A day in the life

A few people have asked about my daily life here so I thought I'd just write it in my blog. I just want to give a disclaimer though: this is only my life, it is not the life of a typical Malawian because I am both wealthy (here, anyway) and white.

I wake up at 5 am to Lucy running circles around my mosquito net. I don't let her inside the net with me because she would attack me all night long. It's just getting light outside and the sun shines bright pink and yellow above the perpetual fog that appears every morning here in Thyolo. I get up and walk out the door to go on a walk through the hills and tea estates that surround my house. I stop first to pick up a rock to threaten my landlord's dogs because otherwise they would surround me barking.

My walk can either be peaceful or a lot of mental work. It's beautiful here so it's always relaxing to wander the dirt roads passing by brick houses and corn fields. However, I am white so I stick out like a sore thumb. The word for white person in Chichewa (the language spoken in most of Malawi) is mzungu. So the children stand at the side of the road staring or waving and shouting mzungu! mzungu! Older people will ask "Mwaduzka bwanji?" which means "How did you wake up?" and I reply "Ndazuka bwino, kaya inu?" which means "I woke up well, how about you?" to which they would reply "Ndazuka bwino". Sometimes, there are a lot of people so I have to greet lots of people or else just say "Zikomo" which means many things, among them "thank you", "excuse me" and I guess "hi".

After my walk I make breakfast which is not very Malawian but an idea I got from a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer. I make warm chocolate milk and then soak a bun in it (they call it an "Obama" I don't know why. There are also buns called "Bin ladens" because they're really hard to find). I used to each a porridge called likuni phala made from soybeans, peanuts, beans and corn. But the chocolate milk and bread is so much better. Anyway likuni phala is often used with nutritional rehabilitation for children and PLWHAs.

After breakfast I take a shower using a bucket and a cup to pour water on myself. I have a bathtub but often the water isn't working. Sometimes I don't have water for days at a time. My landlord's wife told me it was really bad last year and there was one time when they didn't have water for 3 months. It's been fairly reliable recently (knock on wood). Also sometimes the electricity goes out, like it did last night. Then if i want to eat I have to use a small metal stove and cook with charcoal (which is illegal here by the way because of the impact on the environment, but what are people supposed to do for cooking when there is no wood?)

Then I go to work. If there is no electricity it is a little harder since a lot of my work now involves computers. If there is electricity I might go to the computer room at the Assembly (yes we have one!) and check e-mail. Or I'll go to the District AIDS Coordinator office and wait for my counterpart to show up. I made a calendar for us to use last week. The idea is we'll use it to let each other know what our plans our and if we plan on going out of town. I wasn't sure if he would like it but he loved it and called it "best practice". I thought he might just be humoring me but when I went into the office yesterday he had written his schedule for this week into the calendar. Sometimes I go to meetings either with the nurses at the hospital to plan the nutrition training or with the District AIDS Coordinating Committee to plan World AIDS Day or with the statisticians at MSF to gather data for the grant proposal.

I go for lunch around 12. If I need to buy food then I just go over to the open air market down the road. Some vendors have stalls, some sell on the ground (I suppose it has something to do with what they can afford). There are people who just sell vegetables; people who sell meat; people who sell home goods like candles, soap, lotion, matches, sugar, batteries; people who sell clothes; people who sell sheets, table cloths and curtains; people who sell shoes; people who sell plastic ware like buckets, plates and cups. It's a small market and I have my favorite vendors for different items so I usually go to them and haggle to get a good price. Sometimes they give you a "prize" at the end like an extra tomato or bun because you are a good customer or they want you to become one.

Then I go home to make lunch on my hot plate. After I go back to work around 2pm and do one of the activities I mentioned above. Sometimes I have Chichewa lessons so I have to take a minibus (a 16-passenger van that is usually packed to more than full capacity) 5 minutes away to Thyolo Secondary School. We meet in one of the classrooms: a mid-sized room with windows in a larger concrete building. Thyolo Secondary School is actually a nice school (I think built with outside funding), but I think the schools here are generally better than the ones in Togo. Bigger, cleaner, better stocked.

I usually go home around 5pm. I've been just making dinner and reading in my house, but it's getting lonely just talking to a cat. So I have the number for my landlord's wife and if I want to hang out with them I'll just call her and she'll send someone to come get me. All of this would not be necessary if they didn't have the 5 beasts of the apocolypse they call dogs. I typically go to bed around 9 or 10pm.

Weekends are a little different. I do laundry on Sundays, visit friends, stroll around the market, go to Blantyre. But that's basically my life here.