Transcript
I read a lot of books and I wrote a lot of letters. But we had the mess situation there, so you could always go up to the mess after work and socialise. Sometimes didn't do that every day of the week, we did have mess functions. We also had R and R, so there were two periods of R and R where we could go to, most of us went to Nairobi or Mombasa or somewhere like that for a couple of days. And we did get two weeks off during our time there, where you could go home or you could go anywhere in the world that you wanted to basically. And the Sunday was my day off generally.
That was a day where you can do washing and things like that. We could go to a local cafe, so that was always good to get out there. We occasionally did some fun runs. We occasionally did socialising with other contingents, the Indian contingent, British contingent, Canadian contingent. So there's always something to do. And I guess, because I didn't have a lot of downtime, even if you didn't do a lot on your day off, that was okay …
Mail came in a couple of days a week. I did a lot of letter writing. When I was on night duty, which I did a lot of night duty, I wrote a couple of letters probably every night. So I was sent off a lot of letters in the hope that I would get a lot of letters back and parcels and things like that. So mail arrived about every couple of days… we had a phone set up i in the barracks, but it was quite expensive to phone home. We'd would buy the old phone cards and they didn't last very long. So it was quite expensive to phone home, but I did it on a regular basis.
