Christmas, Malawi-Style

If there’s one thing that reminds me just how far away we really are it’s having to schedule phone calls with family ten hours behind. No open-jaw Boston-Anchorage-Albuquerque-Boston tickets this year. Still, with the wonders of modern technology at least we got to hear people’s voices.

With only vague plans for the weekend (potluck brunch Saturday at “11ish”) we started off Christmas Eve with a whimper. When “just let me send a few emails” turned into two hours of work on what was nominally a government holiday Ariel let her displeasure be known. Fortunately, we rallied, did a three supermarket blitz for critical ingredients, and made it home just in time to avoid getting soaked. This was the view out our back door:

White Christmas? Not this year. Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted, but coping) we put on our sole Christmas music (Too Many Santas by The Bobs) and launched into some serious holiday cookery… just in time for the power to go out.

Fortunately it was only a brief outage and the Harms/Brooks culinary duo was soon back in action. We cooked full steam until seven, when we quickly dressed and headed over to the Ligatzi CCAP (our local church) where our friend Dave was supposed to be giving the Christmas Eve service.

Sadly, despite an hour hanging about on wooden pews people-watching and listening to Malawian Christian rock at high volumes, we did not get to see Dave preach. Apparently they spent two and a half hours stuck in Blantyre traffic. A hour and a half after the five hour program was to have begun (an hour after we arrived; give us some credit for knowing better than to show up right on time) a distinguished church elder arrived and took the microphone to address the 15-20 of us scattered around the thousand plus capacity space. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I will not hide the truth from you. If it appears we are not ready to begin our program, it is because we aren't. The people who should be here are still in Blantyre; we are plan B.” As much as we appreciated his honesty, once it was obvious Dave and Haley weren't going to make it back (and once we realized the youth chorus was performing only in Chichewa) we headed home.

After changing our best guess for appropriate Malawian church attire (suit & tie and full print dress, respectively) for pajamas and a final burst of kitchen activity we sat down to this:

Nothing says Christmas like linguini with fresh pesto from the khonde herb garden, garlic toast and caprese salad with perfectly ripe tomatoes, right? Also pictured: the famous five-star pretzels, flourless chocolate wonder cookies and secret-sauce homemade cracker jacks. Bring it, potluck brunch!

Christmas day, we decorated what may be the smallest Christmas tree on record:

After opening our Harms-family care package (thanks guys!) we whipped up a quick cornbread and split pea soup and headed over to Keith and Melody’s for brunch. Contributions were varied (cinnamon rolls, juice, takeout pizza) but uniformly delicious. Fueled by tasty food Ariel dominated the Wii dance-off and I managed to squeak out a narrow victory in hundred-pin Wii bowling. Good times. Home in time to putter in the garden a bit, talk to fam (hooray for Skype) and watch the silly Get him to the Greek before calling it an early night. Certainly not the same without family, but a good day nonetheless.

Rats, cats, bats and...hippos?

Thursday morning starts out rough. Our roof rat friend (or other unknown ROUS – rodent of unusual size) has been tromping around above our heads all night keeping us both awake. This is Nathaniel’s third or fourth bad night in a row, although our buddy is so active Wednesday evening that it disturbs even my own sound sleep. (In our search for said ROUS, we’ve discovered a half-dozen bats who have also taken up residence in our rafters, but luckily they’re out doing their bat thing while we’re trying to sleep.) We’re up at five am – and, bleary eyed, decide to set out for Liwonde even earlier than planned.

The drive is strikingly beautiful – especially a long stretch of rolling hills with jutting escarpments through which the one-lane highway wends and winds. We reach Liwonde’s Hippo View Lodge (approximately 4 hours south-east of Lilongwe) just in time for Nathaniel to join a two-day salt iodization monitoring meeting for the pre-lunch session. I settle in to do some work on my own projects (building a website and updating the capability statement for Salephera Consulting Ltd) and away we go. Multiple meals on the lodge khondie (veranda) bring us some vocal cat friends and swooping bat friends, but we see none of the promised hippos!

What to do? Trek further on to the Liwonde National Park’s Bushman’s Bao Bab Lodge for the weekend. Saturday morning, we follow a winding dirt track through corn fields and villages for 4km and arrive at a Bao Bab grove with a cluster of thatched structures. We’re shown to our safari tent (complete with protective thatch a-frame) and invited to help ourselves to drinks at the self-serve bar and relax in the open-air “living room.” We arrange an evening game drive and a morning canoe trip – hopefully we’ll finally get to see these promised hippos!

Little do we know that we’ll leave on Sunday feeling sun tired, but a little gross. It’s the first time I’ve been to a national park and done negative exercise. The game drive is awesome (see pictures of all our sightings and the rest of the trip here) but it’s three hours of sitting in the safari truck. We only climb out to pay the park fee. Same with the canoe trip – three hours of being poled down the river by our guides while we tried to stay comfy on the canoe bench and get good shots without getting the camera wet. We do take one walk down to the river, but are quickly stymied in our exploring by the preponderance of hippo tracks and the muddy sludge. And the food! Three delicious vegetarian meals -- three courses for dinner, two for breakfast – and lounging around all day = sluggish Hookses!

Hmmm…may need to try to track down a more innovative, interactive safari company next time. If that’s possible. The “lodge organizes everything” method seems to be the norm here. Yet another indication of the income stratification here – it’s nearly impossible not to vacation like a rich person. 

Wine and Cheesecake, Malawi Style

We correspond all week with Teresa about prep for the sixth annual wine and cheesecake party back in Boston. By Thursday night, when Nathaniel arrives home tired and damp after a lengthy bus ride back from Blantyre, we suddenly feel that we can’t leave the event unmarked here in Lilongwe.

Friday morning, I send out a few invites to our closer friends here and then spend the afternoon visiting grocery stores to try to round up cheesecake ingredients. Tragically, the decently sized blocks of cream cheese I’d seen at the Shoprite earlier in the week are long gone, but I find ricotta at the Old Town Mall shop and purchase two, 100g (4oz) packages of cream cheese at the Foodworth’s at the bargain price of $3.98 per bar.

Saturday, I follow tradition (I’ve usually had to attend the PBHA board retreat the same day, then rush home to finalize decorations and prep) and spend the day working. I facilitate a department-wide meeting for the Medical Department of Kamuzu Central Hospital in the conference center at the Kumbali Lodge (claim to fame – this is where Madonna stays when she come to the country).

