Everyone always dreads the morning commute to work. All of the traffic, waking up early and those crazy people you can’t help but yell at from your car who cut in a swerve.
Well my commute to work is a little different. It starts by me walking down to the boat. Shoving the boat off of the banks and then hoping it starts as I slowly start drifting down stream. Then I have to monuver around the crocodiles, hippos, turtles and giant water hyasin plants (that can get caught in the engine and cause havic). After crossing the river I have to tie up the boat on to the dock making sure the engine end is tied well in case a freak storm rolls in I don’t want it to drown our engine.
Once the river crossing part it through I have to wait for my bike taxi. What is a bike taxi you may ask, well it is a bicycle with a cushion on the luggage rack. So once the bike taxi arrives, you climb on to the back, inches away from the man that is pushing the bike. More often than not, the man pushing can’t weight more than 110 pounds and if you’re lucky he is young and fit; however, you don’t want the pusher too young because then you have a 10 year old pushing me on a bike which has happened.
After I climb onto the bike we are off through the national park. Most days we see the occasional monkey or baboon stealing a coconut or playing around on a dead tree however the day we all fear is the day we cross the elephants on their way to the river. When elephants are on the path, there is nothing you can do but wait and pray you are unnoticed. But that has only happened once.
The bike taxi ride in total is only about 10-15 minutes depending on heat and fitness level of the bike taxi driver. This is great time to practice my Chichewa and amuse all the village children. Then I arrive at the school and about 8 hours later do the trek back home.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The morning commute
Everyone always dreads the morning commute to work. All of the traffic, waking up early and those crazy people you can’t help but yell at from your car who cut in a swerve.
Well my commute to work is a little different. It starts by me walking down to the boat. Shoving the boat off of the banks and then hoping it starts as I slowly start drifting down stream. Then I have to monuver around the crocodiles, hippos, turtles and giant water hyasin plants (that can get caught in the engine and cause havic). After crossing the river I have to tie up the boat on to the dock making sure the engine end is tied well in case a freak storm rolls in I don’t want it to drown our engine.
Once the river crossing part it through I have to wait for my bike taxi. What is a bike taxi you may ask, well it is a bicycle with a cushion on the luggage rack. So once the bike taxi arrives, you climb on to the back, inches away from the man that is pushing the bike. More often than not, the man pushing can’t weight more than 110 pounds and if you’re lucky he is young and fit; however, you don’t want the pusher too young because then you have a 10 year old pushing me on a bike which has happened.
After I climb onto the bike we are off through the national park. Most days we see the occasional monkey or baboon stealing a coconut or playing around on a dead tree however the day we all fear is the day we cross the elephants on their way to the river. When elephants are on the path, there is nothing you can do but wait and pray you are unnoticed. But that has only happened once.
The bike taxi ride in total is only about 10-15 minutes depending on heat and fitness level of the bike taxi driver. This is great time to practice my Chichewa and amuse all the village children. Then I arrive at the school and about 8 hours later do the trek back home.
Well my commute to work is a little different. It starts by me walking down to the boat. Shoving the boat off of the banks and then hoping it starts as I slowly start drifting down stream. Then I have to monuver around the crocodiles, hippos, turtles and giant water hyasin plants (that can get caught in the engine and cause havic). After crossing the river I have to tie up the boat on to the dock making sure the engine end is tied well in case a freak storm rolls in I don’t want it to drown our engine.
Once the river crossing part it through I have to wait for my bike taxi. What is a bike taxi you may ask, well it is a bicycle with a cushion on the luggage rack. So once the bike taxi arrives, you climb on to the back, inches away from the man that is pushing the bike. More often than not, the man pushing can’t weight more than 110 pounds and if you’re lucky he is young and fit; however, you don’t want the pusher too young because then you have a 10 year old pushing me on a bike which has happened.
After I climb onto the bike we are off through the national park. Most days we see the occasional monkey or baboon stealing a coconut or playing around on a dead tree however the day we all fear is the day we cross the elephants on their way to the river. When elephants are on the path, there is nothing you can do but wait and pray you are unnoticed. But that has only happened once.
