Shopping

After over a year here I finally realised that you can get most things here as long as you know where to look! On our way back from visiting rural schools there are many shops along the road where food can be bought much more cheaply than in the towns and cities. My colleagues are always keen to buy yams and I usually get fruit like paw paw, oranges, pineapples and bananas. I draw the line at bush meat!

They take great care in displaying the fruit. I love the towers!

On one of my travels we had a burst tyre. We pulled  up on the side of the road and immediately a bench was brought out for me to sit on. I was next to a ‘shoe shop’! I started to look at the ‘slippers’ (flip-flops) but they were too small. The woman asked what size I was. She shouted to her friend who disappeared for a few minutes. She returned with my size! I didn’t really like them but they were only  £1 so I felt I had to buy them after her efforts!

The Plastics factory is an amazing place. It is run on the lines of Argos! They have shelves full of samples. You select the one you want and take it to the counter. When the girl wakes up she writes it in a ledger and gives you a slip of paper. Then the fun starts! You take this paper to a dark corner of the shop behind some tall shelves. There is a closed metal door with a small square cut out at eye level ( if you are a small person!). You then have to squint through this hole and give in your slip of paper and the payment. You are then given a number. You take the number to another girl who gives you a receipt which you then have to take to someone else. This person then gives it to a boy who goes to the store to get your purchase!!!! It does , of course, go hopelessly wrong when people like me go in and buy things in bulk! I spent ages choosing containers to test capacity only to get to the stage of waiting for the boy to return and then be told they had not got all the ones I wanted. I chose different ones and had to go through the whole procedure again plus another step to get a refund as the new ones were cheaper!!!!! Once you get your goods you have to check every item as there are no returns. I had to pull apart every chair I bought for the orphans under the beady eye of the ‘boy’!