New Developments

It has been a long time since I’ve actually written anything of note, so here’s a post to fill you in on what I’ve been up to these last few weeks and new developments in my life.

It’s hard to believe that the end of November is fast approaching. I’m coming up to the 4 month mark in my internship and have actually decided to extend my contract for another 3 months. My initial 6 month contract ended at the end of January, so now with the extension, I will be working until the end of April, and be home in June. I like my job, but its not exactly what I want to be doing, however I realize that this is just ‘step one’ so I’m taking the opportunity while I’m here to meet as many people as I can and see what other possibilities are out there. Extending my contract means that I’ll be around long enough, hopefully, to see some of the implementation of the policies we have been working on at work, and play a bit of a role in the new HIV/AIDS mainstreaming project (fingers crossed). An extra three months in Malawi means I have 9 months under my belt, rather than 6, and I have more time here to see what other options I have (read: get someone to give me a job). The last thing I want is to be yet another jobless intern-returnee, so I’m hoping to have something lined up for my life post-internship. More than anything, I just like being here, so its also just good way of staying a bit longer.

I’ve moved flats, and am now temporarily roommates with my friend Francesca. Kanthu and I got word that we needed to move out of our place by December 1, as the flat is actually owned by an organization who has an expat coming to Malawi and they will be needing the place. I realized after to talking to friends about rooms for rent that I was getting a ridiculously good deal on rent by living in a flat in Area 11, rather than renting a room in a full house and having to pay for such extra trivial things as walls and guards. Area 11 is actually really safe, nice, and cheap and moving to Francesca’s meant that the actual move was easy as she lives just round the corner. You don’t get a huge garden and swimming pool like you might in some of the other expat-y areas, but we have an avocado tree outside the door, so that is good enough for the moment. (un)Luckily, Francesca is moving to Washington in mid-December, and I’ll be able to take over her room. I’ll be living with Rusty, a quirky middle-aged South African lady and it should be really good as the place is much ‘homier’ than my previous flat. Rusty has a very cool “Afro-Boho” sense of style which I love about the place as well. She is currently on holiday until the middle of December, so I decided to move in a bit earlier to be roomies with Francesca for a few weeks. It’s great as we just stand in the kitchen, drink tea, chat and eat whatever happens be in the fridge, straight out of the container.

The last few weekends have been quite busy. Believe it or not, a few weekends ago, I was part of an International African Football tournament. Yes, that’s right. Anna and competitive team sports. I’ve been playing football on Tuesdays with the Lilongwe Womens Football Club, which is really just a bunch of expat women who play for “the fun and the fitness”, and we were invited through some connection to play against a team in Mozambique, in a town called Metangula, just on the other side of the Lake. It was a very LONG bus ride for a very SHORT game, but the atmosphere was something else as I think the whole town turned up to watch us play. We lost, of course, but only 2 -0, so we didn’t get killed, but after the game the entire crowd stormed the field (which was really just a patch of ground at the airport – which was really just a strip of dirt and a building) and circled around us cheering. Quite the scene – big enough in fact to get a TV crew, National Mozambique Radio, and the mayor all out for the evening. It is election time in Mozambique, and any cause for a crowd is also cause for a FRELIMO political rally!


Anna the football star


Me being interviewed for National Mozambique Radio

I was lucky enough last weekend to be invited to my friend Leigh’s parent’s cottage in Monkey Bay. Leigh is South African and works for GTZ (Germany’s version of CIDA) and whose parent’s happen to live in Lilongwe as well. The weekend was fabulous. The cottage (and by cottage I mean Beach House with veranda, swimming pool and lawn down to the beach with palm trees and baobabs...) was gorgeous and we had a great time sipping drinks, having a Braai (BBQ, for the non-South Africans), going swimming and just generally lazing about. We drove to Cape Maclear on the Saturday afternoon and hired a boat to take us out to an island where we had picnic and went snorkelling. I knew Malawi was famous for its fish, and the millions of kind of Cichlids, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of fish in the water, or for the bright colours! Will, if you are reading this, I felt like I was swimming through the aquarium you used to have. Amazing. We also got to watch the boat guys feed the fish eagles. We bought fish from two boys in a dugout canoe and watched as the driver threw the fish in to the water. These huge eagles would then soar down majestically from the treetops and swipe the fish right out of the water in one fell swoop. Mike, remember the Okavango?