The bike taxi ride in total is only about 10-15 minutes depending on heat and fitness level of the bike taxi driver. This is great time to practice my Chichewa and amuse all the village children. Then I arrive at the school and about 8 hours later do the trek back home.
The elephant that knocked down a house
When the rains fail everyone suffers. The food supply you saved from last year has run out and the cost of food in the market has risen 400% while you are still trying to feed your family on a dollar a day. Family and friends constantly ask for loans or gifts of food if you are lucky enough to still have maize. Also because of extreme malnutrition and starvation you and your entire family keep falling sick. Thankfully however the local clinic distributes free medicines, when they are in stalk.
But that is still not your biggest problem. Everyone fears for their lives and fields when the elephants are near. Elephants like humans are drawn to maize when times get rough and are drawn out of the park and tempted by maize fields.
A herd of elephants can clear a maize field in less than a night, which is your main food source for the next year.
Recently a friend and college of mine had his parent’s house demolished by elephants and they ate their entire field of maize. Leaving them homeless and at the mercy of friends and family for the next year until they can re-plant. My friend, Stephano, asked for a loan of $12 because that is all he can afford to pay back so he can assist his elderly parents by buying them a goat and a small bag of maize. These two small gifts along with opening his house up to them are all he can do to help his parents to survive for the next year. So now Stephano is supporting his six children, wife, and two parents on a salary of $18.40 a month along with any extra tin (he is a tin smith) he manages to sell.
But that is still not your biggest problem. Everyone fears for their lives and fields when the elephants are near. Elephants like humans are drawn to maize when times get rough and are drawn out of the park and tempted by maize fields.
A herd of elephants can clear a maize field in less than a night, which is your main food source for the next year.
Recently a friend and college of mine had his parent’s house demolished by elephants and they ate their entire field of maize. Leaving them homeless and at the mercy of friends and family for the next year until they can re-plant. My friend, Stephano, asked for a loan of $12 because that is all he can afford to pay back so he can assist his elderly parents by buying them a goat and a small bag of maize. These two small gifts along with opening his house up to them are all he can do to help his parents to survive for the next year. So now Stephano is supporting his six children, wife, and two parents on a salary of $18.40 a month along with any extra tin (he is a tin smith) he manages to sell.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
A yearly wrap up of 2011
I’ve never really written my own Christmas card, I’ve always been signed on to my parents card, but this year, with all of my travels and adventures I had I thought I could use my blog as a way to write my own Christmas update card.
So first and foremost Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family and random people who read my blog, and thank you for doing so. So here is a re-cap of 2011.
I rang in the New Year in Ghana with my boyfriend Mark and three other close friends. Accra, the capital of Ghana was extremely more developed than the capital of Guinea or Mali so we were all excited to have chines food and ice cream as our New Year’s Eve feast. Midnight was celebrated on a roof top bar, ducking and dodging ill exploding fireworks. New Year’s Day we went to the beach and enjoyed the warm Gulf of Guinea. Our two week vacation was over and a 48 hour bus ride back to Mali with a quick 16 hour stop in Burkina Faso to see some friends was our next adventure. Surprisingly after about the first 10 hours of the bus trip your mind shuts off and you just fall into a daze and block out everything bad about West African public transport and you get through it. We were welcomed back to Mali by some very friendly boarder customs agents around 6 in the morning on January 4th, 2011.
In February the town I was living in, Segou had its annual music festival which is internationally famous (if you are into West African music). The quant city I love changes over night into a huge party filled with Ex-patriots and West Africans alike. The quite streets are alive with beer sellers and avocado sandwich ladies. I hosted six people at my house where they slept on my roof because of lack of space inside. We experienced an out of the ordinary cold front that week and experienced temperatures as cold as 60 degrees at night. Brr! I got some great souvenirs and listened to some great African music.
