New House

So this week I moved into a new, 'permanent' house that will be my home for the rest of my time here. As you can see from the photographs, it is a very cute little one-bedroom, bathroom, kitchen/study area. It is basically a little guest house in the backyard of an American couple who has lived either here or in Malawi since the late 1970s. They are very nice and have four young children (the oldest is 12 or 13, the youngest still in diapers) so I have lots of screaming and playing going on in the yard outside the entire weekend. It is a good time. I think it will be a very nice place to stay. It is located less than a half mile from the main border post, but is on a quiet side street...the main noises at night even here in the capital are insects and dogs. It is a nice space in which to work, cook, live.
This week was an interesting one work-wise. I got into the archives of the Catholic newspaper and scanned about 75 of their photographs from the 1950s and 60s. It was sort of like a mystery game, however, because while most of the photographs identified one person in the picture, or the group to which a bunch of people belonged, very few had identifying captions telling where or when the photograph was taken (the ones that did were, of course, mainly in Sesotho in very light pencil so I was squinting a lot). So I spent a lot of time looking at clues in the photos to try to get dates and places with them. The paper itself (it is a still-published weekly) is published on Wednesdays and I was there on Thursday so most of the staff was not working very hard and I had constant visitors looking to get more photos for me or willing to take a look and see if they could help with the identifying process. I got the feeling that while a few people might have stopped in before to ask for photos of specific people (big-name politicians and church people most likely), they had never had anyone interested in their entire archive before! I am planning on heading back there this coming week to look at more photos and see if I can track down an old mission journal published in French there (for use by the mission home offices in Quebec for fundraising) to see if they would have more photos and other good stuff. So work continues on in a winding, very-few-days-are-alike manner, but I am enjoying it still. Plus we got a little rain this week so green is starting to appear! Spring is always exciting.