Never a dull moment

So, with two weeks to the day left of my time in Malawi, and a fair number of writing assignments to complete, my work computer decided to die abruptly. It's got my (already late) prayer letter on it too. I guess part of this experience is supposed to be learning to be adaptable, but do you really have to adapt in the last two weeks?

Most non photo work I can probably do on my personal computer, once I get the data off the other one. Still, it would be nice to do things with a computer where all the keys work, especially since I seem to use hyphens and emdashes so much. But I can mostly spell out six and five, so those are avoidable.

Does anyone know a quick fix for a Mac with a bad video processor?

Cue adolescent-girl-at-Elvis-concert squealing

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Birds of a feather

I've never been much of a bird watcher, but since I've been in Malawi I've felt obligated to photograph every exotic bird I see. Which is tricky, since they don't generally hold still long enough for me to go get my camera.

But occasionally I get lucky. The bird at right is a yellow-bellied sunbird that I saw in Kasungu, which is in the central area of Malawi, near the capital (Lilongwe).

Sunbirds are like hummingbirds in that they drink from flowers, but their wings don't move fast enough to hover like hummingbirds do, and their beaks are curved.

This one is a purple-crested turaco that lives in the woods behind our house. It spent a lot of time in our guava tree while it still had fruit, but it was very shy. I had to keep my camera by the window for a couple of weeks to get this not-very-good shot.

If this sort of thing interests you, you should really search online for a better picture than this. Purple-crested turacos have a purple-black iridescent crest, red eyes, a green breast, and, when they're flying, bright red wings.

 

It's a funny bird. When it came to eat at our tree, it would pick up a guava in its very small beak and violently shake its head, spraying seeds and mushed fruit everywhere, until the piece left in its mouth was small enough to swallow. 

 

As you can see, before this treatment, the guavas are about as big as the bird's head.

 

This gray-faced go-away bird was also at Kasungu. Technically, it's also a turaco. I was very glad that it was sufficiently disturbed at my presence to say 'go away!' The bare-faced go-away bird I saw on safari wouldn't say anything at all, even when I waved my arms and pointed a scary telephoto lens at it. 

 

It actually sounded a bit more like 'gway!' but I'm probably being too particular.

 

All turacos eat fruit. They also have other unique characteristics that are too boring to mention. I had hoped to see a Livingston's turaco before I left, but I'm beginning to lose hope on that one, since they don't live in this area and I only have four weeks left.

Livingston's turacos are a bright green, sort of kiwi colored. They mostly live south of here, in the hot lowland areas. They also mostly live in forests. Since Malawi hardly has any forest areas left, seeing one before I leave could be challenging.

I'm fairly sure this (at left) is a silver-cheeked hornbill. It's certainly some kind of hornbill. I went on a guided tour of a coffee/tea plantation one weekend, and we saw three of them eating berries in a palm tree. Yes, I know that's not a palm tree. That's the tree they flew to after they finished eating.

I've seen a few different kinds of hornbills, but this is one of the more dramatic species. They looked a little like dinosaurs.

The beginning of the end

Recently I've been reading about 'reverse culture shock,' which, frankly, sounds entirely unfair. Why should it be a shock to return to my own culture? It's MINE.

I'm not entirely sure I believe in the whole thing, but everyone says it happens so I suppose I will have to take their word for it. The other day, I visited Mr. Price, a South African clothing chain store. It was weird. It looked and felt exactly like an American store, something along the lines of Express or PacSun, complete with the really annoying canned music. It even smelled like new clothes. (What is that smell, anyway? The shipping boxes they came in? Dry cleaning?)

And it just didn't feel right. Didn't feel normal. It was quiet and the sales people weren't unnecessarily pushy, but I just kept feeling I had to get out of there.

So, yeah, I guess maybe there's something to this re-entry thing. But it's still not fair.

Humanitarian Dilemma

There is a giant grasshopper trapped in my window. I would like to let him out, but what if I accidentally let him in?

The turn of the screw

My favorite sunglasses fell apart while traveling home from Sankhulani, a village in Nsanje district. A screw came loose as I was taking them off in Sarah's car, and bounced down onto the floor where I assumed it was lost forever.

We went to Sankhulani because our gardener, Suliali, wanted us to meet his family. There is a brand-new road down to Nsanje boma (town), but Sankhulani is in an entirely different part of the district, and of the four hours it takes to drive there, three are on a rocky dirt road that runs along the edge of the Thyolo escarpment--a gorgeous line of mountains that seems to go on forever, mostly because of the state of the road.

