town

Many people seem to enjoy going to town. As most of you know, I’m not a shopper. And while getting out of nkhoma from time to time is a great thing going to Lilongwe is not my idea of getting out. As Lilongwe (aka town) is where you have to go to get things done and I try to go as infrequently as possible, whenever I do go I usually have quite a list of things that it would be good to do while there. And you get other people’s errands when you are going in as well as your own. Our list looked like this—

Vet (some chickens were dying of new castle disease so we needed the vaccine)
Bank (need money)
Post office (posting letters)
Immigration (I’m going to be legal—if they will give me my stamp)
Grocery (food is a necessity)
Pharmacy (decongestant so I can breathe at night)
Shoes (rhona needs shoes to wear to work)
Market (fresh veggies!)
Lunch (keep us going)
Internet (faster than nkhoma—not hard to do)
Clinic (reason we get to take a car to town)
Ice cream (treat when in town)

Rhona did her rounds and then we got to leave…it was about 1030 and the clinic starts at 1…so roughly 1.5 hours to run around in town. First things first when we went to get the car we tried to take the wrong one (no worries—it didn’t work as the keys would fit the locks). Got the right one and headed in. at the vet (where we’d never been) we went in to ask for the vaccine or medicine or whatever and he asked are they local or exotic chickens…we had no idea and while trying to find out (from the owners who were in South Africa) he decided to give us the one that would work on either (why not just give us that anyway?!). do you have a way to refrigerate it? no we’re in a car. are you headed straight back? No this is our first stop. Can you make it your last stop? Only if you’ll stay open until 6 (they close around 4). Nope. So he bagged it in ice and away we went…rush to immigration—I’d gotten my letter saying that I could get the 6 month temporary residence stamp…now I’m legal through the beginning of next year! Then to the bank to get money and change money, post letters across the street. Grocery shopping for others as we’d decided to leave town for a week we didn’t need anything. Then lunch and to the clinic where rhona saw 25 patients and I gave out as many drugs as I could that she prescribed (we ran short of one and had to tell them to go to the hospitals to get the rest)…ice cream and then home again—leaving some more on our list for our next trip in to town.