two weeks

These last two weeks went by very quickly and very slowly at the same time (if that makes sense). Sorry for the extremely late blog post, we had power at work for only a few hours two weeks ago, and last week I had a meeting, then was sick, then it was Thanksgiving, and now it is Monday again.

Bujumbura had been having problems with power, but I was told that they borrowed some money from the world bank to pay the DRC, who apparently supplies a large portion of our power. So, now we are supposed to have power everyday starting in the morning and ending around 9pm. This has been true so far, and I am very thankful for the ability to get work done.

This is a crocodile at the musée vivant, our local zoo. We went there for a visit two weeks ago. The zoo is very small but has some crocodiles, snakes, two chimpanzees and some sort of small cat. This zoo is also pretty sketchy, the cages are not that convincing, and we have heard some stories. I was told that one of the chimpanzees escaped a few weeks before we arrived in Burundi. It then made its way to the Catholic cathedral in town and disrupted morning mass!

This is the chest high fence that stands between you and one of the full grown crocodiles. Some expats told me that they have climbed into the cage to have their pictures taken while holding the crocs tail!

Last week was a very productive week at work even though I was there only three days. We finished one project, almost completed two others, and we started recording another choir. It’s amazing what you can do when you have consistent electricity!

(This is a picture of the lake and the mountains of the DRC. This place is a 15min walk from my house!)

I also asked my parents to send some music software that was at their house, and it recently arrived and was installed, and I’m very excited about it. I didn’t have a serial number for one of the programs, so I emailed the company and surprisingly they gave me a free upgrade to the newest version of their software! It is only a light version of the full product, but it is the software that I use on my personal computer and the studio will definitely benefit from many of its features. I had to download the update though, and when I started it said it was going to take 21 hours to download! I had to terminate the download because it would never finish. Thankfully, I had the opportunity on another day to use a different connection during a time of low usage and it only took 3hrs. I am very thankful that everything worked out in my favor because there was so much potential for things to go wrong.