The Botanical Gardens

This Sunday we went to the Botanical Gardens. It was started by the British (when Malawi was a colony) and is now run by the government. It's a place with lots of streams and trees and beautiful flowers and bushes, plus a lot of monkeys. We sometimes go there to have a day off and enjoy nature. We also celebrated my brother's 8th birthday there.  It's fun to imagine that this a place out of a movie, like Pirates of the Caribbeans, Narnia, or another fantasy movie, because there are lots of old bridges with missing boards, jungle, and big rocks you could just imagine there was a cave inside.

MR. OWL

Awhile back I decided to take an early morning stroll. As I was walking I saw Evans (one of our guard/ gardeners) , he started talking rapidly in Chichewa (the local language)  I did not understand . He brought me to his house and emerged with a live owl! I ran to get my mom and dad and they were just as amazed as I was. Our gardener explained that the owl had gotten stuck on the barbed wire on the top of our fence. The owl had flapped its wings trying to get away and you could see feathers on the wire. My dad put it in a card board box and later we brought it to a friend, who tried to help it, but it was too badly injured and they had to put it down. He may not have been very healthy anyway, because we saw that his poop had all kinds of slugs in it, not their normal diet.

mowing the lawn

Here in Malawi people don't mow their lawn like people in north America do. They slash the grass with grass slashers.  Now how do I explain this.....? A grass slasher is a metal stick with a knife on the end. Umm.... Here's a video.