In April a good friend of mine from college came and visited me for a week. Molly in Mali was the tag line of the week. She enjoyed seeing my life, meeting my friends, my Malian family and experiencing a normal day in village. She spent several days in my town and a few nights at Marks village. It was a real pleasure of mine to be able to show someone a bit of my life here.
May brought in the hot season where temperatures rise as high as 125+ for two solid months. It’s a bear! There is nothing you can do to avoid heat that high, especially when you don’t have air conditioning. The only good thing about this year’s hot season was it wasn’t as bad as 2010’s hot season here temperatures were over 130 for three months.
One of Marks good friends from his American days came and visited us in July. It was nice to finally meet someone from Marks past. Since we started dating in Mali we hadn’t had a chance to meet anyone from the others past. AJ was a great sport, his luggage was lost on arrival, it was over 110 degrees and the city of Bamako was as dusty as always. Luckily luggage was found and our trip to Dogan country was able to continue. Mark, AJ, one other friend Kendra and I all did a one night hike through Dogan again. We chose a different route this time (Mark and I hiked Dogan in 2010) and got to see different villages and different cliff faces. Dogan, as always is a scary thing for me. I’m not much of a hiker and those deadly latters and bridges don’t agree with me. But somehow I suck it up and get through it. And in the end it is all worth it. AJ, Mark and I also went to Djenne, a historical village near Marks village what houses the world’s largest structure (a mosque) made out of mud.
I closed my service (COS) as a Peace Corps volunteer on July 27, 2011. It was a moment of pure happiness and extreme sadness. It is always hard to leave some place you love and leave the people who became your family. As crappy as the situation was that I ended up in Mali I will always look back fondly of the places I went and the people I knew. And thankfully with the internet I am able to keep in contact with my work colleagues and host family.
After a clean bill of health I was off to Spain with Mark for a two week adventure there. I had never been to Spain and really didn’t know what to expect. We landed in Madrid and after finding our way to our first hotel we walked the streets of Madrid in Aww of the architecture, the people, the smells, and the sounds. We sat down at this little restaurant in the middle of a square (with a fountain!) and indulged on pork and sangria. I literally ate so much pork sausage I thought I was going to be sick, but it was so worth it! After we re-awoke from our food coma we went to a grocery store for the first time in three years! Imagine you haven’t had options in three years and then you see aisles and aisles of choices. You would freak out too. It took Mark and I almost two full hours to pick out one type of cheese, one sausage and a loaf of bread (you really can’t make this up, it is sadly true). We took a day trip to Segovia to see the aqueducts and the castle there and tried suckling pig. It sounds gross but let me tell you what, it was delicious, so tender and flavorful. The city was great too, but that pig was to die for. Back in Madrid we stayed with a friend of a friend who was amazing. He gave us free tickets into all of the national art museums and a behind the scenes tour of a Picasso painting being restored. The Spanish art museums were incredible. I never had an appreciation for Spanish art but I loved walking around the never ending halls of old and new art not to mention the galleries were air conditioned. All over Spain they have these great things called daily lunch specials where you get a starter, a main and a desert plus a glass of wine for around 8-10 Euros. It is entirely designed for tourist to try different local meals year round but boy of boy did I love that deal. So we tried all types of local traditional dishes all around Spain this way.
Madrid was amazing but sadly we had to keep moving, next we went to Granada in the south east of Spain. This place was fantastic. It was settled by the Moore’s (the same people who reside now in Morocco) so it is very Arab and different than northern Spain. The Moore’s have always been dessert people so imagine someone from the dessert having access to unlimited water supply, they went crazy! There were fountains every 5 feet, lush gardens covering every square inch of “old town”, reflecting pools in every house and did I mention the gardens? Also Granada is one of the last places in Spain to still give free tapas (appetizers) with each drink. Mark and I discovered this fantastic bar where you order a drink and a plate of food shows up… FOR FREE! We ordered a beer, a sandwich showed with a salad. We ordered another beer and a plate of pork and fries shows. We order another beer and another plate of something fantastic magically appears FOR FREE!!! I could have stayed there all night but sadly a long day of travel was in store for the next day so we had to call it an early night. We hopped around for a bit and then went to Santiago.