A brief digression about the “conference center” is essential here. We’re talking a traditional Malawian structure – beams and a thatched roof – with a traditional conference center set up (tables arranged in a u-shape with flip chart stands and paper, projection screen, etc.) except for the leopard print table cloths. It should have felt weird, but instead just felt typical Malawi. Check out the picture to see what I mean. Highlight? The cows from the lodge’s diary farming concern that mooed loudly outside for the duration of the session and which all of the participants completely ignored.

Anyway, back to the party. I arrive home a little after five, feeling good about that fact that I established a good rapport with the group, despite cultural differences, and find a gorgeous mango cheesecake waiting in the fridge and Nathaniel puttering around the garden in an amazing combination of flip-flops, cargo shorts, unbuttoned, short-sleeved, collared shirt and Mexican adventure hat (sorry, no picture available). I also find, upon logging into my email, that no one is available to come to our gathering aside from Keith and Melody. We’re grumping at each other as we prep, both wondering if this shadow of the real thing will make us feel better or worse.

Nonetheless, we serve up some party snacks, mix up a lemon basil syrup as a topping, mull a bottle of wine and prepare for good times. I’m just feeling bummed that we don’t have champagne to start things off when Keith and Melody arrive with a delicious bottle of almond flavored goodness they shipped over from the states. It's a little tamer than the 85 guest heyday of the shindig, but Keith and Melody are great company and at the end of the evening, we’re glad to have celebrated, even if only in a small way. 

Wait…how does the world work again?

As the holidays approach and the seasons change here in Malawi, we’ve been talking about we don’t realize how much our native geography impacts how we understand the world.

Some of the examples are relatively inane and silly – we make our own frozen fruit here because it’s so cheap that you can’t buy a reasonable amount. (11 large mangos for 100 kwacha / US$ 0.60 ?!) Then we make fruit smoothies that seem incredibly decadent from a northerner’s perspective, but are actually a cheap source of calories here.

Every calculation has to be translated. It takes us a good half an hour – maybe longer – to get from, “How many kilometers can we get on a full tank and how much kwacha does that cost?” to a miles per gallon and affiliated cost estimate in US dollars. And I definitely haven’t conquered Fahrenheit to Celsius. Luckily our Malawi cookbook has a conversion chart for the oven. For daily weather I’ve settled on “hot” or “not so hot” and left it at that.  

Other things seem weightier. We struggle to understand what is going on with the flora. We’re just coming out of the hot “summer” season, but trees are bare or harbor branches full of dead leaves. It seems like they may now leaf out now that it’s raining, but did the leaves die months ago in the “winter”? Was it so hot and dry that they died in the summer? It’s profoundly disorienting to not understand the broad scheme of changes to one’s environment.

On a related note, I can hear my night guard outside the house whistling Jingle Bells. How has this song pervaded sub-Saharan Africa where snow and therefore sleighs do not exist? Is it just that catchy a tune? Culture is a weird thing.

Even more broadly, why is the Irish government pouring millions of dollars into Malawi while things are falling apart at home? How did the Germans and the Dutch end up with such strong representation in local aid organizations? And what is the definition of “missionary” – do you have to be proselytizing? Or just motivated by god?

Becoming aware of these different paradigms – the ways other people see the world – is exactly why I wanted to live abroad, but struggling each day to create new understanding is certainly not an easy or relaxing way to live. Trade offs, right?

(Temporary) Residents!

It’s official: two and a half months and countless conversations with the indefatigable Norman Mwambakulu later, we’re temporary residents of Malawi! With the expiry of Ariel’s second visa extension looming, upon my return I again raised the matter of getting our immigration paperwork sorted, this time with a bit more urgency. Lo and behold, my buddy Norm went down to immigration himself, spoke to the regional director, and returned to tell me that, in fact, all we needed to do is turn up with the same letter we got authorizing a duty exemption on the car and all would be well. Did I mention we’d had said letter for almost a month? That Ariel had paid for another visa extension in the meantime? No, I did not. I simply smiled, thanked the man, and immediately made plans to get to immigration.

Flash forward to yesterday. We drag a bit getting out of the house (I blame lingering traces of food coma from the previous evening’s IWAM holiday party) but make it to immigration by nine. I track down the deputy regional director, explain the situation and get shunted off to wait in another room. Things aren’t looking good. Nonetheless, we exercise some of our newly developed patience and wait for fifteen minutes or so to talk to the guy the deputy regional director had pointed out. Shockingly, he seems able to help us. There is a minor snag when he asks about a copy of our letter from the Ministry of Finance having been sent to Blantyre, but I plead ignorance and ritually utter the phrase “Office of President and Cabinet” and “Regional Director” a few times, and a way around the potential obstacle is found: he will simply fax a copy to them. Of course the electricity is out at the moment, but still, a problem-solver! We don’t yet know his name, but I like this guy already.

A short one-page form (in duplicate) later and we’re ready to surrender our passports, but our mystery helper has disappeared. After ten minutes or so of waiting I crack and ask one of the other immigration officers (nonchalantly reading the paper despite the fact that there are about eight people waiting in various parts of the room) if she knows where her colleague has gone. Her response: “He’s around.” Well, thanks. Now I feel much better. Sensing our impatience, a second non-working staffer chimes in: “He’s just in a small meeting.” Well, if it’s only a small meeting…. Determined to physically place our passports in the hands of the man who has promised to help us, we continue to wait. Fortunately, it appears to have, in fact, been only a small meeting. Five minutes later our hero returns. I hand him our passports and forms and am told to come back “this afternoon.” Not wanting to make a second trip downtown in vain, I ask for a contact number and we finally learn his name: Mr. Mwakipunda.

Flying high, we decide to take on the last major administrative hurdle: obtaining Malawian driving licenses. The bureau of road traffic is just down the street, and we manage (with only a brief detour to the wrong room and some jostling in line) to get to the start of the process within about ten minutes. Of course, at that point the lady helping us asks for our temporary residence permits…. I suppose both in one day would’ve been a little too much to expect. We collect various forms and surrender for the time being.

Come three o’clock I ring Mr. Mwakipunda and, wonder of wonders our permits have been processed, and the passports are ready for collection! Ariel makes the schlep alone and manages to collect them without fuss. To celebrate we take Christin for a sundowner at Harry’s Bar and go out for surprising good Chinese food. All in all, we’ll count it as a win.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Conclusion: Thanksgiving as we know it isn’t possible on a work day.

Nathaniel arrives home from Liberia two hours late, exhausted and bedraggled after a grueling overnight flight. Christin has an insane day at work. Word gets out that she’s hiring enumerators for a pilot study and people start showing up at her office in droves, waving C.V.s and demanding interviews on the spot. She rolls ups at 6:45 for a dinner planned at 7. I’ve home from school by mid-day but am feeling de-energized after being forced to teach grammar with no warning time to prepare or review. Not a total disaster, but I’m no Teresa Elsey.

