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.