Its beginning to look a lot like christmas

What to say, what to say….it hasn’t been a particularly eventful couple of weeks in meheba, and that suits me just fine. Jeremy is feeling much better, which is quite good because his birthday was the 19th and no one wants to be sick on their birthday! Alice, our amazing super woman housekeeper, helped me bake a cake (no small feat over coals) for his birthday and we made (soy) tacos, one of our favourite meals here. We had a good old gin and tonic to ward off malaria and ring in his 22nd year in style. All and all I think it was a good celebration! I’m pretty excited that I’ll be celebrating my birthday here this year as well. My second birthday in Africa...woot!!

My friend Sara is coming to visit next week and I can barely contain my excitement. She is busy shutting down FOGE operations in Kala right now. FORGE is moving out of Mwange and Kala as UNHCR is shutting down Mwange entirely and Kala population has dropped more than 60% since Sara got there in July due to repatriation. Sara is moving to the Democratic Republic of Congo to work for FORGE there in January and is coming to Meheba to study how some of our projects run. She’ll be here a week and then is taking a much needed vacation with her good friend, ME!! We’re leaving December 13th and heading to Lamu Island and Malindi Beach in Kenya, then down to Zanzibar for Christams, and finally ending on the lake in Malawi for New Years before heading our separate ways. I’m not sure when I’ll get to see her again, so I’m pretty pumped about getting to spend so much time together and doing such a fun trip. Lamu island is supposed to be amazing; there are no motor vehicles allowed on the island so the only transport is donkeys! Malindi Beach is a town with a thousand year history and is most recently famous for their Italian food of all things! Hopefully I’ll get to see some old friends from my first trip to Tanzania when I’m in Dar and Zanzibar; Zanzibar is one of my favourite places on earth and I’m excited to be getting back there. I hear Malawi is just gorgeous and hopefully Jeremy will be hopping a bus to come meet us for New Years. We’ll see if he can make it, the bus ride is about 10-12 hours.

As for life in Meheba, the rains are starting to make things a bit more difficult, and a lot more green! I feel as though I live in a completely new place now that everything is so green and lush. Its a far cry from the dried grass and dead trees we arrived to. Its really gorgeous, but I had such an odd feeling the other day when one of my staff members remarked that everything being so green and lush reminded her of Christmas and New Years. Funny, because I was having the exact opposite reaction! I heard Christmas music playing the other day and was shocked. My first reaction was ‘Why on earth are they playing Christmas music this early!?!’ until I realized that its almost December. Holy cow, its almost December. This will be the first Christmas I’ve spent away from my family, and I admit thats pretty hard for me to swallow. Of course, sipping pina coladas on a gorgeous beach in Zanzibar will probably help ease the pain a bit…