The Cottage


Swimming with the fishies.

Oh yeah, I also got a wicked tan last weekend. I hear it is snowing in Canada??

So, all in all, I’m doing well. I feel a bit less guilty for not posting for ages now that I’ve crammed everything in to one Super Post.

Until next time...

A Day in the Life of Anna: Part 3 - After Work

After 3 and a half months in Malawi, I feel as though I’ve settled into a bit of a routine. When I first arrived, I couldn’t really picture a day when I would ever really feel like I had settled in, but its amazing how quickly everything becomes normal life.

If nothing much is happening after work, I catch the Area 12 minibus home from outside of Shoprite, usually after picking up at least something from there or some bananas or mangos from one of the women who carry baskets of fruit. It’s about $1 (or 150 kwa) for a bunch of 15 bananas, and they are infinitely better than the ones at home, which I now realize are tasteless! The sidewalk in front of Shoprite is crowded with mini-bus touts all yelling where their minibus is going, and trying to fill their minibus up as fast as possible. Buses only leave when they are full, so they quicker they can fill up, the more trips they can take and the more paying cutomers they have! It costs 100 kwacha to go anywhere in the city, and I go from Old Town, where I work, to City Centre and get dropped off at the Capital Hotel. From there it is about a 5 minute walk home through Area 11. Kanthu, my flatmate, and I never really seem to cross paths too much when I’m home so usually my evenings are my own if I’m in. I cook some dinner, and then either read, write in my journal, or watch Desperate Housewives DVDs, which I bought from the market and am now addicted to.

If I have any plans after work, I usually stick around the office until then and try to get where I am going before dark, as the minibuses stop running, and since I don’t have a car, I need to be at my destination for the evening at about 6pm. On Tuesdays, I’ve been playing football with the Lilongwe Women’s Football Club, which is really just a bunch of expat women who kick a foot ball around at the football pitch at the Golf Club, but we do actually have a coach and do proper drills. I’m never much one for competitive sports when I am home – it seems to be a bit of an overseas phenomenon, but it is a great way to meet people and quite fun. On Wednesday, the place to be is The Shack, a bar in town that runs beach volleyball on Wednesday evenings. The teams were set up before I arrived, and once I realized that I could go, and not play, and just drink beer, I was all in. Usually at some point during the week as well, I go out for dinner with some friends. There isn’t a huge selection of restaurants in Lilongwe, but there are enough to do a rotation, and not long ago I discovered they have gelato at Mama Mia’s, which made me quite happy. Fridays might involve heading to Chameleon for some drinks and then on the weekend, Kelly usually comes into town (although she is finished her contract in Malawi and gone now! ) or we try to head off somewhere.

That’s about it! A Day in the Life of Anna in Malawi. I think people might be surprised that what I do on a day-to-day basis living in Africa is not that much different than what it would be in Toronto, although I do admit that living in Lilongwe, the capital, is probably like living in an alternate reality to the rest of Malawi...

A Day in the Life of Anna: Part 2 - At the Office

The MUSCCO Offices are upstairs, above FINCOOP, and all the offices open on to one centre hallway. I am the first office on the right, and I share with Violet and Triza. The first thing I do when I get in – and indeed what I do for probably the first hour if the internet is working – is check my e-mail and the major news headlines. It takes a while to get productive in the morning and usually I try to get a hold of the one newspaper that is always floating around the office.