Once home, Nathaniel crashes out for a few hours to try to drum up enough energy for dinner, so I sous chef for myself to keep busy. And I realize that beyond family and the traditional meal, it’s the shared leisure of the day – slow morning, cooking with friends, eating too many snacks so you’re already when stuffed when dinner arrives – that makes Turkey Day feel like you remember.

Eventually I roust Nathaniel out of bed to help cook and we whip up some delicious mashed potatoes and braised green beans. The frittata and sweet potatoes are passable, although the local yams are white and not as soft or sweet. Christin’s squash-carrot soup and Nathaniel’s “Big Daddy” biscuits round out the meal in a relatively satisfactory manner. And, not surprisingly, the mango-rum crumble is edible. ;)

It’s a nice meal with our one guest, Derrick [former Peace Corps volunteer who has been living in Zomba village for five years and needs friends now that he’s moved to Lilongwe], but it just doesn’t have the gravitas or the real feeling of celebration that the day achieves in the states. Ah well. Effort made. And people are already gearing up for Christmas and New Years here, so I don’t think we’ll have the same problem with the December holidays.

Luckily, Nathaniel’s got Friday off after working through the weekend in Liberia and we rally to head to the mountains. The Luwawa Forest Lodge is the perfect retreat – friendly staff, rustic atmosphere (including a fireplace to relax near and weather cool enough to enjoy doing so) and tasty food. Two night of sleeping in our cozy tent, hiking, kayaking, and reading on the khondie capture a bit of the rejuvenation we missed on Thursday. Check out pictures of the trip here!

PS. The mysterious bugs with the transparent wings were termites! Apparently if we were real Malawians, we would take off the wings and eat them.  

The Rains Arrive

For the first to months of our stay, Lilongwe is HOT and dry. Ninety degrees in the shade at midday hot.  Sleep without even a sheet, good thing for the bed net hot. Overnight, the rainy season arrives and the weather changes.

Benefits:

- Gorgeous, moist, seventy degree days with cloud cover and twice daily showers (mostly gentle, occasionally heavy)

- Lovely, cool nights (with even some blanket utilization!)

- Enthusiastically growing pumpkins (which I previously struggled to even keep alive until Nathaniel’s return from Liberia)

Drawbacks:

- Swarms of new bugs (ZIPPY stink bug looking guy, armies of one-inch almost-moths with transparent wings, flying ants and, of course, malaria bearing mosquitoes)

- Red clay mud (enough said)

Still, on the whole I vote “Yes!” for the rainy season. We’ll see how I feel three months in…

Teaching Technology

A few weeks ago, Phinious approaches me to ask if I will help him learn how to use a computer. He claims that he “doesn’t even know how to turn it on.” I’ve seen his facility navigating through the menus of a cell phone, so I tell him that I know he will pick it up quickly. And indeed he does.

A friend has told him about “Word, Excel and PowerPoint” and we agree that Word would be the most useful place to start. We spend two lessons practicing basic word processing and formatting. My work is made easier by the fact that he knows just how he wants things to look (“how do I make it go in the middle?”) and has a quick memory for processes. Creating new files, saving them to folders, no problem. I remember Nathaniel’s stories of trying to teach middle-aged Honduran women how to do similar things (in Spanish, of course) and give thanks for my quick study of a student.

During lesson three I introduce the internet. It’s refreshing to look at the internet through the eyes of someone who has never experienced it, and who is starting with the wonder of today’s World Wide Web, rather than back in the days of ugly pixilated icons and aol chat rooms. Even with our (sometimes excruciatingly) slow connection speed, we manage to do a basic google search, check out Wikipedia and google maps and send Nathaniel an email in Liberia: “I'm practicing sending an email. And it's so amaizing! By the way, how's Liberia? See you soon! phinious.”

We spend lessons four and five learning PowerPoint (at Phinious’ request). He decides to make a presentation teaching his younger brother about gender disparity. Not sure anything else needs to be said about how much I’m coming to appreciate Phinious’ motivation to learn and thoughtful approach to life.

Today, I set out to take a photo of the amazing “flame trees” at the end of our street (which I’ve been meaning to do so I can send photos to my grandpa). It’s taken me a while because there are always a bunch of locals camped out under the trees and I feel awkward being the mzungu with the camera. Today being Sunday, I know I’d better not miss my chance or the flowers will be gone. As I head through the gate, I encounter Smith, who has been very shy up until now (Phinious claims I’m his first mzungu). We take a picture of the sunset together and I convince him to come along on my excursion. Soon he’s happily turning the camera on and off, and using the zoom to take picture of trees, flowers, his apartment and our yard. More lessons to come, I’m sure, given his enthusiasm.


(Here is a picture of Smith and the flame trees.)

Homesick... For Malawi

Friday night in Monrovia, alone in my windowless hotel room with a weekend of work to look forward to. Boo.

Find myself wishing I could wake up tomorrow at seven to sun streaming in the window, putter around the garden for a while then make Saturday pancakes (with extras, of course, for Phinious and Smith). I’m already missing out on things: Ariel’s first day at New Statehouse, volleyball practice, sundowners at Keith & Melody’s, the first real rains, opening day at Game Lilongwe, zucchinis sprouting in the garden…. It’s still a far cry from our well-worn groove in Boston, but being away makes me appreciate how quickly we’ve begun building routines, networks, friendships. And I find myself eager to get back.

First Day of School

I arrive at New State House a few minutes before 7:30 and triumphantly hand my crisp assignment letter to the Head Teacher, Mr. Masolola. He welcomes me (everyone here says, rather formally, “you are welcome”) and takes me to the teacher’s lunch room to get my assignments from the heads of department. I am assigned to a desk by the lunch room president and take my seat as he proceeds to introduce me to the other teachers present. The lunch room is loud and boisterous. Tables circle the room facing inward, and new arrivals tell stories in Chechewa that get the whole crowd rolling.

I’ve met Ann Ndigola, the head of the English department (which consists of herself and another part-time teacher) on a previous trip to the school and she vigorously welcomes me, says she is thrilled to have me take on Form 1 English Language and Literature and assures me that we’ll talk about books and curriculum once she gets back from teaching her first class of the day. Later on we commiserate about trying to get students to be excited about boring literature and her amazing maroon snake-skin pumps with pink metallic heels (this sounds totally tacky, but they’re actually great shoes). I’m excited that she may become a real friend and help me to get outside the expat bubble a little more.

