Independence Day

Was a while back but thought you might like this pretty picture of the Malawi flags they put all up the highway!

Girls & Boys in Zomba

A wanted to go & stay in this log cabin thing with no hot water but a high snake / spider count. Naturally I wasn't keen.

Happily he's now got enough boy chums to get a few crates of beer, some steaks and poker chips together and settle in for a boys weekend.

One of the guy's girlfriends & I checked ourselves into nearby hotel & enjoyed real log fire in the room, bottle of wine & first bath since I got here - general delightful pampering!

Everyone's a winner!

F x

Zomba Baboons

"Is it true that there are no thieves in England?"

We were giving the pristine guard that always winks from the MM office a lift to the shops as he'd forgotten the key for his bike chain (think his name might be Wilson). Explaining the need for a bike chain, he expressed the view that he didn't know what the world was coming to, there were many young men stealing things in Malawi now because it was getting wealthier & there was more to steal. He also explained that sometimes there is a problem with the armed gangs who were something to do with the private army under the 'president for life' in the 90s.

It's sad to think that might be true, though many international surveys still have the crime rate as very relatively low in Malawi. But he asked me if it was true that there were no thieves in England! ?!?! I couldn't find out where he had heard that but replied that, no, there were thieves in England, there were thieves all over the world.

He wanted to know whether the thieves were “Englishmen or black men”....naturally I said they were all Welsh ;-)

F x

I was going to steal that!

So there are quite a few pawpaw trees in the garden & the pawpaws are getting ripe. Phiri went to Davina the other morning to complain that the night guards had taken a big, juicy, nearly ripe pawpaw that he had his eye on. Wasn't there but believe the conversation went something along the lines of:


“Madam, you must tell them! I was going to take that pawpaw and they have, you must tell them not to touch the pawpaws, they are for me!”
“Ok Phiri, everyone must bring the pawpaws to me and I'll distribute them.”
“But madam, they also took big apple from the tree.”
“No Phiri, that was me, it's my apple tree & I knew if I didn't take it one of you would!”

:-)

F x

A genuinely sorry sight

I always worry when I see men carrying babies. Invariably it seems to mean that something is horribly wrong with the mother.

We live quite close to a hospital but I only really notice it about once a week....still, it's enough. Once we were driving to work and noticed two men, one carrying a baby and one with a very large child strapped to his back. Look closer, it wasn't a child but a skeletal woman slung up in a bit of tattered fabric. This morning on the way to work I noticed a woman curled up on the grass lying with her head on the kerb. I thought, she is crying and might have just lost a child. Moments later I drove past a man walking down the street towards a local clinic, with a baby strapped to his back and a couple of water bottles with what looked like milk in his hand. I don't know if they are connected, but I am so sorry to see it.

15% of the adult population have HIV/AIDS here. Some reports say it is coming on for 20%. That is one in every 5 people. There are literally millions of orphans. But if you are Malawian HIV/AIDS is just another thing to add to the list of stuff that will kill you. Most people have malaria, many have bilhartisa, there is cholera and TB and dysentery. I understand a Malawian's life expectancy is around 45 (a recent improvement from 38).

I do not know what to make of all that.
F x

Nobly Carrots

So we're feeling better. Appetite is back anyway.

Food that is good here =

• Avocados (though all finished now);
• fresh green peas (hours of podding fun & tasty raw snack);
• burn-your-lips-off-chillies (do not touch anything after handling them, seriously, especially if you are a man who needs a pee....);
• beef (don't listen to American friends, 500g steak is too much, 300g....always get the 300g....);
• dark, sticky, meaty roast chicken, especially the scrawny ones that run about town & are called 'roadrunner' on menus (though ALWAYS check that you aren't actually eating chicken face / head);
• chips (genuinely ubiquitous here, eat your heart out Ashton Lane!);
• mangoes (apparently, not seen them yet but people get well excited about mango season);
• cherry sobo (like cherry coke, but more sugar, less coke).
  

