Our House

Here are pictures of our house here in Zomba. It really has become our home away from home, and we are so fortunate to have electricity (when there aren't blackouts!) and running water. We live about a 10 min walk from my work and a 25 min. walk to the market and bus depot. There is also a bakery close by where we get fresh bread and buns :)

We live in the house on the right. On the left is where our security stays. The don't actually live in this house they just spend their time on the cement porch cooking, hanging out, sleeping etc. I'm happy to report that we have mastered good morning/good afternoon/stay well in Chichewa :)

Zomba is really lush and green. The picture on the left is the gate from our house that leads to the main road. On the right is the maize plot that the security people have planted just outside the house. It's really amazing how people use every inch of arable land here to plant.

As you walk inside you enter our kitchen. We just got a new stove because our other one broke, and this new one is luxury!

Below is our living room/dining room.

Our bedroom. We were really lucky that this bedroom came with a fan! And we have become accustomed to sleeping under the mosquito net every night but unfortunately we are pretty tall so our feet hang over the edge...

And last but not least I had to take a picture of the fruit on top of our fridge. The fruit here is amazing, and on Thursday Josh bought 90 mangoes for 3 dollars.. i'm not kidding. Not sure what we are going to do with them all!! Maybe our next purchase is a blender to make mango shakes??

The Mini-Bus

So Josh and I decided that we needed a little bit of action on our weekends (plus we heard there was a 'mall' with goods that we cannot get here in Zomba, i.e a coffee maker) so last Saturday we decided to brave the mini-bus and go to Blantyre. Blantyre is the commercial hub of Malawi so because of that there is decent infrastructure and it has a larger international presence. When we heard that the biggest 'mall' was in Blantyre with the largest 'Shoprite' (grocery store) and 'Game' (kinda like a wal-mart) we (probably more me) was stoked! We have desperately been missing drip coffee (all they have here is instant) so we were on a mission to find a coffee maker and other things we can't get here like cheese and canned tuna. The only thing standing in the way of us and our caffeine fix was the distance. Blantyre is about 55km from Zomba, and it takes about 1.5hours to drive there because the hwy is in pretty poor condition. If you don't have your own car and driver, the next best thing is mini-bus. These are the main mode of public transportation between cities. Now these mini-buses are just vans that hold about 12 people, but at one point in time we had 17 ppl in ours.. but i'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning...

Early Saturday morning josh and I walked to the bus depot, already sweating and thirsty from the walk (about 15 min.) we enter chaos. "Where you go? Where you go?" is all I immediately heard and I saw josh say "Blantyre". He was immediately whisked into a mini-bus that was at the front of the line of many other mini-buses while I was led to a mini-bus further back, "I'm with him" I say to the guy leading me, and I run ahead to see where Josh went. He is asking the driver how much, and the front door is opened and he is put into the front seat. The van is about 1/2 full with 7 people inside already, so I slide into the back of the van, not knowing really where i should be sitting. Josh then tells the guy he wants to sit next to me and crawls into the back. We are now 3 in the back next to a man carrying a field hockey stick. He shakes both our hands, and the side door closes and we slowly leave the depot. As we head along the main road the guy who I think is 2nd in command hangs out the window and yells "Blantyre, Blantyre" and tries to persuade more people to get into the van because we aren't quite "full" yet. As we drive along to the gas station, snap, our trunk flies opens and suitcases fall out.. Josh and I just give each other the 'what have we gotten ourselves into??' glance. Haha. We all just laugh as they try to shove the suitcases back in and slam the back trunk closed.. now i wish we took a photo of our mini bus.. because that really would tell it all (the one above is just one that I took from google images, but is similar). This thing was rickety, rusted, beat up, the seats were broken.. no way was the trunk going to close.. so the solution, just tie it down! As they were doing this, we noticed that they also started changing one of the back wheels while we were all still in the van.. hmmm. But, quickly this was done and we were off.. We stopped a couple more times to pick up some people and now we were 12, flying down the hwy. I'm not exactly sure what speeds we reached, but it was at least 130-140km at points.. the whole time i thought, 'well, this might be it!' but all the while feeling the exhilaration of doing what we were doing. In these situations it's hard to explain, but you kinda just gotta go with it and pray that somehow things will work out.

