I don’t sleep very well. It could be a factor of many things: the humidity, the whirring of my ceiling fan, the mosquito buzzing around my head, the hard thin foam mattress I sleep on, the ole fellas next door enjoying a night session or the packs of wild dogs howling and barking into the night.
I rise with sun and find that after throwing a few buckets of cold water over my head, I am slightly refreshed. I dress and head down for breakfast.

 

Breakfast is normally wheatabix with powdered milk, fruit and a cup of tea. On a weekend I’ll have a fried egg butty and for a treat I enjoy bread fried in coconut oil (no toaster) with peanut butter and jam. Bad Anna. 

I walk the fifteen minutes into town, already bustling with streets venders selling bread and eggs, children making their way to school and trucks loaded with supplies and people heading off to the remote villages to work.

 

I jump on a bus to take me the 10 minutes to work, the upbeat reggae music lifting my spirits as we trundle along the jungle road. I think the bus service is amazing. There are about 5 buses run the service to Kilu’ufi Hospital so you never wait longer than 5 minutes. The young bus “conductor” jumps on and off at every stop, yelling his destination, picking up fares. It costs $3 Solomon Dollars (@ 50 cents or 25 pence) to go anywhere around town.

 

I arrive at the office at least an hour before anyone else (Solomon time) so settle into work before heading to the wards. 

The days can vary. Sometimes I stay in the clinical areas. I am still finding my feet but it is such a foreign environment and I know this will take time. Other days I will head to the classroom to deliver training or stay in the office for research. I have so many ideas and plans. If anything is going to stop me, it will be the brick walls and barriers which are constructed in every place I look.

 I’m lucky, or so I’m told. This is my office (you have an office?). It has electricity, air conditioning and four computers, with internet access (gasp). Not only this, but there is access to a bathroom, with water and toilet paper. It is sore point for my fellow volunteers who work in schools with none of these luxuries, going the whole day without a bathroom. So yes, I am lucky. I share this office with Julie (my boss), Isaac (the young man I am training up to be a nurse educator extraordinaire), and the hospital dietician Arimer. It is also the only place for nurses to come to undertake research and online training. I probably wouldn’t bother either. Would you? 

After work, I catch the bus back into town and head to the market. The market here is fabulous. It is on everyday and it is clean. The vegetables are organic, cheap and tasty, the fish straight off the boat and the bread is baked fresh.

The thing I like most is that you never get bothered and are free to browse at will. The hard sell and bartering that is so common in developing countries thankfully missing. Unfortunately, this is possibly due to the culture and how women are raised to be subdued and unassertive.

I then carry my load the fifteen minutes up the steep hill to the guest house. This time, as I throw another cold bucket of water over my head, I don’t miss a warm shower as much. 

Life in the guest house

Hill Top is an interesting place to live and I am adjusting well to life in a guest house. It is mostly just me and George. George is the local bank manager who is painfully shy and never ventures from his room, so mostly, it’s just me.

 The nights I’m not at Zumba, I like to sit on my balcony for an hour or so when I get home. I will read, write my blog or just sit and listen to the noises about me. It is my favorite part of the day and I often long for a cold beer. The fresh lime juice is nice, but it never quite hits the spot. When the mosquitoes finally get the better of me, I head down for dinner.

 All I have is a gas burner. No fridge, no freezer, no oven, no toaster, no kettle. My food is all stored in plastic containers as the ants are everywhere and the vegetables only last a day or two. It makes me sad to throw away so much food and I often have pumpkin days, or egg plant weeks, or watermelon weekends. That said, I’m learning to cook well with what I have, my most famous to date being an amazing moussaka I rustled up for a dinner party (at a friend’s with an oven of course).

 Most nights I eat alone (violins playing). However, sometimes there are interesting guests to chat to. I quite like these nights. For example, the man from Fiji who manages coconut farms all over the Pacific and exports most of the organic coconut oil we’re all health consciously wolfing down, or the man from Australian who was here to make an ABC radio broadcast on Malaitan music. Local musicians came to jam in the leaf hut outside, all lit up with fairy lights, accompanied by the croaking frogs. It was one of those nights I’ll never forget.
Then it’s back to my room for an hour with my book or a movie before I bunker down to the sounds of the night, on my hard bed, in the humidity, with my whirring fan and the howling dogs. Goodnight.