Meanwhile, my table-neighbor takes me under his wing, gets me some social studies books and points me to the head of the humanities department to get my other assignments (Form 1 and Form 3 Social Studies). These books are filled with moralistic stories about men who are lured into town by evil cousins (who force them to become criminals) and young women who are deceived into becoming mistresses of rich men who turn out to have AIDS and dump them when they get sick. “What kind of entrepreneur was she? What was morally wrong with this kind of entrepreneurism?” What do you do if your brother hits and kills a man on the road while driving at night (while you’re in the car) and you don’t stop, but later see a MK20,000 reward for information about the death? Hmmm. Social Studies may be an adventure!

The current Form 1 English teacher peaces out when he learns I’ll be taking the class. (I think I’m only introducing myself and then he will come to teach so I can observe, but when I send a student to get him, he has gone to the bank.) The students and I get to know each other a little and practice reading comprehension. Thirty-eight kids in broken desks with only about 10 books among them, but we have a good time. Amazing how the same characters (class clown, know it all over-volunteerer, shy but smart, behind and afraid of failing so pretending to be zoned out) exist in classrooms the world over.

I realize in the afternoon that the reason there are so many teachers in the lunch room all the time is because there are actually only four people teaching at a time (one per form). The students from a given form stay in the same room all day and the teachers rotate. On the one hand, it seems incredibly wasteful compared to American teaching schedules and truthfully, if I were getting paid and were thus required to sit for five or six periods – out of nine – per day, I would probably go crazy. (As it is, I’ll probably just come and go for my own classes.) On the other hand, people get all their prep and marking done during the regular work day (what a crazy concept!) and seem to be having a great time doing it. Happy teachers means the school feels light and energetic even with the depressing lack of material resources.

At this point, the term is nearly over (only two weeks until exams), so I’m going to trade off teaching and observing with the current teachers for the next two weeks and then start in more seriously January 3^rd. Even still, it’s good to be back in the saddle!

My New...Venture?

We’ve officially warmed our house here (had about 15 people over last night for homemade pizza and sangria good times) so it’s clearly time to get back to Boston levels of busy life. I’ve been working more seriously on finding volunteer work/employment for the past few weeks, but was hampered by a nasty two week cold, Malawian bureaucracy, the lack of an established network and the distraction of other “getting settled” tasks. All of a sudden things started moving this past week.

A new friend [Keith -- American who lived for years in Kenya, Afghanistan and the Sudan before landing here with his wife Melody] hooks me up with some of his consulting contacts and I meet three times in a week with Hestern Banda, Managing Director of the local Saliphera Consulting Ltd.

In our first meeting, Hestern tells me he’s impressed with my C.V. and spends most of the rest of our hour-long meeting walking me through the company’s capability statement. Consulting firms here keep files of possible resumes with few full-time staff, and I’m figuring that maybe I’ll hear from him in a few months. At the end of the meeting, he reveals that he used to run leadership trainings/conferences, but that his partner on the project moved to Lusaka. Would I be interested in brainstorming some ideas with him?

During our second conversation, it becomes clear that my new potential employer is nothing if not a big-picture visionary. He’s talking about putting together executive level trainings, mid-level manager trainings, a train the trainer. Maybe a brochure? Can I go home and write things up? As Hestern Banda is amazingly well connected in Malawi, and has been working in the civil society sector here for more than 30 years, I figure it’s worth a few hours of time on spec.

My proposal receives a resounding “Well done!!!” and, only moments later, another email arrives in my inbox proposing names and a range of services (including grant management??) for “our new venture”. I’m still confused when I show up for our third conversation. Is this just a language thing? But no, he’s all about going big or going home. He wants to set up a whole new capacity development brand (he thinks there’s a big need and money from the major donors) with me as director, a website; the whole shebang. And he wonders what my availability will be to take on the work full time once we get off the ground (he’s that certain of success) as well as whether we might eventually be booking the country’s president to help us do trainings for local Members of Parliament. “This is Malaiw – it’s small enough that you can do that,” he tells me with a laugh.

Of course all of the initial work is pro bono on my end until we actually book some work – a very different model than in the US (at least while I was thinking of myself as a consultant rather than an entrepreneur). As I’ve really enjoyed our conversations so far, it doesn’t seem like it will hurt to put some time into materials and see what happens. Who woulda thunk.

At the same time, I finally got the paperwork to start teaching at New Statehouse CDSS and am planning to report on Monday morning! And yesterday got an email from another consulting firm I spoke with wondering if I’d like my name to be put forth for a three month program evaluation project that would involve field work in the Central African Republic, Burundi and here in Malawi.

Zero to sixty in three days flat.

More fun with food

Fortunately, not all our recent culinary undertakings have been quite so fraught. Witness the totally amazing nachos Ariel managed to conjure one day when I was feeling particularly homesick:

It took visiting four stores and the market (and this before we had wheels) but boy were they good! Salsa fresca, beans, veg, and cheddar that turns just a little brown and crunchy at the edges...mmm.... (The ubiquitous orange squash and the South African merlot aren't necessarily reminiscent of Boston meals, but you know what they say: when in Rome....)

On a slightly more "down-to-earth" note, there's my recent innovation in yogurt making:

Who needs a yogurtalator when the air is 100 F and there's all sorts of thermal mass lying around just waiting to be used? (For the record, the end result is edible but a bit on the runny side. May be down to too high a temperature, weak starter cultures, or perhaps a mismeasurement with the powdered milk.)

Finally, we dined in style on Sunday at the "Goodbrai Finn" barbecue. Finn Magill, fiddler extraordinaire, is headed back stateside to work on final production and distribution plans for an album telling the stories of people living with HIV he's producing with Malawian pop star Peter Mwanga. This was both a celebratory gathering (he and several of the other attendees had completed the Lilongwe half marathon that morning) and a bit of a send-off. (For those who don't know, in Malawi brai = bbq). Can you spot the veggie burgers? Once again we were spoilt for choice when it came to faux-meat (I swear there were more options in the Shoprite cooler than they stock anywhere but at the biggest Whole Foods in Boston). Our verdict: tasty!

ANTS!!!

Weekend is off to a good start: Saturday morning pancakes (something of a tradition), running a few errands in our new wheels (huzzah!), then back in time to putter around the kitchen and finally put all those overripe bananas to good use. Had even persuaded Ariel to splash out for walnuts and chocolate (without which banana bread really just isn’t the same). The loaf bakes for an hour, we leave it cooling (covered, of course, in our fancy keep-the-flies-off beaded screen) and go for lunch at Barbara’s house, only to find, upon our return, this:

Aaargh! My first loaf in the new bread pan, and it's a total loss. I'm so heartbroken I make Ariel carry it out to its compost-pile grave while I crush out every last member of the thieving horde. Me and ants = not friends.