Santiago is famous in the catholic world for being a pilgrimage place where in olden days Catholics from all over Europe would pilgrim to kiss the neck of St James. We also stayed with someone just outside of Santiago. He was great and showed us all around western Spain. He took us to one of his local bars and had us enjoy octopus legs which were chewy but good. He also introduced us to these little green hot peppers that were lightly fried in olive oil and covered in coarse salt which was a favorite of mine while in Spain. We also got to meet some of his life long friends which was a real pleasure to meet a group of Spaniards who all spoke good English and we were able to chat for hours.
Sadly I fell terribly sick in Spain. I had a major reaction to an anti-malaria medication I had to take after leaving a malaria zone. I had a terrible fever, cold chills, total body aches and nausea I thought would kill me. I wanted to die but I pushed through and continued to France. Once mark and I got to France I was near death and had to go to the hospital to get blood work done. Doctors were afraid I had malaria so I got tested and it came back negative so I stopped taking that medication and eventually got better.
In France Mark and I were WWOOFing, that is the worldwide organization of organic farmers. We volunteer our time to work on someone’s farm and they give us free food and housing while we are there. I really wanted to find a farm that produced wine and cheese but apparently so did everyone else because all I could find was gardening work and apple picking, which was fine. Mark and I did two stents of two weeks each so our first two weeks were spent in Auteze, an extremely small village in the mountains near Carcassonne. Coming from West Africa I had spoken good west African French however that is very different from France French so that was the plan while volunteering, improve my French! I would say I was able to do this but maybe not to the extent that I wanted. The work in Auteze, like I said was gardening so we picked veggies, dug potatoes and onions and de-clovered a field. Mark surprised me for my 25th birthday early and bought cheese, wine and olives and took me to this great spot near a babbling mountain brook. We spent my real birthday in Carcassonne and walked the old walled city, ate more cheese and tried duck wings (which were tasty). It was a great birthday!
Our second farm was with a French family (speaking no English) on an apple orchard. I sorted apples by size and quality for two weeks while Mark picked apples off the trees. It was hard work but the family made up for that by preparing great traditional dishes like ratatouille, French onion soup and French toast. There, we worked hard and played hard. They had a pool and transport into the big city was easy so we had the entire afternoon to relax and goof off with the other volunteers and family.
After two weeks there I never wanted to see an apple and I will forever look at apples differently, always gauging them by size and quality. That was our last stop in France, so we had to go back to Spain and catch our cruise ship in Barcelona Spain. We took three days in Barcelona and enjoyed the Mediterranean beach, the Barcelona museums and La Ramble (the main shopping street with a huge daily market) and the Spanish wine and pork.
We left Spain on the Disney Magic 2 week trans-Atlantic cruise ship. Mark had never been on a cruise and was delighted with the amenities and attractions on board. There were five ports of call and 8 glorious days of ocean sailing. The food, the shows, the gym, the pool, the sun, and the nice people we met on board made those sailing days fly by too quickly. You really can’t beat a two week cruise, across the Atlantic to travel back to America, not to mention it was cheaper than a flight! We docked in America on September 25 and I flew home for the first time in a year and two months.
To be home was amazing. I was greeted at the airport by mom, dad, Nick and his girlfriend Misty. They took me out to dinner where I enjoyed my first American meal of spicy chicken sandwich warp with fries and ranch dressing. Can’t get more American than that. I was able to see a lot of friends and family while home, but certainly not everyone. Most of my days were spent relaxing and starting a job hunt. Surprisingly I found a job less than two week after the day I started applying for jobs. I was hired on to a non-governmental organization called H.E.L.P. (Hope, Educate, Love & Protect) Malawi where Mark and I were both hired as International Program Managers. I left America exactly one month after arriving, back to Africa.
As of late October I have been in Malawi, and it is great to have my best friend here with me. Mark and I have been able to travel around a little bit and are starting to enjoy life in Malawi. We have gone to the lake twice and enjoyed the crystal clear warm lake water.
