1 - a typical house in the villages around Kongwa. Well actually, this one is a very nice one - in the foreground are the washed away remains of a small building... many houses are made from mud bricks like this which you can probably imagine don't stay up well during the rainy season! If the family has more money, mud is mixed with cement to make for a stronger house. I think the story about the man who built his house on the sand would resonate in these villages in ways that it just can't in Melbourne. (would probably resonate in swampy earthquake prone Mexico city too!)
2 - climbing up to visit the quartz rocks luke would often visit as a child. Lia (from Holland, now working with her husband at St Philip's) kindly lent me her hiking sticks - made clambering with a basketball up my t-shirt much easier!
3 - The lovely Jan and Lia next to the milestone leftover from colonial days, now situated in the college grounds and edited (by Hugh Prentice :-) ) to show accurate distances from it's current location.
4 - The 'Ghorofa' - one of the first college buildings built by Westgate in 1914 - this was one of the houses Luke and family lived in during their time in Kongwa (they lived on the right hand side, upstairs and downstairs). The walls are nearly a metre thick (good insulation!) and now it's been rennovated to house a guesthouse at the top, with living quarters downstairs. Luke has a lovely memory of sliding along the concrete floor upstairs from what was then the bathroom (furthest room to the right) covered in soap, spreading bathwater along the ground with Leon. Unfortunately Hugh's study was directly under the bathroom, and stern words were spoken when water leaked through the floor!
5 - Climbing to the 'chem chemi' (spring) with Jan and Lia, the Mwitewe family and Fadhili. Luke remembers going to the spring often as a child, then jumping off a stone wall for retaining water into Hugh's arms. Living here was a good place for active kids! The college site was chosen for its proximity to this spring - which now has been fixed up (by Jan, with some help from villagers) to supply pipes to the college and 2 villages all year round!
6 - the raging torrent of floodwater that is not going into the pipes because the spring got blocked by the heavy rains... we're climbing up to see the spring still.
7 - the sign at the entrance to the college - talks about when the college was built and inaugrated (and I think a bible verse Col 3:23)
8 - cooking tea after the power failure on our last night in Kongwa
9 - the view from the Ghorofa over the college to the plains below. Luke has a photo given to him by a friend's dad of this exact view.