Vignettes

We Are the Chicken Bus

Sunday I travel with Phinious to his home village near Dedza (about an hour and a half south of Lilongwe by matola bus). We walk about 5K from the bus depot to the village and everyone is hugely impressed that the mzungu didn’t mind the walk. After greeting many aunts, brothers, sister-in-laws, cousins, the village chief and the parents of close friends, we collect Smith, Phinious’ ten year old brother who is coming to live in Lilongwe so Phinious can ensure he goes to school. Phinious’s older brother insists that we take a hen with us as a gift (I’ve given his mother a packet of seeds and a chitenze wrap). The hen is duly wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and Smith takes charge, gently holding the chicken as we are biked to the depot on the backs of a trio of the local tank-like bicycles, and squeeze into two different mini-buses on the way back home. Luckily a family gets on with a dove only a stop or two after us on the return trip, so we’re not the sole party to bring livestock on board. The hen has been doing laps around the house back in Area 12 and started laying eggs on her first morning in her new home!

The Li-Ma Noun Class

Tuesday night Sabrina [German girlfriend of a guy we met through Daniel] and her friend Christiani, plus Dave and Haley show up at our place for Chechewa lessons with Chrissie [Peace Corps trained language instructor]. This nice little class emerged out of a first-mover advantage in booking Chechewa lessons and now people gather in our sparsely furnished living room twice a week to stumble over unfamiliar sounds. In the first blush of learning the new language, things seem encouragingly simple. All nouns begin with “ku” and end with “a”. To modify a verb, you simply squash together a subject prefix, a tense modifier and the root of the verb together and voila, you’re speaking Chechewa. Also glorious news? There is no feminine and masculine in the language – something that is the death of me in my study of Spanish. Come lesson two, these hopes are dashed. Turns out there are no fewer than eight noun classes. Each noun has two different forms, the singular and the plural, and each noun class comes with different modifiers (again, separate for singular and plural) that must be applied to related question words and a whole host of other things. Groan. At least we’ve memorized enough to greet people, introduce ourselves and explain where we come from!

A Full Tank of Gas…

Wednesday evening, Nathaniel and I drive ourselves to volleyball in our own car, and are even able to bolster our car karma by giving someone else a ride home. Shockingly, we have triumphed over Malawian bureaucracy, the petrol shortage and Bank of America's online banking system and find ourselves in possession of a very mini Toyota Rav 4, a full tank of gas, a title, certificate of fitness, vehicle registration and comprehensive insurance. How long did this take us? A mere six weeks, you say? Imagine “Sufficiently Stamped” times five or six different government office visits, plus extensive time trying to find work-arounds to Bank of America’s safe-pass system using excruciatingly slow internet – you get the picture. Operation highlight? I manage to charm Joseph, a seemingly influential bureaucrat at the Road Traffic office who produces a certificate of fitness without ever seeing the car – no trip over the inspection pit for us. : ) Here’s a picture of our new friend – any name suggestions? 

Ups and Downs

Beyond the fairly constant exhaustion of just figuring out how to live in a new place and being mostly dehydrated most of the time no matter how much water and fluorescent orange squash is consumed (hello hot, dry season), there are ongoing emotional highs and lows that certainly keep things interesting.

Friday morning I triumphantly track down a candy thermometer (for yogurt making) and reasonably priced q-tips. It’s the little things, really. Then Nathaniel calls with the news that he is physically holding our duty exemption letter for the car, an item that has been standing in the way of our purchase for more than a month. Hallelujah! I’m happily puttering around the kitchen warming up lunch when I realize that my wallet is missing, meaning I’ve lost the driver’s license that would allow me to drive our new car and the ATM card that is a life-blood in a totally cash-based economy where the maximum per-transaction withdrawal limit is $133.00 (MK 20,000).

Luckily kwacha bills don’t really fit into US wallets, so the real cash stash is safely in the inside pocket of my purse and I’m able to take the bus back to City Center and Nathaniel’s office. I have a crying, “I want to go home” breakdown when I arrive – the first and only real one of the trip. Getting around here is REALLY hot and fairly restricted with no car and I can’t believe that I won’t be able to drive for another month or two while we wait for a new license to arrive.

Nathaniel is waiting for a copy of a different letter from earlier in the process (we want to have all possible pieces of paperwork with us when we arrive at the Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) to process our duty free purchase) but the soft copy of the letter has been corrupted by a computer virus (which seem to run rampant in the OPC office) and the ladies with the hard copy are out to lunch. With Nathaniel’s help I pull myself together and go to stand on the corner where all of the mini busses pass by. I’m looking for an older bus with really nice new maroon seats (enough of an anomaly that I’d noted it during the fated lost wallet ride).

Amazingly, I locate the bus! The driver and conductor, thinking I’ll cause trouble, deny that I’ve ever been on their bus, but the other riders are sympathetic and let me search the metal floor. No wallet, of course – at least 30 riders have cycled in and out by now, and someone has clearly taken it. At least now I’ve done all I can and can feel confident that canceling and reordering the ATM card is the right thing to do.

We finally have all the paperwork and fight our way through the blocks-long petrol lines (will we even be able to find enough petrol to drive once we have our own vehicle?!) to hitch a ride to the MRA from our trusty taxi driver, Davies. We’re sent to the “fast track” office (very promising!) where the guy looks at all of our paperwork, nods, agrees, says things look good…and then points out that we’re missing form C-102, which needs to be filled out by the seller and the buyer in triplicate.

And so it goes – the couple we’re meeting for a “sundowner” (happy hour) drink are an hour late, but turn out to be really fun. We have people over for homemade pizza, which comes out delicious, but Nathaniel has caught a cold (miserable in this heat) and can’t enjoy our newfound social success. Whew! Too much! And that doesn’t even begin to cover the retrieval of the wallet (a guy calls the number of a woman whose card I have in my wallet who calls me with his number and we go to retrieve my wallet and license and ATM cards – useless to people here with no internet or credit card purchasing in stores – this morning).

What will this week bring – is it possible that we’ll actually be driving our car tomorrow?! 

Evening Pursuits

It took me so long to write the last post that I’m already ready for a new one on a different topic! As previously mentioned, evenings here are long (the sun goes down at 6) and slow. We’re finally getting a little familiar with the scene, and finding some friends to help us share the time. So what have we been up to?