Well, this was my 2011. Not too bad. I was in 13 countries this year, shared a beer with people from all over the world, spoke 4 languages to varying fluencies and had the time of my life. So here is to an amazing 2012!!
So first and foremost Merry Christmas to all of my friends and family and random people who read my blog, and thank you for doing so. So here is a re-cap of 2011.
I rang in the New Year in Ghana with my boyfriend Mark and three other close friends. Accra, the capital of Ghana was extremely more developed than the capital of Guinea or Mali so we were all excited to have chines food and ice cream as our New Year’s Eve feast. Midnight was celebrated on a roof top bar, ducking and dodging ill exploding fireworks. New Year’s Day we went to the beach and enjoyed the warm Gulf of Guinea. Our two week vacation was over and a 48 hour bus ride back to Mali with a quick 16 hour stop in Burkina Faso to see some friends was our next adventure. Surprisingly after about the first 10 hours of the bus trip your mind shuts off and you just fall into a daze and block out everything bad about West African public transport and you get through it. We were welcomed back to Mali by some very friendly boarder customs agents around 6 in the morning on January 4th, 2011.In February the town I was living in, Segou had its annual music festival which is internationally famous (if you are into West African music). The quant city I love changes over night into a huge party filled with Ex-patriots and West Africans alike. The quite streets are alive with beer sellers and avocado sandwich ladies. I hosted six people at my house where they slept on my roof because of lack of space inside. We experienced an out of the ordinary cold front that week and experienced temperatures as cold as 60 degrees at night. Brr! I got some great souvenirs and listened to some great African music.
In April a good friend of mine from college came and visited me for a week. Molly in Mali was the tag line of the week. She enjoyed seeing my life, meeting my friends, my Malian family and experiencing a normal day in village. She spent several days in my town and a few nights at Marks village. It was a real pleasure of mine to be able to show someone a bit of my life here.
May brought in the hot season where temperatures rise as high as 125+ for two solid months. It’s a bear! There is nothing you can do to avoid heat that high, especially when you don’t have air conditioning. The only good thing about this year’s hot season was it wasn’t as bad as 2010’s hot season here temperatures were over 130 for three months.
One of Marks good friends from his American days came and visited us in July. It was nice to finally meet someone from Marks past. Since we started dating in Mali we hadn’t had a chance to meet anyone from the others past. AJ was a great sport, his luggage was lost on arrival, it was over 110 degrees and the city of Bamako was as dusty as always. Luckily luggage was found and our trip to Dogan country was able to continue. Mark, AJ, one other friend Kendra and I all did a one night hike through Dogan again. We chose a different route this time (Mark and I hiked Dogan in 2010) and got to see different villages and different cliff faces. Dogan, as always is a scary thing for me. I’m not much of a hiker and those deadly latters and bridges don’t agree with me. But somehow I suck it up and get through it. And in the end it is all worth it. AJ, Mark and I also went to Djenne, a historical village near Marks village what houses the world’s largest structure (a mosque) made out of mud.I closed my service (COS) as a Peace Corps volunteer on July 27, 2011. It was a moment of pure happiness and extreme sadness. It is always hard to leave some place you love and leave the people who became your family. As crappy as the situation was that I ended up in Mali I will always look back fondly of the places I went and the people I knew. And thankfully with the internet I am able to keep in contact with my work colleagues and host family.