Depending on if we have just done some kind of field work or interviews there may or may not be something to type up, but Violet and I usually just putter around, working on MUSCCO’s policies or the policies that we are helping some of the SACCOs develop. At some point in the morning I’ll pop in to Leroy’s office across the hall for some guidance, or to just touch base, and I usually stop by Elsie’s office to say hello to her and Lena for a bit, and I chat for a bit with Masutano and Killian. All the people in the accounts department seem to be much busier (and more productive?) than we are. lol.

12:00 is lunch time, and usually Elsie and I will go off somewhere. Now that Killian is at the office, he and I go out for lunch a lot together as well. Lunch of choice is usually chicken and chips from Summer Park, or a salad at the Bohemian Café if I’m feeling in a healthy mood. I really like Summer Park because it is the closest thing to sitting in a park eating my lunch that there is in Lilongwe. I would bring my lunch more, but if I do, it means I have to sit at my desk the whole time because there really is no where that you can sit outside to eat without actually having to be in a restaurant. I also might run some errands, or pick up some groceries, or pop into Bookmart, the used bookstore across the road to look around.

Back to the office at 1:00, or shortly thereafter. The afternoon is much the same as the morning – we do different things each day depending on what is coming up, or what we have just done, so it is hard to describe a ‘typical’ day of office work, but that is definitely what I like about the job. The view from my desk always keeps my occupied as well. I look across the road to the Kiboko Town Hotel which always has an interesting mix of travelers coming and going. There seem to be quite a lot of beggars and street vendors around Mandala Road (perhaps because this is the ‘touristy’ part of town, if you can even call it that) and it is interesting to watch the interplay of people.

When 4:30 rolls around, it is time to knock off. Depending on the day, I’ll either head straight home, or stick around the office for a bit if I have some plans in the evening.

Part 3 to come soon...A Day in the Life of Anna: After Work

A Day in the Life of Anna: Part 1

Every blog I post seems to be about something I did on the weekend, or a trip I went on. This series will be about my everyday life. This is what it’s really like to live in Malawi.

The alarm on my cell phone goes off at 6:05am. More often than not, I’m usually awake before this because Rashid, our worker, has been up since about 4:30, whistling away, sweeping the driveway, mopping the floor and listening to the radio. This is my one pet peeve of the house, but a small price to pay for someone who sets out breakfast for me every morning and does my laundry by hand. I hit the snooze button twice, for an extra 20 minutes of lounging, and then pull back the mosquito net and hop into the shower. Rashid, of course has already switched on the heater, so that the water will be nice and warm for me. Deciding what to wear is never much of a problem as I don’t have that many options (why is it that the more clothes you have, the less you seem to have to wear? One of the mysteries of being a woman...) A quick blow dry of the hair and then it is down for breakfast. Rashid has set the table with a thermos of hot water, coffee, tea, Milo, milk, juice, PB, honey, margarine, sugar and what ever type of cereal or bread I happen to have lying around. We have a permanent ant problem, and I have become used to the little guys crawling all over the honey jar. Now that I have a French Press, and I can make a real cup of coffee, I try to give myself at least 20 minutes so I have time to read my book, and enjoy my coffee. This is a far cry from high school when I used to scarf down Honey Nut Cherrios and run to school with wet hair. Back upstairs by 7:15 to pack my backpack – laptop, wallet, phone, keys, book and depending on what I am doing after work, maybe yoga pants and running shoes. A swipe of eye shadow, and a brush of the teeth and I’m out the door to meet Elsie to catch a ride to work. If I haven’t already said “Mwaduzka Bwanji” to Rashid in the house, I catch him in the driveway as I walk next door to the Peter Pan Kindergarten. Elsie drops off her niece Chikondi at school, and I stand by the fence and watch the cute little kiddies arrive while I wait for her to pull up. At first I felt like a bit of a creeper, hanging around a pre-school, but now the ladies that work there know me and greet me every morning in the exact same sing-songy voice “Good Morning Madame!”. It is a bit of a posh pre-school, I think, because as every car pulls up to the door, one of the ladies opens the door and helps each child out. Just the fact that they are all pulling up in cars, with cute little outfits and backpacks, puts them in a different realm than the kids at Biwi (see previous post). Chikondi hops out, and I hop in then we drive to work, listening to the exact same mixed tape of songs that will forever and always remind me of Malawi. We drop off Max, who is always in the back seat, at the market where he works at Elsie’s Mom’s market stall, and we usually pull into work about 7:45. This is of course the last possible minute that you can sign in the register before you have to sign the “why I am late” sign-in register. I think our boss, Mr. Kadzola is the only one in Malawi who is not on “African Time”. I think Patrick, the Office Assistant in charge of the sign-in book, has started to wait until Elise and I arrive before he takes the sign in sheet to Mr. Kadzola. Patrick is a nice guy.

