Beer rebates and defecating in buckets

My luck with money has continued – last week I thought that getting $30 was good, but this week has been much better! Just after I posted last week I went for a beer with some friends and there was a competition to win a briefcase of cash. To win you had to guess a three digit code to open it. There weren't many people there (the promoters were blasting out music making it pretty difficult to talk) and so I was lucky enough to get the first attempt. Trying to think of some lucky combination, I chose 588 (May '88) and much to my surprise, the case opened!!! There wasn't any cash inside though and the guy looked rather worried. A few minutes later they told me that the case was broken and that any number opened it. I was fairly understanding, if a bit annoyed, but my friend was adamant that they should give me the money as I had opened the case. The boss came to apologise and offered us drinks but no money, but then one of them asked if I had a credit card. I said not on me, but he gave me his phone number and told me he would call me to sort things out. Needless to say he didn't call me, but I told Jean Marie about what happened and he got on to the manager of the hotel where we were and she in turn got on to the brewery. Eventually, on Friday I got a call from a manager of the brewery who told me he wanted to meet. I was expecting some kind of excuse as to why they couldn't give me the money, but in fact he told me that beer is supposed to be enjoyable and that therefore they would give me the money the next day!!!! They wanted to let lots of Mutzig (the beer) drinkers see them giving me the prize, but unlike most of the time, hardly anyone was drinking it. We waited a few hours but eventually they did give me the cash - £400!!! It feels like a lot more here too though partly as it goes further and partly because the highest denomination note is worth £5.

As you might imagine, my new found wealth made me try and give back as much money to the brewery in one night as I could. I was still alive the next day though and had all my belongings, even if it was almost 6pm by the time I managed to get up... Unfortunately though, the next time I got a beer, the price had gone up by 10p a bottle, but I can't really complain at that.

In other news, my laptop charger has kind of died – somehow the wire coming out of the transformer got damaged cutting the connection. It does still work fortunately and using my penknife (thanks again Joe + Victoria) I cut some of the plastic off around the wire and managed get the connection sorted again along with some bits of velcro from my phone charger and laptop charger. It's still rather dodgy though, especially as my plug adaptor is temperamental and has to positioned precisely to work. I got rather confused on Friday trying to use it at the office – I couldn't work out why it wouldn't work for about 10 minutes, before realising that the electricity had gone... woops.

Finally got round to moving house into the mansion on Monday. It's a pleasant change to have a toilet seat, a washing machine (well, a maid), a kitchen and a sofa and for only £10 a month more! As you can see it's a lot bigger than the last house. I don't think I put any photos up of inside the last place, but there was basically only one room with a table and a chair so there wasn't much to see!

The biggest change though is probably Jan's nutrient recycling system – if you can remember back to sometime in March you might remember what I'm on about already. If you can't remember / didn't read the post, I'm talking about humanure. Here's out toilet (we could have got it made in mahogany too, for a touch of class):

It's a very simple system – you do your business into a bucket, then cover it with sawdust and spray a bit of water over everything. I was sceptical to it working at first and it's certainly taken a little getting used to, but there is no smell and no flies at all. The sawdust serves two functions – firstly it adds a lot of carbon, increasing the carbon : nitrogen ratio which stops ammonia being produced by bacteria, causing a stink! Secondly it forms a biofilter when it's wet which traps any smells which come out. Once the bucket is full it can be added to the compost heap – surprisingly once the temperature of the heap reaches 50C and stays there for a couple of days, anything nasty is killed off. We've done some back of the envelope calculations and worked out that globally we flush away about half of the nutrients found in the fertiliser we use each year. If you take away the huge subsidies on fertiliser in Rwanda, people here produce fertiliser worth about $0.50 a day, which when you consider that many people still earn less than $1 a day is a pretty staggering amount of cash!

Rightyo, think that's enough for this week, I'll pat muself on the back for managing to post only 10 days after the last time.