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DustySpirit home

In the morning, we started on the bathroom renovation projects after breakfast. At the beginning of the main hall they have four rooms to one side of the hall: a master bath for Fanny and Martha with a tub, shower, toilet, and sink; a similar sized room with a tub, sink, and clothes hamper; a very narrow room with just a toilet; and a second narrow room with just a toilet. The first of these last two we labeled “men” and the second we labeled “women”. That sort of setup worked pretty well for the team. Anyway, I spent the morning engaged in two activities. One was scraping paint off the walls. The second was helping Aaron saw a new plywood top for the built-in clothes hamper since the old one was rotted. This allowed us to stand on the hamper to reach higher places like the ceiling. You may ask why it takes two people to cut a rectangular piece of plywood...let's just say the saw was very dull and the morning was very hot. Others were scraping, removing old wallpaper or patching cracks in the plaster. Some of the things we found to stand on were a little precarious, but we managed quite well.

The team realized pretty quickly that we needed primer to prime the walls before painting, and there was none readily available. There was also a number of other things that we could use like floor paint, ceiling paint, and glue for the wood-tiled floors. All the walls, ceilings, and floors were in pretty rough shape. But predictably, there was no place to purchase such items in Zimbabwe, let alone Gweru. Fanny and Martha have been making trips to Botswana once a month recently in order to get groceries and other supplies. Claudio latched onto the idea of making a Botswana run today and offered to go. This turned out to be a good call. Fanny gave his consent and Melissa wanted to go as well. The list of items started growing to include a bunch of groceries from Martha as well as other hardware supplies. Fanny didn’t want to think about all that stuff because the original idea was to go there and back today. But preparations for leaving took some time and we were not able to leave as early as we desired. Claudio approached me about going along as well, so that we had another male team member along. I wasn’t going to be much help in figuring out the rest of the renovation work, so that sounded great to me. We packed a few things in case we need to stay over night and left on our adventure probably shortly after 2pm.

The back seats of the Big Horn are folded up to make room or a 50 gallon barrel that we will fill with fuel. We also have some 20 liter plastic containers that will hold diesel. It’s two hours from Gweru to Bulawayo – the 2nd largest city – and from there we hope it is only an hour to get to the border. It’s pretty clear that we will have to spend the night in Botswana since the stores we need to shop at close at 5pm.