So about an hour in to the trip we stopped to pick up more ppl, 'where are they going to sit??' I asked myself, pretty sure Josh was thinking the same thing- well they looked at us in the back seat said something about "Muzungu" (which means white ppl) and then squeezed in a 4th and 5th person in the rows in front of us. They proceeded to do this for the next 10 or so km and at one point there was 17 people in the minibus literally sitting on each other. I guess Josh and I got preferential treatment because we still only had the 3 of us in the back seat. I really couldn't believe that people were ok sitting right on each other.. but I guess this is what is done here!
So the mini-bus actually stopped at Limbe, the city right before Blantyre and everyone got out. Josh and I just looked at each other, huh? I thought Blantyre. So we asked the driver and he said well we are stopping here and gave us a "Welcome to Africa!".. it was actually kinda comical.. except now we didn't really know how we were going to get to our beloved mall. So we started walking, and asking people were it was, and they would point us in the direction. Little did we know it was probably still about 5 km away, so luckily another mini bus driver started shouting at us and we ended up getting in that mini-bus, and then he dropped us off near the mall.

SUCCESS! We had made it.

We spent the next 5 hours just basking in the air conditioned stores and looking at all the products (all imported from south africa and $$$) and bought our coffee maker, cheese and some other goods and braved the mini-bus again to get home. But by now we were old pro's and more comfortable. So we knew the routine. And i'm happy to report that the driver on the way home was not as crazy and drove slower and didn't pack us in like sardines! So I guess we just got a driver who was in a major rush on the way there.

So our first mini-bus experience was very cultural, one that I know we will do again! Although there were moments of pure skepticism about whether we were going to make it, everything turned out in the end. And I feel that if you only traveled by car and driver you would miss out on these exciting adventures!

We've arrived in Zomba!

Hi everyone! Danielle here:

Just wanted to write quickly and let you know that we are here in Zomba safe and sound! We arrived here Wednesday Oct 25th and are in good hands here with my team at LEAD (which stands for Leadership for Environment and Development). They have given us a house to live in (which includes a caretaker and security!) and Josh has slid easily into the role of "bug killer". We are trying to adjust to the idea of having 'help'. This is something we are really not used to. Steven, our caretaker comes every morning at 8am and washes the floors etc. And our security is actually the family who lives in the house opposite us. They don't have electricity, and they cook on a wood fire that they make every night outside. It's hard for us to look out our kitchen window everyday and see them there, and not feel just so ridiculously privileged..because we are..

We have learnt a bit of Chichewa (the local dialect) and we have these super funny daily exchanges of "hi, how are you? good? and you? good, and you? good? and you? good. Thank you, thank you." and we all just end up laughing because that is all we can say. So we are super eager to learn more so we can communicate with them.

So Zomba is pretty small but is actually quite green and lush. It sits right below the Zomba Plateau so when you look up all you see is green. We have been told to go hike the Plateau so one of these weekends we will have to do so. My boss gave me Thursday and Friday off so Josh and I spent the past 4 days adjusting to life here and setting small goals for ourselves, like today we will go to 'Tasty Bites' (one of 2 restaurants in Zomba), today we will go to Shoprite (their grocery store) etc. We haven't yet gone to the market where apparently there is tons of fresh fruit and veggies, so this is next on our list. So we are doing well- culture shock hasn't been too bad, but it has been super hot here.. but at least at the moment it's a dry heat. Luckily we were given a fan, but the power goes out for about 3 hours every night and sometimes in the morning as well. We now understand that the power will go out around 6pm everynight, so dinner has to be made before that.. one night we got caught offguard and ended up making peanut butter and jam sandwhiches by candlelight.. haha.. I do love that we have hot water though (for those who were in the Philippines with me I think of our time there often as similarly we shower with a bucket.. but we didn't have hot water!) so we are very fortunate.