Part 2 coming soon... A Day in the Life of Anna: At the Office

YANGA SACCO - My SACCO Belongs to Me

Last Saturday, on International Credit Union Day, the Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs – a.k.a. Credit Unions) in Malawi came together to create awareness and celebrate the successes of the SACCO movement. On Saturday, over 100 SACCO members from the central region walked through the streets of Lilongwe from MUSCCO House to Biwi primary school, wearing shirts, dresses and chitenjies of ICU Day cloth and carrying signs with the names of their SACCOs. Every year on ICU Day, the SACCOs celebrate by making a donation. Last year, they donated an oxygen machine to one of the hospitals in the city, and this year, the Central region SACCOs celebrated ICU Day by making a donation of new boys’ and girls’ toilet blocks to Biwi Primary School.

The new toilet blocks were small cement buildings, with nothing more than a hole in the ground, and no running water. Visiting this school seemed to put things into perspective – the school was a series of classroom buildings, with no glass in the windows (it had obviously all been broken) and only a few of the classrooms had desks. There were no supplies in the classroom – no books, or pictures or children’s artwork – all the things we associate with primary schools at home. I don’t know whether to be amazed that children are able to learn here – and that they are happy to have the chance to even GO to school - or whether to be appalled by the fact that this is what they have to put up with. No parent, teacher or student in Canada or the West would put up with these kinds of facilities, so why do we think that it is okay for the Malawian kids to? In Malawi, primary school provided free by the government. If the government is meant to support the schools, then why must schools rely on charitable donations from outside sources for something as basic as a toilet block? Saturday was a big celebration, with speeches, music and dancing – yet something as basic as toilet blocks should be such as given that people should not even think about celebrating them! Imagine in Canada a huge celebration because the school finally got toilets... Some food for thought.

Of course there was no indication of a sour note whatsoever, and everyone was really pleased at all that had been done. The day was quite enjoyable, and we all gathered around the toilet block while the Principle Secretary of Industry and Trade did the honours of pulling back the ICU cloth to reveal the (huge) donation plaque. After that were some more speeches in Chichewa, (which I can only assume were about SACCOs and toilets) and then there were a few groups, including the Biwi primary school choir who did some songs and dance numbers. There was even a clown duo who did a little skit and song and then centred ME out of the crowd (not hard to do, being obviously the only mzungu) and sang it all over again in English just for me! I even got a little round of applause at the end. Haha.

Check out some photos of me sporting my SACCO chitenje, and the super cute little kids who were excited about the mzungu and the toilets...


Vi and Me, decked out in SACCO chitenjies


The new toilets

Lake of Stars

Last weekend everybody who is anybody headed to Senga Bay for the annual Lake of Stars Festival. This is pretty much the biggest event on the Malawi Tourism calender and I think the every expat I have met in Malawi so far was there. It was a bit of a mzungu-fest, as the tickets were a prohibitively expensive for your average Malawian, but the crowd was a bit more diverse on saturday, when lots of Malawians came in for the day. Most of the people there camped for the weekend, although Francesca, Christine, Lucas and I had our doubts about the living conditions at the campsite so we opted to stay at a hostel in the area. Turns out that camping would have been fine, except for the fact that one one got an ounce of sleep. The music stops when the sun comes up, so there isn't much hope! At least you can sleep away the afternoon on the beach. I spent most of the time hanging out with the Engineers without Borders crowd, and mingling with a smattering of people that I have met in the last 2 1/2 months. The music was pretty good, although during the day we spent most of our time on the beach and in the Lake and really only paid attention to bands in the evening when the party really got started. There were mostly Malawian acts, the biggest name being the Black Missionaries who I saw in my first week in Lilongwe, and there was also a selection of bands and DJs from the UK. Saw Seth Lakeman, who didn't really seem to fit with the other music at the festival, but this fiddle was a huge hit! A great weekend had by all, and lots of fodder for gossip back in Lilongwe...