Sankhulani is near the Ruo River, which forms the border with Mozambique. People in Sankhulani go across the border to the market there. From the Malawian side, you could see a Mozambican soldier on patrol, presumably ensuring that nobody brought in a bag of peanuts or bundle of sugarcane without paying proper customs.

Suliali's family insisted on giving us two live chickens. It's been a while, and we still haven't eaten them.

I get migraines when I spend a lot of time in the sun without sunglasses, so I was little worried about going through the rest of the trip without them. But the sun was going down and I managed. And after we got back to Blantyre, Liz, a nurse with HOPE for AIDS, gave me her spare pair. Which were great, even though they had tiny butterflies on the edge of the lenses that I could just see out of the corner of my eyes and which drove me crazy.

So for a couple of months I wore Liz's sunglasses, and I even got used to the butterflies. I wore them walking to work every day, when I sat outside in the afternoons trying to get a better internet connection and  when I went to Lilongwe to help out at SIM's Marriage Enrichment Conference.

We had two Marriage Enrichment Conferences, one in Lilongwe and one here in Blantyre, both co-sponsored by by the Evangelical Association of Malawi. Prof. Stephen Adei, a Ghanaian of many talents, was the featured speaker at both events. Prof. Adei is an economist by training, a retired UN ambassador, and the author of several books on economics and development, but he also has a life-long passion for teaching about Christian marriage principles and he and his wife have counseled numerous couples over the years. Mrs. Adei was supposed to speak also, but was unable to travel because of health problems.

The two-weeks of conferences were something of an ordeal, but Prof. Adei was a really good speaker and I think he made a real impact on the people who attended. There is a dearth of marriage education and counseling in Malawi and in all of Africa really.

I was still wearing butterflies at the corners of my eyes on my trip to Tanzania for what was probably the most exciting vacation I'll ever have. I traveled up to Dar es Salaam and then to Zanzibar for three days with my friend Gill, who is SIM's short-term coordinator.

Zanzibar is an island that is officially part of Tanzania but it has its own unique culture, a mixture of Swahili, Arab and Indian traditions. Gill kept saying it didn't feel like 'real' Africa, but I liked the mishmash of languages and foods.

Our stay there included a very interesting tour of a spice plantation where I left the butterfly glasses sitting on a bench under a coconut tree. A pretty good trade for the silly coconut-frond 'crowns' our teenage guides gave us as we left the plantation.

Against my better judgement, I gave $10 to a street vendor outside our hotel for another pair. I couldn't very well spend a week staring out at the open plains without them and not get a headache, and Gill and I and three other women I didn't know before were going from Zanzibar to the Serengeti for a safari. As it turned out, I needed both the overpriced sunglasses and a hat to avoid a migraine. But even with a headache the trip would have been worth it. We saw everything--except rhinos. Lions, leopards, elephants, cheetahs, and even a lion kill, which was depressing, but you're supposed to hope you see one on safari so I dutifully photographed it.

We went from the Serengeti to Ngorongoro crater, which was a volcano once upon a time. Now it's just a big basin with grassland and lakes and little patches of forest in it. Elephants would walk through our campground on the rim sometimes.

The sunglasses made it to the car on the way to Kilimanjaro Airport, where they fell apart.

I've been back to normal life in Malawi for a week and a half now, and I've been looking for new sunglasses. Yesterday Sarah cleaned out her car and had Suliali wash it, and then he and Luka, who cooks and cleans for us sometimes, vacuumed out the inside. It wasn't a two-man job, but the two of them became best friends a few weeks ago when Sarah had some money stolen and they insisted on launching a private investigation of the matter, so they seemed to enjoy doing it together. (The money was returned, and the young boy responsible sorta-kinda admitted to it.)

It also gave them an opportunity to play with a vacuum cleaner--a novel experience. They found the missing earpiece for my old sunglasses, which brought up the story and made them determined to find the screw as well. I wasn't hopeful and told them not to bother looking. It was tiny.

But after more than an hour of cleaning, Luka walked into the house with the screw. They had opened the vacuum and gone through the dust in the bag till they found it, and Suliali screwed it in tight with his pocket knife.

Radio silence

Life leading up to SIM Malawi's Marriage Enrichment Conferences in May was increasingly hectic. Something had to give, and, as it happens, that something was this blog. But I'm going to try to do better in the next couple of months.

A few things I need to update y'all on: the conference--natch, my trip to Tanzania, and our website, which launched last week. And I have a lot of pictures to post.

The web address is: malawi.sim.org. Check it out, and I'll have more to come.