To see pictures of my adventures in Malawi click here for part I, and here for my trip to the lake.

Friday, December 31, 2010

New Year

In about one minute it will be 2011. Everyone except for Anthony and I has already gone to bed. I informed them that they are all lame.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Nov 28, 2010 (Sun) – 11:05pm (+2 GMT)

Thanksgiving dinner was quite a success, the only other thing I would have liked to have would have been pecan pie. We had mashed potatoes and stuffing and sweet potatoes and corn and green beans and pickles and olives and Special K loaf and apple pie and apple crisp and pumpkin pie and chocolate pie and ice cream and other things I don't remember at the moment. We all stuffed ourselves till we couldn't eat another bite then had dessert. After digesting for awhile a bunch of us went for a walk to convince ourselves that we were not completely unrepentant gluttons. We walked up to a vacant lot with an amazing view of the valley while the sun was setting. One would think that mountains would make the world feel smaller but in fact just the opposite occurs. In Michigan where everything is so flat I never feel like I am actually seeing all that far.

The house Anthony and I are in now is starting to feel more like a home. When we moved in the only two pieces of furniture were the beds. We have now managed to obtain two dressers, a bookshelf, a desk, a chair and a small dinning table. There is a living room which is about 12 feet by 8 feet, a large bedroom that is about the same, a small bedroom that is about 6 ½ feet by 7 ½ feet, a shower room, a toilette room with a sink that one gets to know very well when one is taking care of business due to the abnormally close proximity of the toilette and sink, and finally a kitchen where when two people are in it they have to take turns turning around. The house has no hot water, no fridge and no stove. There is a laundry machine that sits in the kitchen and has to be hooked to the kitchen faucet to use. There is also a large niche in the wall with a chimney for one to burn charcoal in to cook with. Fortunately we managed to dig up and fix a double hot plate to use. While fixing it I managed to electrocute myself with 240 volts which was rather exciting. The Haytons just purchased a new fridge which should be arriving this week so we will be getting their old one. It will be quite pleasant to be able to refrigerate food and have cold water to drink. Hopefully this week our room will also get fixed since every time it rains (which is nearly every day now) my bed gets wet. I try to move my bed out of the way but since I lost our round of paper, scissors, rock I got the small bedroom and there isn't exactly much space to move my bed if I actually want to be able to open my door as well. All in all things are quite interesting as always. T.I.A.

Nov 25, 2010 (Thu) – 12:56pm (+2 GMT)

I'm sitting in the waiting room of the Limbe clinic waiting – appropriately enough – for Christi to finish up what she is doing so she can ride with Cheri and Elde and I over to the Woods' house for Thanksgiving dinner. My stomach is quite looking forward to it. The last two days I have been trying to figure out how in the world the accounting works at the hospital and have come to the conclusion that it doesn't. After hours and running back and forth between multiple people and them searching for lost receipts and some lucky guesswork we finally figured out what all 10 (really just 8) line items were on my Tech account. It turned out that I an approximately $600 item had been charged to my account that never should have been. We are going to be setting up a separate bank account for the IT department so that in the future it will be easier to keep track of what is going on in the account.

Nov 20, 2010 (Mon) – 11:48 (GMT +2)

At this time last weekend Anthony, Hannah, Diane, Jacquie and I were completely focused on the objective of trying to stay cool, which proved quite elusive. We headed out from Malamulo at around 6:45 Friday morning when we caught a minibus to Blantyre. Once reaching the Limbe (a suburb of Blantyre) bus stop we changed to a large bus to take us up to Liwonde. We all piled into the bus where we all sat in the very back row and proceeded to observe the goings on of the people. Shortly after boarding a pastor stood up and announced that we were going to be having a church service at which point he started leading song service. Everyone joined in the singing and after several songs he launched into a sermon entirely in Chechewa. I don't think in the States anyone would put up with some random pastor leading out a church service on any sort of public transportation.

Once our spiritual dose for the day had been administered we set of on the three hour drive to Liwonde. Every time the bus stopped people would crowd around the windows hawking their wares. At one of the stops in a larger town we purchased some cold drinks, some crackers and a few samosas. The drinks were interesting in that the sellers expected us to drink the whole thing and give the bottle back before leaving the bus stop. If we wanted to keep the bottle we had to pay an extra 30 Kwatcha (~20 cents) for the deposit. Jacquie and Diane didn't feel safe eating the “street food” but Hannah and I quite enjoyed the samosas and I'm not dead yet.

When we arrived in Liwonde we called the Bushman's Baobab – where we were going to stay – and had them come pick us up. We were a bit surprised - some less pleasantly than others – when they arrived in a safari jeep thing (a very technical term) with no roof and a transmission system that had seen many better days. But it was nice being in the open air as we drove to the camp which was located in a small, rarely visited, section of nowhere. On the way we picked up a guy who we later found out was the owner and also discovered to be quite eccentric. He was white Malawian whose family had been in Malawi for 7 or 8 generations. He also drank from sunrise till long after sunset and chain smoked worse than about anybody I've seen. But he did have many interesting stories and had traveled quite extensively, he also knew each of the elephants in the herds that came by the camp by name.

Shortly after we arrived, once we had put our stuff in our sleeping quarters, we all piled back onto the safari vehicle to drive over to where we would be having a canoe safari. We started out in a shallow swampy area, polled through tall grass for several minutes and then broke out into the river. We saw around a dozen hippos, a bunch of impala, water bucks, various large birds and, when we got back to our starting point, a whole herd of elephants. That evening we chilled at the camp - although “chilled” might not be the right word considering the deathly heat. After trying to get to sleep for an hour or so Diane, Jacquie and I temporarily gave up and went out to sit in the common area where it was breezy. The owner was still up and he came over – much to the dismay of the girls – and started talking up a storm whilst knocking back a few beers and going through a cigarette every few minutes. After awhile the girls got fed up with him and went back to the dorm. I ended up staying out and talking with him till 2 am mostly about world politics and related issues. His ability to argue rationally and usefully declined through the night as his blood alcohol level increased. I finally got to sleep for a couple hours before getting up for our safari drive at 6am. The drive was decent, the main problem was that the transmission system on the vehicle kept getting stuck so the driver wasn't able to stop when we wanted to get pictures. The rest of the day we spent most of our energy trying to keep cool. Jacquie had somewhat of a cultural shock breakdown. In the afternoon we ended up sitting in a circle taking turns spraying each other down with a hose. That night we all showered with our cloths on and went to bed wet which was amazingly helpful for getting to sleep. Sunday morning after breakfast we headed back to town where all of us except Hannah caught the bus back to Blantyre. Hannah parted ways to head to the lake before heading back to England.

The bus ride back was interesting. At one point someone got in with a very large box of fish which smelled quite potent. In Blantyre we caught a minibus going to Makwasa. Diane wasn't able to sit in the front this time and she had a rather unpleasant ride back dealing with a bad case of claustrophobia. We arrived back at Malamulo in the early afternoon and just relaxed for the rest of the day.