Wednesday nights folks hang out at The Shack for the weekly volleyball tournament. Fueled by cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer, the international crowd hangs around outdoor picnic tables gossiping and nominally cheering on the various teams. In the A bracket, teams are composed mostly of Malawians with a few serious expats sprinkled in. The B bracket consists of inexperienced players, and those who want to drink beer between rotations. Nathaniel even finds someone [Dale, South African climate adaptation specialist] to play rounds of darts with.

Friday we host our first real dinner party. Dave [visiting American pastor] and Haley [teacher and, currently, pastor’s wife] live down the street from us and are thankful to take a break from the fishbowl of living in a church-owned house with a church-loyal staff. Cooking up homemade pasta sauce and pasta with only one big pot takes a little juggling, but Dave and Haley are sufficiently distracted by the joy of drinking wine and beer (pastors don’t drink here) that they don’t seem to notice. : )

We’ve also brought a little homemade yahtzee set. Here’s us playing in the dark one night when the power is out. Don’t mind the typical Brooks picture face – we're having a good time:

 And last night, in need of some longer entertainment and with the help of loyal Wikipedia, we divvy up the Bananagrams tiles and make a scrabble board on the back of our corn flakes box. Christin, our new roommate, joins us for a round.

“New roommate?” you may ask. Yes, we were going back and forth on having someone join us here, but were rattling around in the house a little (not a lot of furniture, books or tchokies to help it feel full!) and are excited about using the extra income to travel while we’re here. Christin [education researcher for the World Bank] posted that she needed a place to live, we responded and had her to dinner Tuesday and, wanting to get out of her hotel, she moved in yesterday. So far so good! (Don’t worry, Laura, there’s still plenty of room for visitors!)

Next steps? Homemade Scattergories and the founding of a pub trivia night! 

On Having Your Underwear Ironed

I’ve described other day-to-day aspects of living here, but have not yet talked about the bizarreness of having a domestic staff. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this post all week but have been having a tough time sorting through the cultural nuance, internal conflict and new relationships in a way that does the topic justice. Nonetheless, here we go…

We are warned before coming that it is expected that mzungus will employ local Malawians and provide much needed jobs. From the comfort of our Somerville living room we consider this concept in the abstract, conclude that it makes us entirely uncomfortable, and put the matter aside until it needs to be faced. Which turns out to be sooner rather than later.

Phinious, our housekeeper, is already living in the so-called “boy’s quarters” when we rent our place. Our lovely landlady, Barbara, hates to displace people, so she has allowed him to stay on after the previous tenants sell and leave. She encourages us to give him a chance. The first time we meet, a few days before our formal move-in date, Phinious is meek and silent and the usually generous Barbara, who has translated much of the conversation, uncharacteristically informs us that many Malawian domestic staff don’t work very hard and have to be constantly prodded. Already feeling entirely weird about having someone do our day-to-day household chores, we depart feeling like we’ve made a huge mistake renting our own place at all.

Phinious must just have been nervous about his fate the day we met because in reality, he takes a great deal of initiative and his English is quite good. From ensuring the garden is immaculately swept and watered to hand-washing, sun-drying and crisply pressing our clothes (including underwear), he finds ways to keep productively busy all day with rare intervention from me. [As a side note, the only reason we allow Phinious to go to the trouble of ironing underwear is because according to our guide book, there is a species of fly that lays eggs on drying laundry which will subsequently hatch in your skin unless clothes are ironed first. A fate we are hoping to avoid, especially in sensitive regions!] In conversation I’ve learned that Phinious finished secondary school and has a coveted MSCE, but thinks housekeeping is his best option for now as he saves to try to go back to school to do HIV/AIDS intervention and care work.

Patrick is our night guard. He arrives on his bicycle (apparently from about two hours distance by cycle) at five pm – just as dusk falls. When I ask if he would prefer to try to find something closer to his home, he assures me that there are plenty of other people there who have taken the available jobs nearer there, and that he is more than happy to travel so far for employment. Patrick is older and had definitive views on how he should do his job and how we should take care of the garden. He sits outside our house all evening, departing before we arise in the morning to rest at home where a wife and five young children await. Like Phinious, he is responsible and self-starting, leaving us to wonder whether Barbara’s comment was colored by local beliefs about “lower classes”, or whether we’ve just gotten lucky (soon after we moved in, Barbara’s housekeeper stole the $4000 US that we’d pay for our security and first three month’s rent and has subsequently been located with the cash on his person and jailed.)

We’ve acquired a new American roommate (as of yesterday) and a Malawian renter of the other boy's quarters (who we met during our stay at Annie’s Lodge when we first arrived) so there are now five people living here and others that come and go. Compared to many other expats, this is a tiny staff. Some of the folks I’ve met have 6 or more adult employees, some of whom live at the house with their families, but we are thankful to have kept things small. It’s a different feeling of community – a delicate balance of civility, nuanced power structures, tentative friendship and compromise. Among us we share the newspaper, sometimes food, information, language instruction and water and power outages. More intimate than US living and simultaneously more formal and hierarchical.

As I haven’t processed through feelings about all of this, I could probably blather on indefinitely trying to investigate shades of interpretation, but I’ll leave things here for now. 

Sufficiently Stamped

As our temporary residence permits have yet to materialize (surprise, surprise – the wheels of government turn slowly indeed) and we’d reached the end of our 30 day tourist visa (hard to believe it’s already been a month) this morning it was time for an outing to immigration. Fun!

We arrive right at nine, planning to beat the crowds, only to find the office had been open since 7:30am. We wander in to the visa section, thinking perhaps the early crowds have come and gone. Muli bwanje’s all around and we sit down to fill out a simple one-page form. So far so good. The immigration officer signs our completed forms and we get stamp #1. Hauling out a stack of kwacha, I think we’re home free, only to be told we must go to the other department to pay our extension fees.

Flash forward to the other side of the building, a room packed with several different queues of people waiting for various things. We’re directed to the teller queue, only five people long. Great. Well, it would be great if each person didn’t take at least five minutes. Hmmm...

Flash forward again and we’re at the teller, a charming young man in a striped shirt and short tie (apparently a Malawian fashion; many are worn no longer than mid-chest) whose booth is either bizarrely sunk into the floor, or equipped with the world’s shortest desk. Either way, he processes our paperwork quickly, adding stamp #2 and #3 to our single-page forms and printing out a receipt in quadruplicate(?), each copy of which receives its own stamp. We receive two of these apiece and are cordially waved on to the next window.

At this mysterious second window another clerk, this one wearing what appears to be the matching tie and vest combo from a wedding tux (complete with faux-diamond stickpin) records the information from our receipts into a giant ledger, peels off a carbon copy for us (to which he duly applies stamp #4), applies stamp #5 to our original form (just for completeness) and sends us on our way.