Food that is not good here =

• Cheese (just forget it);
• nobly carrots (covered in mud, impossible to peel & go soft if you don't eat them within 2 hours);
• crooked sweet potatoes (as with the nobly carrots, but they go black when you peal them, ooze weird white sap, take 2 hours of boiling to get soft & still taste muddy);
• Fish (except Chambo at the lake, which is quite nice);
• Garlic (infeasibly tiny, takes an age to peel / chop, so I give up & shamfacedly buy the imported chinese stuff that people sniff about and that I pay 4 times as much for, which still doesn't taste that nice);
• Strawberries / raspberries (very rare, very expensive, largely mouldy & almost impossible to wash off the muddy taste / random bits of grit).

Still putting weight on though......

F x

Poorly

We're not well. Nothing serious (I think), just some virus / colds probably but I feel completely shattered. Normally a couple of ibuprofen would see off a sore throat and the sniffles but this time, wow, totally wiped. Must be some strange kind of Malawian cold that we're not used to.

We've had a few days in bed and a pretty lacklustre trip round the local co-op to stock up on juice and bread. All I want to do is lye under the net and sleep. Everything feels too African at the moment – I can't face the children and the traffic and the dust. I miss home.

We've been watching DVDs (I love Jack Bauer). America & Europe look AMAZING! I crave starbucks (which I never liked), proper tarmac, 24 hour shops and buildings more than 2 stories high. Streetlights and buses and sandwich bars, sushi and internet shopping!

We'll get over it, but right now I don't have the energy for this. I think we're also hitting some kind of 4 month wall. The initial excitement & novelty has worn off. We've got a normal life to lead but it is subtly different and strange things make it harder. No switch, no taxis, no take away, no microwave, no dishwasher or tumble dryer. Mod cons are just that, I miss them. I think we'll skip this weekend's outing south to the sugar fields. Hunker down in the hut, rest and watch MacGregor and Boreman struggle round Mongolia – could be worse!

Take care
F x
PS - The guards had to panga the first troublesome snake the other night as well. Really took a very very long time to die.

Ants

Damn ants! I admire their strength and team work but am scared of the biting ones and annoyed that my house is not my own. The incidences of ant invasions into the bathroom are getting down to one a fortnight (probably combo of continued zero tolerance policy and the gecko that lives behind the hot water tank) but I was looking out of the back window the other morning and noticed the whole ground seemed to be rippling.

My eyes were drawn by loads and loads of little brown birds dotting about on the ground, then I saw the leaves were moving (it is like our autumn here now, leaves have fallen, less than 10 degrees and overcast) and on closer inspection I saw the ground was teeming with these black and red ant things. Blurgh, I never go round there anyway (snakes and spiders) but I now realise that the little holes in the earth are ant holes, and there are a lot of holes.

Sometimes, from the front steps, the noise of the leaves being moved and munched is actually loud and there are at least five different spots in the house where we (Phiri) have to brush black dust off the skirting boards every couple of days. This is the result of the ant nests in the roof that we have put poison down for but are fighting a loosing battle.

Strangely we don't really get that many in the kitchen (fingers crossed). Might be something to do with the other gecko that lives behind the fridge but I have noticed nest like stuff coming down between the wall and the ceiling. Last time we had that I cleaned it away and we had an invasion of Hitchcock proportions, so I'm just going to leave it. They can have the roof and the garden but if they come into the house I will Doom them. It is a very fair deal.

F x

We are OK!

Thanks for the concerned e-mails / phone calls! Do not fret, we are fine and feel pretty safe. Please please do not let it put anyone off visting!

Felt I had to be a bit more balanced as all you were getting were stories about parties and day trips. Maybe I went too far & somethings are better not spoken (e.g. side effects of the malaria drugs, which I'll tell you about when I'm back...)

Keep well back home and BIG CONGRATULATIONS to the following:

- Carrie who is getting married this weekend;
- Katie & Jonny who have a lovely baby boy JJ;
- Megan who has landed a fantastic job in Nepal;
- Karen who is an auntie; and
- Mike who has finally popped the question (and got a yes).

F x

Night of the Pangas

There is a darker side to the ex-pat life here. Not long ago three of our colleagues were staying in a guest house in Lilongwe and each of them woke to four men armed with pangas, a type of machete, standing round their beds. Almost certainly an inside job with the place's guards they took everything from them, but mercifully no one was hurt.

