Things I have noticed recently include:

• A garden centre (with borehole) built amongst a graveyard;
• a crazy blue and orange winged insect thing (may have also had fangs);
• teeny tiny bees (almost midgy size, building a nest by outside hut table);
• swiss anti-mosquito spray is about as useful as a.....[insert phrase of choice / choice phrase]......damn mosquitoes!
• Fertiliser season has started, you can smell the sulphurous pong in some fields (fertiliser is a very big deal here!)

F x

Ps - thunderstorm 2 nights ago and that mahoosive spider in the garden has finally carped it! Yay!

F x

Back to School

To (sort of) continue a theme - its been a fortnight of school books and homework for me!

I've started french classes two mornings a week (tres bien, je les aime beaucoup). Whilst I am actually old enough to be the mother of the rest of the girls in there (and the teacher embarrassingly always refers to me as 'vous' and the rest as 'tu'), it is great to get back into it. All sorts of things are starting to come back to me and with another 8 months I may have even remembered how to conjugate the conditional subjunctive (if indeed it really exists!)

I also signed myself up for a three day course at the uni on int. trade law. Met some great Malawian lawyers, got the low down on the newly appointed judges and I now know my GATT from my GATS, EPAs from my AGOAs. I think I see the importance of the EU 'anything but arms' legislation and may even understand what all the fuss about bananas was!

Hurray for me! (or, as Malawian school children would chant: “well done, well done, sure, keep it up!”)

F x

Backpacks

I helped out (ahem, tagged along and took some pictures) last week when the MM warehouse / backpack team handed out 1000 of these little parcels at Milo primary school, out west of Blantyre.




I still don't know how to describe what these schools are like and how proud I am of everything MM does. I'm not even going to try. I'm just going to post some of the pics.....




(and give you the web address: www.marysmeals.org)


F x

Thank-You

New Backpacks!!

A Mary's Meals Queue

School Bags

A class(room)

Santa's Sleigh (of sorts...)

Lovely, isn't it?

It's getting hot down here

Pheweee, so no where near where it will get to, but I'm already panicking about it! The jacaranda trees have bloomed, great crests of beautiful lilac flowers and when the wind picks up they sprinkle all over the streets like confetti. Reminds me of the white and pink blossom trees that line Musters Road, the street in Nottingham where my primary school was (is?).

I'm told that once the wind has blown all the pods off the flame trees (which are now regularly falling onto the roof of the hut with a great clatter) they'll also come out in a blaze of red – will definitely post good pics of that!

Anyway, once all this lovely colour is over the heat will build and build and build until it breaks into heavy rain around Christmas. Probably only in the mid to high 20s at the moment but the air has changed, it smells hotter. The steering wheel is sometimes too hot to touch when I get into the car so I'm becoming obsessed about finding shade to park in. There are more flies as well, a sure sign it is getting warmer and so people are burning rubbish like there is no tomorrow – lots of smoke and dust.

This is also the time of year for circumcising all the young boys (and some of the young girls!) - a ceremony which seems to be performed in the night to enormously loud drums. The folks of Nbayani (the township on the other side of the wall) are really going for it so some nights all I can do is doze to the sound of drums until about 4 in the morning when they finally stop.

Yup, its pretty African right now.

Hope you are all well (and a radio 1 style 'big shout out' to my Gramps as he prints this out and to my Granny as she reads it, comfy in her armchair!)

F x

Garden Pirates

Phiri came to ask if I had any more bottles, 'big ones, glass'. We're cutting back so I didn't have any empty ones for him. I still followed him out into the garden and found this big bloke digging up a ton of old wine bottles that had been buried in the garden under soil and old leaves!

Having spotted him doing a deal with the 'guy who hangs out at the bottom of the street' over empty bottles, we thought we had Phiri's recycling system sussed. Turns out he must be playing it dangerously and keeping in with two of Blantyre's bottle magnates. That, and making sure the night guards don't get in on the bottle action.

Wonder what else is buried in the garden....

F x

Some sense of scale?

Damn Spiders!

Look at the size of this, I mean COME ON!! It could have my finger off I'm sure.....

A refuses to stand next to it and hold up mobile phone for scale, but I'm sure you can get the jist of how ENORMOUS!! this thing is. Apparently it's just a 'harmless garden spider' and if bitten I'd just go a bit blue, wouldn't die probably. Oh yeah! The cold shivers I'm feeling because of millions of years of evolution beg to differ – I think it is a badyn'.

It is eating mosquitoes though, a good thing.

Urgghhhhhh!!!

F x

Need I say more....

It's not where you are, it's who you're with

Enrico is going home (sniff). We picked him up the day we dropped Mum and Jennie off and I can't believe that's three months already!

We'll miss him lots but are celebrating his last weekend in Malawi by sitting at the outside hut table drinking special brew (his favourite Malawian tipple) and putting the world to rights.

In particular, we've concluded that the difference between being Italian and being Italian Swiss is enormous, but the difference between being Italian and being Malawian may not be so big; for example:

- Both Italians and Malawians drive like total mentalists;

- similarly, the time it takes to get an Italian drivers' licence is measured in days;

- polenta is actually the same thing as nsima (or 'sema', the basic Malawian food);

- car horns (and even worse driving) are the main way to celebrate a football win;

- haggling is compulsory;

- you suspect the hawkers are trying to trick you, particularly when they call you 'boss' or, in Malawi, 'bwana';

- in both countries you are not trusted to fuel you're own car;

- Malawian's describe themselves as the 'warm heart of Africa', Italians claim to be the 'friendliest nation in Europe'; and

- (posh) Malawians say 'ciao'.

F x