Back over at the visa section, the original immigration officer examines our paperwork again, applies stamp #6 to the form (which is duly filed… or something) and, finally, we get lucky stamp #7 in the passport itself, clearing us for another 30 days in country.

Start to finish: seven stamps in sixty minutes.

Lake of Stars

It turns out that music festivals at beach resorts are fairly ideal. What do you do in the morning? Take a swim, lounge on the beach and read, maybe play a game of chess on a giant outdoor board. And once the music kicks in there is a long evening of sitting and dancing in soft sand, Carlsberg Green or Malawi Gin and Tonic balanced nearby. Our car-mates for the trip, the previously mentioned Daniel (agronomist) and Finn (fiddler), along with Lucy (Daniel and Finn’s new roommate – an Australian who just happened to live in Currier House before graduating ’02 at Harvard and is here doing HIV/AIDS research for her Ph.D.) are lovely company. And it is fun to get out of the city and explore more of this beautiful country. Of course a play-by-play of the full 72 hours will bore you to tears, so I’ll stick to observations, themes and highlights like…

…ants. Rather than pay for a hotel room, we decide to camp at the festival. Overall this works out great. It’s a nice campground with decent facilities and our tent and homemade sheet-weight sleeping bag system is nicely functional. There’s just one minor, teensey-weensie problem…or rather hundreds of thousands of them. The campground is one giant ant pile! After a rough first night – lots of ant friends in the tent trying to get to our ripening bananas as well as thumping dance music from the festival until 4:30am – we do a massive and coordinated morning ant attack, stow the food in the car, and move the zippers to a more strategically placed closure position. Night two sees only a small infestation of ants that come in with our now-dry towels and with the help of our trusty headlamp and the Malawian version of Spare Change news, we manage to kill them off. Too bad we return home to a herd of the little guys in our kitchen!

Contrast is everywhere. We drive through the hot, dry Malawian bush for more than four hours to get to the Lake of Stars music festival in Mangochi. When we arrive, a thin strip of palm trees and more lush vegetation fed by the lake makes it feel like we could be on a tropical beach anywhere in the world. Walk outside the resort gates and you’re back to a land of fetid drainage pools and dry scrub. At $60US per ticket, the festival costs as much as our housekeeper makes in a month, meaning that only the wealthiest Malawians are able to attend. Just outside the gates there is a pop-up market filled with tchokies and food vendors selling chambo (local fish), grilled corn, boiled eggs, and roasted chicken. Small boys ask every mizungu for empty water bottles, and locals settle in on the public beach to listen to the music from across the fence.

And then there was the “old married people” factor. Most of the expats here seem to fall into an “middle aged with kids” or a “young and single/significant other is continents away” category. We’re clearly somewhere in the middle. At the festival, we showed our age by hitting the sack at midnight each evening without boozing heavily. Perhaps even more indicative, in the morning I am glad for feeling well-rested while our compatriots who stayed to the end of the live music at 3:30 blearily down cups of coffee in an attempt to wake up.

In the end, we’re home sun-tired and feeling a little gross after a weekend of greasy festival-vendor food, but glad we went to the trouble of securing tickets and a ride. Check out pictures of the journey here. 

On Food and Cooking

Of course one always assumes new foods will be encountered while traveling or living abroad. More striking to me are the foods you expect to taste the same that don’t. Sugar vs. corn syrup is a fairly ubiquitous switch world-wide, of course. (I remember the Mexican-led run on kosher, sugar-based, Coca-Cola near the Jewish holidays when I lived in Allston.) And we have been drinking a ton of full-sugar soda here (hello three flavors of Fanta – orange, pineapple and passion). But it’s been interesting how tomatoes and eggs and oranges taste different too. Points out just how used we are to the singular tastes of mass-produced American products.

Nathaniel and I have been so spoiled by our well-stocked Boston kitchen! It is a fun challenge figuring out old favorites using sub-par equipment and slightly different ingredients, and trying to learn how to cook with local flavors. And with only three pots and no microwave, there is a lot of juggling things around for storage and re-heating. Some of my favorite experiments so far:

Caramel Popcorn

We were jonesin’ for some comfort food a few nights back and decided to take a stab at one of our favorite desserts, despite having no corn syrup, no microwave (our Boston method is crazy and stove-free) and only raw sugar! Enter some popcorn that I bought for 200 kwacha at the local market, “golden syrup” (pancake syrup made from…you guessed it, sugar not corn) our mini cooker and the caramel syrup recipe from our new resource, “The Malawi Cookbook”. All is going well with the caramelizing process and Nathaniel’s popped up a first batch of corn. We realize that these home-grown puppies aren’t nearly as big once popped as the commercial corn we’re used to and go to make a second batch. But wait! What are those little black things in the corn? The dreaded corn-burrowers? Indeed – lots of the kernels have little holes eaten right through them and those little black things are bugs. We actually go through with eating the caramel corn, which comes out surprisingly tasty – after all, those bugs are well cooked and bugs are a great source of nutrition according to our Malawi cook book! For those of you who can’t imagine Nathaniel eating popcorn with known bugs in it, I admit that I am also impressed! We do get rid of the remaining dried stuff ;)

Nsima with Soya “Chicken a al King”

Nsima with “relish” is the basic staple food here in Malawi. It’s really fine-ground maize cooked into a stiff porridge (you can cut it with a knife when cool). Dried cream of maize is super cheap, and we’re intrigued by the line of Imana super soya mince products, which are also very inexpensive. We choose the “Chicken a la King” flavor, which seems less dicey than Oxtail or Mutton (Arinda, are you salivating yet?). We follow the recipe on the Imana box for “Chilli Braai Pap” – soya mince, an onion, tomato and some maize meal. Of course the instructions about how much water to add are contradictory and the original recipe is HUGE, so we wing it a bit. Final verdict? Corn-soya mash a little like baby food, but not bad.

Pancakes!

Pancakes are a weekend morning tradition for Nathaniel and I and it was hard to feel settled until we were able to cook some up. Luckily, pancake ingredients are easy to find the world over, and although we can’t get any real Vermont syrup, the golden stuff isn’t too bad. We crafted our first batch last Saturday – good thing because the power was out Sunday morning and we had to settle for cereal and bread with jam. In fact, I also cooked up pancakes this morning, even though it’s a work day for Nathaniel. Given the heat, the unreliability of electricity, and the lack of things to do in the evening, everyone is on a very early schedule. We’ve shifted to a 6:30 wake-up with little trouble (yes, for those of you who know Nathaniel is not a morning person, this is also quite astonishing). We’ve gotten into quite a nice routine of yoga and working in the garden plus tea and breakfast. Seems livable!

