Winding down in Mwadui

After fourteen weeks on the trot on site, we're finally going out on a month's leave this Saturday. We're going "home" to South Africa.

Living as we do, becomes quite confusing to readers following this blog. Never mind, it becomes quite confusing at times to us as well! We have a permanent home in Marquard in the Free State Province, South Africa.

In the middle of the map (which is also called Central South Africa) is the orange bit called Free State. Approximately between the second "e" in Free and the capital S (in State) is Marquard. That's home to the Hedges of Tanzania. Strange but true, because...

... on the above map, is a county to the north-east - colored dusty pink. It's called Tanzania. This is home to the Marquard Hedges as well! We live in Tanzania for ten weeks at a stretch.

For the most part of thirty years, Grant and I have been expats living in several countries across the African continent. It all started at the beginning of 1990 when we moved from our country of birth, South Africa to live in Namibia. We lived on a diamond mine for five years. We moved back to South Africa where we worked privately for five years. 

In the beginning of 2000, we left our home in Marquard in the care of our wonderful house-lady Emily and went to live as expats in on a gold mine in Mali, West Africa. Mali is the home of Timbuktu the town which we were brought up to believe was a fictitious place! A year later we moved to Guinea, just below Mali on the map and stayed there until 2007. 

Grant joined a private civil engineering company and worked all over Guinea while I remained in South Africa. In 2008, Grant worked briefly in Zambia but before I could join him, he procured a position in Sudan. From August 2009 I lived in a two story apartment with him in a city called Omdurman. This was part of Khartoum which is a tri-city. We lived on the banks of the Nile River.

When Grant's contract finished in Khartoum at the end of 2010, we returned to South Africa thinking that this was the beginning of our retirement years. 

Not so. 

A voice from the past beckoned. 

An expat who had worked with Grant in Guinea offered him a job on a Fluorspar Mine in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya.  Many of my blogger friends will remember how I loved the year we spent in Kenya.  We lived on a remote camp in a valley within the GRV.  I know this is where my love of birding and photographing birds was really born. 

A year later a project manager for whom Grant had worked in Guinea, contacted him. He was not operations manager of an earthmoving company operating on a diamond mine in Tanzania; he offered Grant the position of Contract's (Project) Manager in this company.

And here we are, living in Mwadui in North-western Tanzania. 

At the top of the map is Lake Victoria. Just below it is Mwanza - we live 160km from here in the Shinyanga area in a diamond mining town called Mwadui! 

We've come a full circle...

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