The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
August 30
Some aspects of life everybody has to deal with in Blantyre – or at least everyone with money, which I guess is not that many – are staff & electricity.
The good.
Evans, or as he spells it, Evance. We were quickly introduced to the rather foreign concept of house staff through all the other stories from expats in town, and everyone seemed to have a tale of woe regarding theft, inefficiency, demands for loans, etc., etc. Interestingly, the concept of paying someone to spend their day potentially rifling through your personal life was not something we were particularly looking forward to, and before coming here weren’t particularly keen on involving ourselves in. This, we quickly realised, was not a particularly viable perspective with so many people in such desperate need for work – not to mention the time it would drain from our lives maintaining such a beautiful, but extensive garden. While sitting on Tom’s konde watching the sunset and sipping a Green one afternoon, not long into our time here, we had our staff issues sorted out then and there.
Tom & Janette had one of their staff currently working part time as a guard and gardener. Given he has a wife and seven children to support - the norm in this part fo the world - he was naturally quite keen on some extra work. This fit in perfectly with out plans, allowing him three extra days per week at our house playing ‘jack of all trades.’ Admittedly, when he asked us how to use the ‘floor machine’ on his first day as he pointed to the vacuum cleaner (carpet not being a big feature of many houses here), or when we saw his rather questionable attempts at ironing (you’re meant to iron the creases out of the clothes, right?), we had our doubts. Yet before long we realised we had stumbled upon a rather dedicated ‘house boy.’ Evance arrives at least half an hour early each day to give the Silver Stallion his morning bathing – cleaning cars is another national obsession here (and water, unlike in good old Oz, is something which falls in ready supply). He does our dishes, hand washes our clothes, polishes the floors, cleans the bathroom, sort of irons the clothes (unless I manage to hide them from him first), maintains the garden, tends the vegetable patch and takes care of any other odd jobs that we need doing that particular day. Despite our initial trepidation, this is definitely something we are becoming far too used to very quickly!
The bad.
Electricity & water, or lack thereof. Generally, when you flick the light switch at home you expect electricity. Most of the time, with a few turns of the tap in the bathroom or kitchen, running water is the presumed result. Think again. Blantyre, in all it’s claims as a ‘city’ still has a good number of problems – much like Evance and our clothes, there’s more than a couple of creases left to iron out. The number of blackouts, or 'power shedding' as it is dubbed here, are disturbingly common. Given the electricity company cannot supply enough power to the Blantyre city grid, they simply shut down selected areas for a few hours at a time. In fact, some areas lose power so regularly that they publish the times in the national newspapers… novel, hey. Fortunately our suburb of Namiwawa isn’t as affected as some (for example, the College of Medicine guest house where we first lived when arriving), and we often go weeks on end without any problems, only to be hit by a spate of power cuts over several days – I guess that’s one the perks of being in an area that many government and business personnel live. The real problem hits when the hospital has no power. We don't have a generator, other than for the four intensive care beds usually reserved for adults, meaning that all oxygen concentrators (we don't have piped oxygen from the wall) cease to function, syringe pumps are useless after the batteries run out, you examine children by torchlight and theatres simply make do. Not something you want to experience as a patient.
Water is the other rather haphazard commodity. Although we had a wonderful supply when we first moved in (to the point where we were questioning what everyone else was whining about… and not just the Brits), we would later discover that mornings without any water at all are not altogether uncommon. The only saving grace is that most houses run hot water via a geyser, meaning that this holds a certain amount of ‘backup’ water, so you can usually squeeze out enough for a quick shower. In saying that, one particular weekend a few months in we were to experience the entire city being without water for 48 hours thanks to a blown transformer at the water board. People were wandering the streets with buckets searching out village bore holes, buying up bottled water from the stores for drinking, bathing in public swimming pools, you name it. And their solution to the water crisis? Sack the Water Board CEO, of course.
The ugly.
Clement. Okay, so we have had a bit of a win with our first staff member, Evance. Not so our second. We live in a compound with five houses in one fenced area. Mike, one of our several expat neighbours, has his company sort out our night guard (a necessity for most houses here unfortunately). This works well in that we don’t have to worry about organising his employment or references or payments, but means that if things go wrong it is difficult to do anything about them.
Perhaps the warning bells should have sounded when Clement, our rather eccentric guard, was on while we had a dinner party one night. Jackie, one of our guests, arrived with a bottle of wine. After being asked to move her car by Clement when she first parked as she was blocking someone’s access, she handed him the wine for a moment and promptly obliged. Upon returning for her wine Clement looked at her.
‘Ma’am, I think I’ll need a glass,’ he said rather seriously, holding up the bottle.
Although we laughed this incident off, putting it down to what we naively presumed was his bizarre personality, things rapidly escalated from there. All too commonly he would be found fast asleep in his little booth despite your car sitting at the gate honking repetitively, he often staggered to the gate when awake, and one night even refused to let one of the tenants out of the compound. He asked for advances on his pay, stating that he hadn’t been paid and was starving, then was unable to be woken for the rest of the night as he sleep on the ground, obviously smashed. When we told Mike, who had been holidaying at the time, he issued him with a written warning rather than firing him (something you apparently must do first here, or risk being taken to court by your employee, regardless of what they have done), but it wasn’t long before he began drinking again. The straw that broke the camels back was to be when Mike himself returned home one night to find Clement unconscious in the middle of our carpark. After he eventually woke, in complete confusion with his boss standing in front of him, he proceeded to strip naked. A rather sad story, but not a person we could sustain as an employee. Wallace, our new guard, is delightful.