I simply can't imagine how terrified I would be if it happened to me. It isn't that common but its not uncommon. Our American friends' guard has been attacked and the tyres stolen from their car three times now and, completely understandably, the girl is having trouble sleeping. It would be hard (though not impossible) for someone to break into a domestic house in the night, but someone was tied up and robbed at home at 10am two Sunday mornings ago.

Thankfully, I think (hope) that we are relatively safe here in the hut, we're certainly as safe as we can be. Crime is relatively low in Malawi, the second safest country in Africa, but that is still a relative measure. The difference in wealth and what I think is a greater normalisation to violence, makes us automatic targets. You place so much trust in your guards, it begs the question whether you are actually creating a vulnerability and would be better not using them and staying more vigilant / building better defences?

But its not really an either or. I'll take guards, barred windows, padlocks, barbed wire, attack alarms and constant vigilance and pray that we're OK. With the vice-president two doors up, we're never far from the army anyway and I will continue in my 'give the guards regular food and thanks' strategy.

F x

PAAARRTAAY

Holyrood secondary school are on their way home. We waved them off at the airport today (sat) and went to their goodbye party last night – it was brilliant!

A gave a MM talk at the school a few years ago and since then he and their deputy, Tony Begley, have been good mates. Tony has done wonders getting the teachers and children of Holyrood and its feeder primary schools engaged in MM and they have raised a fortune! This year alone the sixth formers raised over $200,000 for their trip out here to spend two weeks building and renovating classrooms and a special needs centre. They've also forged a kind of link with Stella Maris, a specially funded boarding school for some of the brightest young girls of Malawi. Run by nuns, we had a top party there last night.

I've learnt that in Malawi protocol is everything, so before the hall full of people could eat, everyone had to be 'introduced' – the trustees, the education minister, the head nun, MM e/ees suppliers, contractors, us, the teachers, the drivers, the children. Stand up, wave, sit down, clap. 6 different speeches thanking everyone & two sets of prayers. Dodgy acoustics but Tony actually managing to pull off quoting Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, no mean feat.

We MM people mucked in serving the drinks and the Stella Maris girls put on this play – quite surreal at times and lots of characters shouting 'shut up' at each other, but from what I can tell they were doing an excellent job of an African Macbeth.

The dancing was awesome (no doubt helped along by relief that the speeches were over). A's colleague Nelia (who would not get off the stage) could give Beyonce a run for money in the arse wiggling stakes and its amazing how well the Gay Gordons fit the, very catchy, Malawian 'Zwangla'.

Its always felt good being Scottish here, somehow more a part of the place than I suspect we would be elsewhere in Africa – probably something to do with Livingstone and all the 'trade, not slavery' work he did 150 years ago. There's also a sense of momentum building behind the renewed Scottish / Malawi relationship and, judging by last night, I think both countries could be on to a really, really, good thing.

F x

Roadtrip

We're back safe and sound from a ridiculously long road trip to Karonga, right in the very north of Malawi, about an hour from the Tanzanian border. A had a meeting there so to make the 2.5 days driving for a 1.5hr meeting a bit less of a nonsense, I took the chance to see the north and keep him company.

What I take away is not so much memories of the empty beauty of that part of the country (wild natural forests, high mountain passes and a great road along the lake shore) but a terror of A's boss's car – that huge gas gazzling Nissan was a beast! The suspension was knackered, the fuel tank leaked, the speedometer didn't work, there was a big crack in the windscreen, the headlight lamp blew and every time you turned the engine off it backfired Del-Boy style with a tremendous 'CRACK'! We certainly made an impression arriving late in Mzuzu, the freezing cold northerly most proper city. Oh, and of course the doors didn't lock, the windows didn't open and the tape deck didn't work, such things 'come as standard' in Malawi.

It did the job though, we got four rice farmers, a business manager and the head of buying for the national co-operative all in it at one point. We're safe and we'll certainly never forget our three day whirl wind tour of Malawi.

Fx

PS – they speak a different language in the north, though all I was able to pick up was “Muli wuli?” instead of “Muli bwanje?” for 'how are you?' and 'yeaoo' (sp? Like yellow but without moving your tongue) for thank-you – helpful to know when being stopped by the police (again).