xmas

i just wrote a huge thing on the flood and the stupid computer froze and wiped it all.so second time round i'm just gonna be quick. sorry everyone.
firslty merry xmas!!!xmas morning we were woken up at 3am by james our guard and discovered water pouring in through the front door. spose to be in dry season but its been raining pretty heavily everynight and finally i think the rivers couldnt take it and some of the banks broke. Katolo is in a really flat area surrounded by hills so we copped most of the water. anyway we just managed to get everything off the floor and onto the bunks before all the water came in. pretty hard to find everything in the dark though. after that we sat down and waited till the sun came up. the water outside was about a meter or so i think. its hard to tell, i took some photos at 7am and the water had already gone down about 2 feet so i'll try put them up. so yeh xmas morning was spent in the dark listening to the bbc radio talking about the droughts in Australia and we're sitting in water up to our knees eating all our xmas food - chocolates and biscuits and everyone else- just coz we could. was a pretty funny xmas.everyone was laughing and stuff so that was great. they said if it kept rising we would have to be airlifted out so i think we were all secretly hoping that it would. but it stayed fairly stable until the morning so that didnt happen. we were spose to get taken out with a 4wd aswell but that didnt show - so in the end we packed up all our stuff and had to walk the 3km to the road and get driven back into town. probably the longest walk ever. the water on all the roads and the tracks was like a river about knee deep. luckily mum and dad rang just in the middle of the trek which made it nice and easy to juggle everything.
but yeh then we just came into Kisumu, napped, ate, and went out for a nice dinner. was almost normal! spose to be at a big celebration in Katolo today for boxing day but we're not allowed back into the village until tomorrow. i'm not sure what the damage is there yet so i'm pretty annxious to get back. pretty sure all our chicken houses we built would have been washed away so thats reassuring. haha no cares too much though. the frames are alll there they just need to be re-mudded.
on xmas eve we delivered a bed to 'dani' whos this 90-or so yr old woman with no family who lives in this tiny mud hut and sleeps on the floor. we've been getting her water and food over the past couple of weeks and decided to get her a bed for xmas. so we delivered that and cooked her up a feast and she was so excited it was the best! the bed takes up half her house! it was so lucky we did it on xmas eve though so atleast she wasnt on the floor when the flood hit. dont know how her house held up but we'll find out tomorrow. we also had our group xmas on xmas eve. we did our kris kringle presents and stuff and had a big dinner so that was good.
we leave the village this sunday so its kinda sad not to be there now. we're just getting settled and everything and now we have to leave. in the past week we've been invited to everyone in the villages house for dinner aswell so gonna be alot of eating this week. anyway this is pretty boring so i might leave it there, havent got the best flood photos but i'll get some more from the girls and try and put them up later
hope eveyone is well and hada good xmas.;
christmas maber! xx

Katolo, Zambia