Visits!!

My friend Karine came for a quick visit from Belgium! she traveled the
north of Malawi with an organised tour and then came to the south to
spend a few days with me. Unfortunately I couldn't take the whole time
free while she was around, so I was coming to work to sort out
lectures and labs and meeting her for lunch and show her the city in
my free time. She is a really good student and in one day she mastered
the transport system and was jumping on and off minibuses like an
ordinary Malawian!

For her last week end (and my birthday!) we went to Mulanje, the huge
mountain one hour away from Blantyre and we hiked for 3 days. Mulanje
is just beautiful, every time I go I come back with my head full of
images and willing to come back. I have put some pictures in flickr
but I doubt they can capture it.. I hope that looking at them you will
understand why Mulanje is called Malawi's island in the sky.

And now, just one week to recover and my parents will be here! If you
knew my parents, you would understand that this kind of trip is not a
joke for them, they hardly ever travel abroad and they don't speak a
word of english.. I will let you know how their visit goes but I think
is going to be fun.

Just a quick note, thanks to everybody that wished me happy birthday
from the distance in the last days and sorry to all of you who tried
but couldn't reach me since I was high (in the mountain!) without
internet or network..

Mwanje public school

My friend Muriel works for WFP (world food program) and she managed a
project where the kids of the primary school of Mwanje did a theater
play to talk about the school feeding program. The project was
coordinated by Nanzikambe ( http://www.nanzikambe.org/ ) a theater
company of Blantyre, and it was performed in the walk the world last
June. You can see some of the pictures of that day in my flickr site,
the kids played and danced songs that talk about how was life before
the school feeding program arrived to their village, and how is it
now. I am not going to tell you again about the school feeding
program, you can read about it in my entry of walk the world!.

The thing is that the play was a total success and the ministry of
education wanted to record it in a DVD! Muriel has done her own fund
raising and the recording has started. So last sunday we were at the
school and I was taking pictures because we also want to do a calendar
with photos of the project. It was fantastic, I don't have words to
describe the effort of all this children, teachers and nanzikambe
actors.. I am not releasing the pictures of the recording yet (top
secret!!) but I have uploaded some pictures of what was going out
around the school.. For those pictures and other things, just click on
my photos link on the right!

budget

The Malawian government still does not have a budget and that means
that from the 1st of July is spending money illegally from the
constitutional funds. The government affirms that they can spend money
during four months without agreement of the parliament. So hopefully
this is not going to affect the subside of fertisers, materials of
schools or hospitals, salaries of public service workers... but if the
parliament does not approve the budget, the consequences could be
dramatic for the country.

Everything goes back to 2004, when the president Mutharika decided to
leave the united democratic front (UDF) with which he had won the
elections, and fund the democratic progressive party (DPP). Several
MPs joined him in the adventure (violating the law) and the opposition
tries since then to move him from the office.

More than half of Malawi's budget come from international donors, and
the donor agencies are urging the government to approve the budget.
Malawi relies in this money but funding agencies cannot provide
support if there is no budget. Is really sad that some politicians can
play with the future of millions of poor people.