Thursday, July 15, 2010
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?
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, July 5, 2010
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.
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.
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