I'm Back!

We are back in Malawi, the kids are back in school and I am back blogging. The protests I mentioned in my last post lasted two days and resulted in 18 deaths. Everything has been calm since we have been back and I hope it remains that way. There were scheduled demonstrations last week, the kids school was canceled for two days and many businesses around town shut down. After all of that the demonstrations didn't happen.

It has been a rough transition back to post. We arrived to find that an entire swarm of honey bees had set up house keeping in our bedroom. Thank goodness the gardener noticed the bees coming and going from a vent in our bedroom wall. He managed to get word to the embassy and they sent someone out to spray the morning we arrived back. When we walked in to the master bedroom we found thousands of dead and dying bees and a chunk of honeycomb the size of my hand, just wax, no honey. I was so jet lagged and astounded that it didn't even occur to me to take a picture. To give you an idea of the sheer number of bees it took 3 very full dust pans to remove the bulk of the dead bees and I'm still finding dead bees in strange places. Interestingly the day we arrived at our house for the very first time there was a giant swarm of bees hanging in a tree by the driveway. You know I think Africa is trying to kill me, and and bees are it's weapon of choice.