visits, lake, and lots of lectures to prepare......

Ok, I'm back to my blog after some days. Its quite crazy here, the preparation of lectures consumes all my time. Also, last week end we were (again) at the lake for a VSO conference. Really, I thought it was too much. I have been here for 3 months and I haven't really done any work, just basking in the sun and travelling up and down..

if this was not enough two friends are coming next wednesday. Saray and her friend Nieves that want to spend some time here and they will stay until the festival 'lake of stars' in october. So those that have followed my adventures know that my three wives left recently (although they come back every week end) and now two more girls will be living with me for a while, and neighbours, night guards and housemaids will start again to look at me with jealous eyes..

about normal and abnormal things...

It’s amazing how can we get used to new things, new friends, work colleagues... as if they had always been part of us. My life has changed so much in the last two months, but I have melted in the new situation, and the things that used to surprise me or cause me horror seem to be normal now. Only when I have some time to stop and think about it I realise that a few weeks ago I was living and seeing very different things.
For example, it doesn't surprise me anymore when I see 25 guys squashed in a minibus that is falling apart, even more, sometimes I jump into the minibuses and I squash my bones with the locals. It has become normal also the general state of crappiness of streets, buildings, cars, clothes, etc.. And I don't gasp when I see someone carrying a sack of potatoes in his head! God knows, I may be able to carry things in my head like the Africans after these two years...

Malawian English

Things are moving now, and after all this period of idleness I start to be fairly busy. I am going to be teaching in the premedical, lab technician and pharmacy courses. If this was not enough, I am getting used to communicate with the locals... I'll have to explain this in detail.
Malawians speak very special English. Nor that I speak better English than them, but their way of talk can be very amusing. One of the main features of their adopted English is the incorporation of vowels in the middle or end of the words. So 'health problems' become 'healthy problems', and the same applies to healthy centre, etc. another good one is blood sample, that is called 'bloody sample', dirt road, dirty road and so on.
But the difficulties don't finish here, is not only a matter of different accent or expressions. An ordinary European like me also has to deal with the fact that Malawians will always tell you what you want to hear. That means that when you ask someone to do something for you they will always say: 'yes, I'm going to do it' but obviously, they don't say when. And sometimes they cannot do it, but they will never tell you. The most negative sentence that I have heard so far is: 'I'll come back to you'.. This means, more or less, that there are serious problems.

MVUU camp

The day after my birthday, not quite recovered from the party (it was great, in my house, loads of people came!) we went to Liwonde national park. That place is like a postcard from Africa. The river Shire crosses it giving shelter to thousands of hippos and crocodiles and hundreds of elephants. There are also any kind of african deer, boars, birds... (sorry, I still haven't learnt their names, they are all called different here!) We had reserved a couple of tents in the Mvuu camp, by the river, and we did a boat safari and a land safari.

Mvuu means hippo in the local language, probably they gave it that name because hippos visit the camp (I have seen the pictures) although they didn't come that night. In the first evening we did the boat safari. It was absolutely magic, we spotted 3 baby hippos, a group of elephants and a few crocodiles.. the sunset covered us in orange light.. I couldn't stop shooting with my camera.

The next day we went into the rhino sanctuary This is the only part of the park with rhinos, they were totally extinted in Malawi and now they try to breed them in a separated area. We couldn't see the rhinos.. Shame, we'll have to come back ;-)

In country training...

I've been atending a 2 week long meeting in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, that's why I haven't post anything recently. The meeting was called in country training (ICT) and we had sessions about the 4 diferent programs of VSO in Malawi, Health, HIV/AIDS, Education and Food Security. Some of the presentations were very interesting and helped me to have a better picture of the problems in Malawi and understand some of the things that we have seen, but in general we all were a bit bored, we have been for 7 weeks in the country and we are all eager to go to the field and start work!!

We had a week end at the middle of the training and we spent one day at the lake, a couple of hours drive from Lilogwe. It was a beautiful day, some people bathed, some spent the time in the beach or in the bar... We went to a beach resort called Livinstonia, with bars, restaurants and tourists... but if you walked to the end of the beach you would arrive to the reality were the locals were washing their clothes and the kids were jumping in the rocks and trapping fish in plastic bottles.

The kids of Ilona (canadian volunteer that has come with her family) were exploring the rocks with the local children and some of us joined them in the afternoon. Those kids were fantastic, they were showing us the way to a cave with bats, jumping in the rocks like goats. They wanted us to take pictures of them posing in the rocks.. At the end of the rocks we were suspended over the lake and the views were fantastic. I am uploading some pictures in my site..