Telikom, Rain and Kava

Well it is now over 4 weeks since I lodged a form for a phone at home. My hopes were raised on Friday morning, by a call from Telikom, saying that they tried to connect my phone a couple of times the week before, but nobody was home when they came. Funny that, perhaps it is because I work and live alone? I told them to come around to the dept and collect me and I will let them in so they can connect the phone. But of course nobody came. Joy in the office seems to think it was probably because it was a payday. Every second Friday every one who earns a salary gets paid. Obviously as you can imagine it is also the day that most of the problems and no work happens. I rang them this morning and they were going to get back to me. I am sure it will happen at some point soon.

Well the weekend, was pretty good. Friday night was an experience, though because of the weather. Martin (next-door neighbour) and then David (British volunteer here at the Uni) came around and we had some drinks, and then David left at about 7.20 to walk home so he could collect his car to pick me up so we could go into a club. 10 minutes after he left it started raining, really heavily! Martin rushed round to his place, getting wet on the way at about 7.50 and then David showed up at about 8. David was saying something about the water in the my street, being really high, and if I could tell him he was not dreaming it. Yeah whatever I thought. Well for about 50m along the street the water was coming over the headlights of David's Land Cruiser, making amongst other things a bow wave and it extremely hard to drive. And this had all happened in just 30 minutes. I was impressed. When we got back at 1 the water was completely gone.

Saturday night was a Kava night. Kava if you don't know is the drink of choice in Vanuatu and Fiji, and is made from the Kava root. They grow it over here too, but it is not really used a lot. PNG of course is the land of the betel nut. Anyway basically it makes you pretty calm and mellow, but unfortunately first you have to turn it from root form into liquid which is a bit of a mission, cutting up and then grinding etc. Secondly you have to get past the taste, which is not unlike drinking muddy water. If you don?t baulk at a couple of coconut shells worth, you will be pretty mellow after about 30 minutes. I think you can buy it from health food shops in tablet form, as a anti-stress medication.