pandastan

Well, it finally happened. The Rumphi District Health Office finally sent some electricians to wire my house for electricity. When I arrived in August, I was told that it was on schedule to happen in September. I had a hard time believing it when I was told two Wednesdays ago that the electricians had arrived and were looking for me. I hung around the house for the next two days waiting for them to drop by. Finally, I found the lead electrician. He said he had spent the previous two days wiring my neighbors house, and would start working on my house "Tuesday, if not Monday." I assumed this meant there was about a five percent chance that they would start on Monday, and planned for Tuesday. "Why not just make it Monday?" I wanted to ask. But I knew it would be a useless question. I was not surprised when they didn't show up on Monday. I was a little bit surprised when they didn't show up on Tuesday either. Someone told me that the electricians were being paid 2000 kwacha for every day it took them to finish and that they were just delaying so they could make more money. They didn't show up Wednesday either. Or Thursday. I was beginning to despair that they would ever come back. I had spent the entire week hanging around my house in case they happened to show up. Finally, unexpectedly, they arrived Friday afternoon and began the work.



So, it's Monday now, and they say they will come by tomorrow morning to finish the work. It's been an exhausting two weeks of sitting around at home waiting for them to either show up, or waiting there as they did the work. At this point, I should explain something for those who, like myself, had no prior knowledge as to how wires existed invisibly behind our walls. In my house, there are networks of plastic tubes that were built into the walls to accommodate wires leading to sockets, lights and light switches. To insert the wires into the tubes, the electrician uses something he calls "fish tape," which is a coil of sturdy, flexible metal with a hook at the end of it. You insert the hook end through one end of the piping, and continue pushing it through until the hook-end emerges at the other end of the pipe. The curves in the piping are constructed to be gradual enough so it can be pushed through. Then, you tie the ends of your wires to the hook at the end of the fish tape and pull the fish tape back through the pipe with the attached wire in tow.
Along the way, they had a little problem getting the wires through a certain section of tubing and decided the tube was blocked with something. The head electrician asked for my permission for him to "Chase the wall." I was puzzled by the expression: is it a British thing or something uniquely Malawian? Also, he pronounced "chasing" as "chezzing" so I wasn't sure I understood the word right. It turned out that he wanted to dig into the cement/plaster portion of the wall in order to deal with the blocked tube in some way he didn't make clear to me. I told him that I only knew of the word "chasing" in the context of someone running after someone (after reflection, I realized, I also knew about using the word "chaser" to describe something you drink after taking a shot of hard liquor. A method of following, I guess). With following in mind, I saw that that was what he had in mind in his "chasing" as well.
He dug into the wall making a vertical line. He found the wiring tube in the center of this vertical line, but he hadn't dug deep into it at first, which is why he had to dig so far along the line higher and lower first. Then he started digging out the tube alongside the path of it. Then he broke open the tube and discovered the wires were present at that location. Then he broke open the tube at the other side of the tube that had been exposed so far, and the wires were also present. So he continued "chasing" the tube, breaking it open every once in a while until he finally found the place where they were stopped. Then he completely destroyed the tube so he could reattach the fish tape to it on that end. But he still couldn't pull it through. It turned out the pipe wasn't blocked at all: it was just that there was a curve in the pipe that was too severe to pull all the wires through at once. In the end, they just pulled the wires through one by one. Here is a picture of the unnecessary damage they did to my wall: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/ChasingTheWall#
You can see the multicolored section of the tubing on the left which is actually a few pieces of plastic trash I had lying around that the electrician used to wrap around the bare wires where the tube was completely destroyed. You can also see the other holes gouged through the tubing at other points. The electrician assured me that a bricklayer would be present tomorrow for renovations of the health center, and that he would take care of the wall. First of all, I suppose that guy might show up, and he might not. But secondly, I'm a little concerned about him filling the wall with cement, even if the wires are covered with scraps of plastic bags. I'm hoping he has something in mind more solid and permanent to separate the wires from the cement. Maybe it doesn't matter.
The other picture is another one of my cat, Kamwezi. It seems little Kamwezi has become pregnant and there is bound to be many littler Kamwezis running around in the world before too long. I wanted to take a picture that would display her swelling belly, but I'm afraid this is the best I could do. It's hard to get a cat to pose for a picture, and the I couldn't find a way to make the prominent belly appear as prominent as it appears to me. If you could see her in person and were used to the way she normally looks, you would agree that her belly is huge. Kamwezi has been more cranky and ornery than usual - I think she is more hungry in her condition than usual, and I'm not always satisfying that hunger as fully as I probably should be. On the upside, she is also lying around a lot more than usual, so if I can keep her well fed, she isn't as much of a handful as usual. But when she's hungry these days, she's a growling, howling terror. Oh well, that's all for now.