Buttoning up the details

Monday was the day we knew we had to button everything up. We would be leaving Tuesday for safari in Zambia and our last day volunteering would be Friday. Friday we wanted to be able to have a celebration and hand over the Community Learning Center and Playground to the children and caregivers at Adziwa.
One of the things we hadn’t done was paint. Our vision was to paint all the things we had built, but only if we had time. We hadn’t even had time to buy paint yet so Lauren, Sai and I were planning to try and go do that while everyone else got all of the details finished. We left everyone at the site and hired a car to take the three of us to town. Today was also the day Tamweka needed to go for her checkup. I sent Tovia to take her and told her to call me later with the update.
After arriving at the paint shop we were told they were having a 30% off sale! Happy days!! Lauren said she wanted to pay for all of the paint as her donation towards the project. Very sweet of her and I know it made her so proud to be able to do that. The process was actually quite funny. We picked the 4 colors we wanted and off the women went to get them. When she returned she told us they didn’t have any of the colors we wanted. Lauren began choosing new colors only to find out they didn’t have those either. I asked the woman to tell us what colors she did have and then we would go from there 🙂 we managed to get a red, a green, a blue and a yellow. Lauren was happy to we paid and off we went. It ended up being much quicker of a process than we had thought. Along the drive back we stopped at the welder to pay our bill with him. He had built the swing frame and the baby swing for us. He also had fixed our bolts and drilled holes in all 21 of our tires. I ran in with his money and then it was back to the site to get things painted. Everyone wanted to help paint and this was great because we actually were able to paint all of the things we built. Initially we had thought we wouldn’t have time. The paint completely transformed our playground! It was really looking nice and we all agreed it was a good thing we got the paint. Thank you Lauren!
The building isn’t quite done but we have been told it will be finished when we get back from Zambia.
It was hot but we did work longer than usual just to be sure that on Friday all we would need to do was button up the buttons 🙂 along the walk back a group of us stopped at the local taylor to be measured for pants. A bunch of the guys wanted pants made from Malawian fabric. What should have been a quick stop turned into a long stop with a lot of confusion. We got it done though and carried on back home.
The evening program was our Malawian cooking lesson and everyone was excited to participate. Jan and Sherry were most excited, but we also managed to get “Phil on the grill” and a few others in there cooking. Sherry had an apron on and was looking like she got right in with all the cooks. The meal was yummy and we had our own team to thank for it 🙂 such fun. We also all needed to pack for Zambia. It was an early night and we planned to leave by 8am he next morning.