I have been learning so much about Malawi, and all their local papers are in English, so it's a great way to become familiar with what's going on. There are a lot of issues here, one of the major ones is that they have a fuel shortage and people line up for 7 hours sometimes just so they can get gas. It's incredible. Yesterday we saw the line of cars extend from the gas station almost all the way back to our house (maybe about a 100 car line up). So everyone is frustrated with this. Because of this lack of fuel people can't go to Blantyre (the nearest major city) to get goods and often places will run out of stock very quickly. This also hurts the farmers and businesses who want to export because moving these goods around becomes very expensive as well.. so it's a mess. Just over the summer some of the major foreign aid donors pulled out of Malawi (one reason being the lack of good governance by the president) so this is hurting the country big time.. But besides all of this, the people remain upbeat and positive. I am beginning to understand that complaining isn't something people do here..

So Josh and I are just taking it all in.. enjoying all the new sights, tastes and sounds.. not feeling too overwhelmed yet.. but i am happy to have started work today so that I can start contributing to some of the really neat things this organization is doing here.

Traveling to Malawi

After weeks of preparation and a lot of waiting, our trip to Malawi is finally beginning!!

After a nice but short visit at Damien and Sara's place (Danny's brother) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (and after picking up last minute essentials such as maple syrup and peanut butter!) on October 25th, Danny and I hopped into our rental car well before dawn and drove to JFK airport. The next bed we would sleep in would be in Zomba, Malawi...the likes of which we could not even fathom at this point.

To reach our final destination we had to drive 2 hours to JFK, drop off the rental car, check in, fly 16 or so hours to Johannesburg, wait a couple of hours, then hop a 2 hour flight to Chileka International Airport in Blantyre (Malawi's commercial hub), hopefully meet a driver who was to be sent by LEAD (Danny's work organization) and then drive 1.5 hours to Zomba, all the time not knowing what was ahead of us in terms of accommodation etc.

Checking in at JFK, the South African Airlines personnel looked at our final destination airport code (BLZ) and had to ask the person next to her whether that was in South Africa or not.....we must be going way off the beaten track if the airline didn't know even know where we were going! So 16 hours on a plane is terrifying for some people, but 16 hours with nothing to do but watch movies, read and be catered to with excellent airline food (tsk) is actually quite gratifying. Before we knew it we were descending into Malawi, with its red earth and scattered huts visible from above.

Hopping off the plane, the hot and dry temperature of 35C hit us like a wave (we were definitely not in Canada anymore leaving that cold rain behind us). After a long wait in customs we got our luggage (which was unloaded by tractor) and our driver was there waiting for us. Hooray! Leaving the airport about 5 men took over our cart to "help" us load our bags into the truck despite our constant "No, thank you's" (We should have tried it in Chichewa..... "Iyayi!") for money of course.

Driving to Zomba was a quiet ride. Firstly, we were exhausted (too much movie watching and no sleeping) and secondly, we were taking in the sights of where we now were. Africa! It was intense to go from the multi-freeway system, bridges and excellent infrastructure of driving to New York (despite my former thoughts that the odd US highway was patchy and poorly maintained) to the disorder of people, animals, bikes, & vehicles and the dismal condition of the main highway. This did not phase our driver as he reached speeds of 130km/h in a rickety truck, on a bumpy two lane road, passing cars into opposing traffic, honking at people (carrying their goods on their heads) to get out of the way, as cars whizzed by who were seemingly too close for comfort. Oh, and the seatbelts weren't working. "This is it," I thought. "Well, we had a good run, it's a shame we couldn't see more of Africa." We obviously arrived safe, but the difference between what is "normal" in Canada and "normal" is apparent. Welcome to Africa!

We've arrived safe and had a very warm welcome from LEAD. Upon arrival we were invited to a lovely meal at one of Danny's co-worker's although my ability to converse was limited having been awake for the last 30 hours! LEAD provided us our own house within walking distance to Danny's work and the main Zomba town centre. They even stocked our cupboards and fridge with food so we wouldn't starve our first days here (chicken, eggs, rice, sugar, flour, water, just, fish, beef, oil, soaps etc).

It will be quite the adjustment here but we're excited to be here...and we are excited to share more of our experiences with you all. We'd love to here your feedback, comments and so forth!