Round One to the Garden

It’s seven am, morning birds are chirping, the sweet scent of burning grass wafts though the open window, and the (relative) cool of the night has yet to fade entirely beneath the onslaught of the sun… what better time to potter about in the garden a bit?

Now, just to be clear, the garden I’m talking about here isn’t the beautifully landscaped amalgamation of native grasses, shrubs, and flowers installed by our landlord’s gardener. Nor do I mean the tidy little patch of vegetables planted and tended by our housekeeper Phinious. No, the garden that has been calling me is the unkempt sprawl of baked red dirt and dry cornstalks that lies in the far corner of the lot. So much space! After Somerville’s postage-stamp properties (35 x 70, according to our deed) it seems an embarrassment of riches. Just think of all the vegetables! It’s so overwhelming I almost don’t know where to begin… but back to this morning: seizing our rake and hoe (a traditional spade-bladed Malawian model that Ariel has procured at the market), I stride purposefully about the space, my mind awash with visions of cucumbers and vine-ripe tomatoes. I quickly site a compost pile, rake together the loose cornstalks, and then reach for the hoe. With the first few swings I know something is up. What’s the soil made of around here, concrete?! Oh for the tender toil of spading up the soft, heavy Homer humus! I make it approximately six feet down the first row before the traditional Malawian hoe raises some nice blisters… unclear if these are also traditional. In any case, I’ve clearly done enough pottering about for one morning.

You may have won this one garden, but I’ll be back… and next time I’ll be wearing gloves.

Chain of Events

In August, when Nathaniel travels here to check things out and be introduced to local partners, he also rents a room from Daniel (Dutch agronomist) for Johannes (Stanford grad student who completes a one month Project Healthy Children internship in Malawi). One of Daniel’s other roommates, Finn, is a bluegrass fiddler from North Carolina who is here making a charity album with Peter Mkwonda (Malawian hip-hop artist).

A few days after we arrive, Daniel and Finn take us out to one of the expat hang outs (Harry’s Bar). Finn mentions that I should get involved with the International Women’s Group of Malawi (IWAM).

Fiona (Irish national working for USAID) posts to the Lilongwe chat list about a weekly quilter’s group. I show up to the quilter’s group and, lo and behold, about half of the quilters are also heavily involved with IWAM. These are diplomat and NGO executive’s wives who have manufactured quite a weekly agenda–a thrice-weekly walking group and “hugging babies” (their words, not mine) at the orphanage besides quilting and IWAM– to keep busy while not working and with multiple staff members to keep house.

Perhaps you can tell that I’m a little turned off by the lifestyle of leisure. Nonetheless, they’re nice women and I’m trying to build connections with people. I get a phone number from Lauren (Canadia wife of a South African man who works for John’s Hopkins) and a promise of a ride to the next IWAM project committee meeting.

Meanwhile, I’m in Old Town at the Axa bus terminal buying tickets for our trip to Blantyre when I run into Finn, who is hanging out with Bella (grungy, raunchy Australian traveler he met during a weekend at the Lake) who has introduced him to Duncan (heavily tattooed Peace Corps volunteer). I invite myself to lunch and ask Duncan about what type of education work Peace Corps volunteers are doing. Duncan gives me the Jason’s (head of education placements for the Peace Corps) number.

Jason agrees to meet with me, gives a lot of good context and his thoughts on the areas of greatest need. Turns out, Malawi’s education system is strained to bursting. Since making primary education free for all in 1994 without the buildings, materials or teachers to create enough space, primary schools have bloated to unmanageable proportions. They operate in shifts with student teacher ratios of 200:1 in some places! Given all of these challenges, only about 35 percent of students actually complete standard 8, and only the 10 percent of those with the highest marks are accepted into government run secondary schools. There are, of course, many more young people who are hungry to learn, so the government has allowed communities to open their own schools (Community Day Secondary Schools – CDSS) which have minimal resources. In Jason’s estimation, these CDSSs are one of the places of greatest need, and he’s placed all his Peace Corps folks in them to try to shore up the secondary system. All of his folks are in rural areas, however, so he doesn’t know which schools in the city need people.

Fast-forward to the IWAM meeting two days later. The first agenda item is sponsorship for ten students and text books at the New State House Secondary School, which happens to be a CDSS and which also happens to be very near my house in area 12. Even more serendipitously, one of the women on the committee is going out to the school that afternoon to advocate for the daughter of her housekeeper and is willing to give me a ride.

This school is also overflowing with students. We’ve arrived between the morning CDSS shift and the afternoon Open and Distance Learning shift, which attempts to serve students who couldn’t make it into either the regular government schools or the CDSS due to space constraints, and who have scraped together the money to pay ODL fees. The school is stuffed to the gills, but there is a boisterous and positive atmosphere. When I mention to Evelyn (assistant head teacher) that I am a teacher possibly interested in volunteering, she gets very excited. There are 18 teachers at the school (for, I gather, about 700 students) and their Form 1 (9^th grade) English teacher is out indefinitely. We trade phone numbers and I promise to call to follow up next week. I still need to think a bit more and talk things over with Nathaniel (he’s been in Blantyre during most of this chain of events and phone calls are expensive) but it seems like a great place for me to spend my time and energy at first glance.

Oh and did I mention that I figure out on the car ride home that the woman who has taken me to New State House is none other than Celia Swann, the woman who wrote the only existing text-based course for learning Chechewa?

All of this strikes me a somewhat incredible. It’s the flow from person to person to deliver me at this school (I’m not above believing in fate). It’s also the smallness of the expat community here; incestuous, but also much more communal. Time will tell where Nathaniel and I fit into the web.  

Best Landlord Ever!

Not only has Barbara filled us in on many of the norms of life in Lilongwe (electricity is prepaid – credits are purchased at gas stations; it’s not just possible but actually preferred to pay the water/sewer bill in cash), provided our sole artwork (two pictures of sailing ships and a huge mirror) gratis, and found us a security guard (the amiable, bicycle-commuting Patrick), she even managed to produce an electrician on Sunday!

Resigned to a further day of restaurant food due to our cluelessness, we nonetheless called her to enquire about getting an electrician to hook up the cooker. Lo and behold, mid-morning Sunday an affable gentleman appeared on his bicycle, proceeded to wrench on some things, journeyed into town to find the correct outlet, and got both fridge and cooker up and running. Total cost: 2,000MK parts, 2,500MK labor.

Finally, our first meal in the new house. Here’s to you, Barbara Davidse.