Frustrations!!!

I was going to write an separate post for each of these topics but they all fit under the same category (Malawi) anyway and this is more than adequate whining!

1) I just spent an hour trying to figure out the stupid water bill!! Granted, it should not have taken me that long but in the end, I have deduced that they have made a 8500 kwacha ($60)mistake! It took so long to figure it out because the bills are very confusing and if I do not have it all laid out very clearly I will never be able to explain it when I go into the office! The huge complicating factor is that they send out overlapping bills! What I mean is: I receive a bill that is due on say, September 31 so I go in and pay it on Sept 25 but by then the bill that is due on Oct 31 has already been sent out and includes the September balance!! (I tend to pay bills fairly close to the due date and never remember having this issue in the States but maybe it is because the bills were so much easier to read and the odds of the company making a mistake so much lower). So the only way to actually have your bills and your receipts match up is to pay the bill pretty much as soon as you get it - that's reasonable!! EXCEPT - the bills are not actually sent on a specific, consistent day of the month so you don't know when to expect them AND they go to John's office... the only thing I can say about the girl responsible for sorting the mail is, "bless her heart"... In short, actually receiving the bill in a timely manner is difficult. However, I do feel a small sense of accomplishment at figuring it out and tomorrow morning will traipse down to the main water board office to (attempt) to remedy the situation



2) Compound staff - I will attempt to keep this short as to go into too many details would be excruciatingly painful. We and especially John have spent literally HOURS in the last week trying to get everyone to get along. It seems that while we were in the US in October some sort of conflict arose between the guards and the gardener. However, no one told us this, we have just gradually been discovering it. It all started because we left cell phone minutes for them to use to call one of our friends if there were problems while we were gone. They only called her once yet all 5 cards of units were gone... An issue since they knew those units were for a specific purpose. When we addressed the one guard and one gardener who have phones all the issues began to leak out. Then to compound the whole thing we also had a misunderstanding over some ufa (flour) and we have been inundated with requests for money that has left us a little short when dealing with all these guys. Add to that language barriers and a VERY indirect culture where backbiting and gossip seems to be fairly common yet no one will actually rat out the other person. I could go on forever on with the he said, she said but... In the meantime, the gardener seems to have recovered from his week of pouting and we will have a compound meeting tomorrow to discuss the issues with everyone at once!

3) Karis's bed - Karis has learned to climb out of a crib so was ready for a "big girl bed". We anticipated this and brought a bed rail back from the States with us. So we asked Baylor if we could have one of the single beds that are in storage. They said no problem but would have to find mattresses (a little odd that there were no mattresses since they had them before but...) and arrange transport. No problem. Other component to the story is that we actually had a single bed when we first arrived and had to take the head board off of it to move it into our guestroom. Since we were just using it as a daybed we left the headboard off of it. Later it was borrowed by another doctor and then eventually went back to storage as we didn't need it. But we still have the headboard... I think we attempted to tell the office to bring us the bed without the headboard...
So, about 2 weeks after the request we have a bed delivered. It had a headboard so was a different bed but that was fine. However, we soon realized we could not get this down the hall with the headboard and the headboard was designed differently and won't come off!! So the next day I see the driver and ask him to please bring us the bed with the missing headboard. he said okay and seemed to know exactly what i was talking about. That same day John went into the shed to look and there was no bed without a headboard or any other single beds for that matter! So that night we spent an hour taking the doors off 2 different doors to get the bed into her room. Not a huge deal and it worked out fine. THEN the next day John was doing something totally unrelated (looking for a screwdriver for his computer) and went into a different shed and found multiple single beds, including the one without the headboard! This is particularly frustrating because the office has inventoried things on multiple occasions yet never seem to know where anything is!

However, we do enjoy living here! But we are seriously considering moving into a flat next year for a variety of reasons, eliminating our need for guards and a gardener not the least of which!!