40 things that have become totally normal....

Living in a quiet neighbourhood

Not driving

Buying tomatoes, onions & sweet potato from the local market

Waiting 2 days to send an e-mail. 

Having 3 meals together as a family each day 

Sitting in funny places to get a good internet connection (above 5kbs/sec)

Boiling and filtering all drinking water

Numerous candle lit dinners!
Using cloth nappies & hand washing clothes

Making meals from whatever is in the fridge or cupboard

Watching major events back home via livestream
Dust, dust and more dust

Throwing rubbish into the bin pit and burning it off

Hearing beautiful African singing voices
Sleeping under a mosquito net

Visiting a grocer twice in 5 months

Seeing more than 40 patients a day at the hospital

Delicious home baked goodies++

Skype chats that have a 20 second delay between sentences

Tapping our shoes each time we go to put them on (to check for any creepy crawlies)

Having small planes land at our village & waving to them from our back yard

Drinking long life milk that comes in a 500ml carton
Managing to avoid clothes stores for 5 months

Having an enormous stalk of fresh bananas in the kitchen

Not having to wear a seatbelt
Treating patients with TB, HIV, malaria and many other tropical diseases

Having a swim in the pool at lunch time

Taking antimalarials

No rain
Listening to a church sermon in English and Kikaonde

Kwacha rather than Australia dollars K50,000 = $10

No peak hour traffic
Feeling the full range of emotions in one day

Having monkeys play in our backyard

Doing lumbar punctures, pleural & abdominal taps more than cannulas

Shedding tears with sad families

Seeing Zambian’s carrying huge loads

Having more than 10 boxes of weet-bix in our pantry
Seeing massive live pigs being transported on the back of pushbikes

Working and living with amazing people from all over the world

- d & m