A Lazy post-concert morning on the beach, with the stage in the background



Christine and Me at Lake of Stars!

Liwonde and Zomba

I had my first chance to play tourist this past weekend with a little IPMP trip to Liwonde National Park and the Zomba plateau. I’ve been traveling with work a little bit, all around Malawi, but I have to say, it feels really great to strap on the backpack, crush in the back of a minibus and head off somewhere new. On the road again! Even if it is just for 4 days, it is good to be moving. Kelly, Christine and I – who were all in IPMP together – as well as Lucas, another Canadian with Students Without Borders, met up for the weekend to explore Liwonde National Park. We had planned to spend two full days in the park, but ended up having quite a bit of time stretching before us, so we headed up to the Zomba plateau for a change of scenery and some respite from the heat.

Rather than having to read an account of our entire trip, I WAS going to put together a little photo essay for you, but unfortunately, even the 'good' internet place doesn't seem to have the capacity to upload anything significant. So I'll write about our trip, and hopefully, someday, there will be pictures to come...

Our first morning in Liwonde, about 5:30 am. We went on a game drive that started at 6, which sounds pretty early, but after sleeping in an (apparently) 2 person tent with Kelly in the sweltering heat, I was up and moving at 4:45. You can get a lot accomplished in your day when you get up before 5! A leisurely coffee and rusks in the quite hours of the morning, looking out over the flood plains of the Shire river is just about heaven.

Liwonde is not really the park to go to if you only want to see the Big Game animals like Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh my!). They do however have their fair share of antelope-type animals. Here is a herd of Impala watching us watch them. We also saw Water Buck, Sable, Warthogs and many Baboons. It is the dry season as well, so you’ll notice (if there was a picture)that everything is pretty dry. Chinguni Hills Lodge had a bit of a water shortage problem, which one has to understand, but which makes you learn to be strategic when trying to get a shower!

The highlight, of course of the game drive was the elephants. They were a bit far away from the jeep, so we were lucky enough to be able to get out and walk a bit closer to see them. The highlight of Liwonde was the canoe safari, and I think the highlight of the canoe safari was the cool straw hats they gave us to wear. That, and of course, the hippos. Hippos are some of the most dangerous animals in Africa, mainly because they are so territorial. These guys didn’t seem to be too bothered by us and even though they were just minding their own business, we still didn’t attempt to get too close.

After a game drive, canoe safari, lunch, dinner and two naps, we felt we’d done pretty much everything there was to do in the park, and so, with another whole day stretching ahead of us, we decided to take full advantage of our days off and head to the Zomba Plateau to explore.

Zomba used to be the old seat of the colonial government, and it is easy to see why. Not only is it beautiful, but the highlands offer some respite to the heat of the plains. It is quite gorgeous, and much cooler – enough so that we got cosy and comfortable by the fire in the evening in our little guest cottage at the Trout Farm. Yes. The Trout Farm. I believe that K-Bar was in Seventh heaven! It’s actually a really cool place to stay, and not only did we learn all about aquaculture, but one of the men there took us on a four hour guided hike of the Plateau. I felt a bit like I was hiking through a primeval forest, with the huge ferns and Dr. Seuss-esque trees (called Aurrcaria, I believe?) and we passed a number little waterfalls, before we came out at the top of the Plateau for a gorgeous, if a bit hazy view of Zomba town.

All in all, a great weekend. Pictures to come... hopefully...