresh chilli but I opted not to. I had some coriander looking a bit limp because Fred the gardener had clearly forgotten to water it while I was away, but still alive in my pots on the verandah but I would have liked more. I had to top up with parsley which is not the same.

Cold soups are great and I did a tomato and capsicum cold soup on Wednesday night when Greg invited three of his colleagues home for dinner. I also cheated and did the beef fillet and salad again. I had people working on things in the house all day and did not have the energy for generator issues, should they arise. By the time guests were due I was ready for my second chardonnay!

Apart from the fact that I have not been outside the house - Greg did the shopping on his way home from work - it has been a good week. I have been busy with my writing and have done some submissions for novels and poetry which may drop into the great cosmic ether as such things often do, but who knows?

The cake and biscuit tins are topped up and I have come up with a great apple cake recipe after stuffing up the one I was following and having to improvise. The recipe had pureed apples in the middle and sliced apple on the top, but, distracted as I was by the ever changing energy environment in which I live, I started creaming sugar and butter only to realise that the cup of brown sugar was meant to go in the water for the apple puree and the cake itself needed only half a cup of caster sugar. Bugger.

But all was not lost and I have been cooking long enough to know the science of it so I added more butter, flour and milk and made my cake with sliced apple in the centre as well as on the top and it turned out beautifully. The brown sugar actually gives a caramel taste to it and I will use it again.

And I have just cooked what looks like and probably is, half a bucket of rice. Greg spotted the black dots in the two jars of rice. Locally bought of course. The Basmati and Arborio, both imported are weevil free but my two lots of Malawi rice were riddled. I used to have the same problem in India particularly with flour, even when we kept it in the fridge and had to sift my flour before baking but it has not been such an issue here. I did buy some white dried beans which, upon cooking, I discovered were full of weevils and weevil tunnels, but, until today, my life has been weevil free.

So into the pot with water went the rice for a sluice and a soak and a rinse with what looked like hundreds of weevils floating to the surface. I don't like to kill things, even weevils, but if I had left them in it would have been black rice not brown. All that protein, Greg said, watching the poor things float on top of the saucepan.

It would have been high in protein of course which, apparently, according to studies done in the UK is what keeps the vegetarian Indians alive. It is an irony of course because they refuse to kill living things and yet only live because their food is full of weevils. This fact was discovered some years ago when Indians living in the UK, eating the same diet, had problems with lack of nutrition. The missing ingredient in food produced outside of India was weevils!

I have put a rice pudding in the oven with the now weevil-free, cooked rice and will use the rest to make salad and Hopping John - black-eyed beans, bacon, and of course rice. We and Limited and Andrew will probably be living on rice for a week. Greg may well be pleased that he has a few days at the mine because he is not a 'rice-boy' apart from rice-pudding.

Life in Malawi muddles along in its own way although I think the fuel shortage has finally been resolved. At least for now. It seems to be a recurring event due to foreign exchange issues which leaves a dozen tankers lined up at the Mozambique border waiting to come in.

I gather there was something of a protest by Malawians this week about the fuel problems and you can hardly blame them. Queuing for countless hours to fill the tank of your car must get tedious. It is something which we in the developed world rarely face. Then again, most things in the Third World take so long that it is hardly surprising development is so slow. What we can do in the West in a day can take a week or month in places like Africa.

For all the criticisms of democracy it still works better than any other system and by that I mean real democracy where the people have free and fair elections and where corruption is at a minimum not a maximum. Too often those of us who have it take it for granted.