After a clean bill of health I was off to Spain with Mark for a two week adventure there. I had never been to Spain and really didn’t know what to expect. We landed in Madrid and after finding our way to our first hotel we walked the streets of Madrid in Aww of the architecture, the people, the smells, and the sounds. We sat down at this little restaurant in the middle of a square (with a fountain!) and indulged on pork and sangria. I literally ate so much pork sausage I thought I was going to be sick, but it was so worth it! After we re-awoke from our food coma we went to a grocery store for the first time in three years! Imagine you haven’t had options in three years and then you see aisles and aisles of choices. You would freak out too. It took Mark and I almost two full hours to pick out one type of cheese, one sausage and a loaf of bread (you really can’t make this up, it is sadly true). We took a day trip to Segovia to see the aqueducts and the castle there and tried suckling pig. It sounds gross but let me tell you what, it was delicious, so tender and flavorful. The city was great too, but that pig was to die for. Back in Madrid we stayed with a friend of a friend who was amazing. He gave us free tickets into all of the national art museums and a behind the scenes tour of a Picasso painting being restored. The Spanish art museums were incredible. I never had an appreciation for Spanish art but I loved walking around the never ending halls of old and new art not to mention the galleries were air conditioned. All over Spain they have these great things called daily lunch specials where you get a starter, a main and a desert plus a glass of wine for around 8-10 Euros. It is entirely designed for tourist to try different local meals year round but boy of boy did I love that deal. So we tried all types of local traditional dishes all around Spain this way.
Madrid was amazing but sadly we had to keep moving, next we went to Granada in the south east of Spain. This place was fantastic. It was settled by the Moore’s (the same people who reside now in Morocco) so it is very Arab and different than northern Spain. The Moore’s have always been dessert people so imagine someone from the dessert having access to unlimited water supply, they went crazy! There were fountains every 5 feet, lush gardens covering every square inch of “old town”, reflecting pools in every house and did I mention the gardens? Also Granada is one of the last places in Spain to still give free tapas (appetizers) with each drink. Mark and I discovered this fantastic bar where you order a drink and a plate of food shows up… FOR FREE! We ordered a beer, a sandwich showed with a salad. We ordered another beer and a plate of pork and fries shows. We order another beer and another plate of something fantastic magically appears FOR FREE!!! I could have stayed there all night but sadly a long day of travel was in store for the next day so we had to call it an early night. We hopped around for a bit and then went to Santiago.
Santiago is famous in the catholic world for being a pilgrimage place where in olden days Catholics from all over Europe would pilgrim to kiss the neck of St James. We also stayed with someone just outside of Santiago. He was great and showed us all around western Spain. He took us to one of his local bars and had us enjoy octopus legs which were chewy but good. He also introduced us to these little green hot peppers that were lightly fried in olive oil and covered in coarse salt which was a favorite of mine while in Spain. We also got to meet some of his life long friends which was a real pleasure to meet a group of Spaniards who all spoke good English and we were able to chat for hours.
Sadly I fell terribly sick in Spain. I had a major reaction to an anti-malaria medication I had to take after leaving a malaria zone. I had a terrible fever, cold chills, total body aches and nausea I thought would kill me. I wanted to die but I pushed through and continued to France. Once mark and I got to France I was near death and had to go to the hospital to get blood work done. Doctors were afraid I had malaria so I got tested and it came back negative so I stopped taking that medication and eventually got better.
In France Mark and I were WWOOFing, that is the worldwide organization of organic farmers. We volunteer our time to work on someone’s farm and they give us free food and housing while we are there. I really wanted to find a farm that produced wine and cheese but apparently so did everyone else because all I could find was gardening work and apple picking, which was fine. Mark and I did two stents of two weeks each so our first two weeks were spent in Auteze, an extremely small village in the mountains near Carcassonne. Coming from West Africa I had spoken good west African French however that is very different from France French so that was the plan while volunteering, improve my French! I would say I was able to do this but maybe not to the extent that I wanted. The work in Auteze, like I said was gardening so we picked veggies, dug potatoes and onions and de-clovered a field. Mark surprised me for my 25th birthday early and bought cheese, wine and olives and took me to this great spot near a babbling mountain brook. We spent my real birthday in Carcassonne and walked the old walled city, ate more cheese and tried duck wings (which were tasty). It was a great birthday!
Our second farm was with a French family (speaking no English) on an apple orchard. I sorted apples by size and quality for two weeks while Mark picked apples off the trees. It was hard work but the family made up for that by preparing great traditional dishes like ratatouille, French onion soup and French toast. There, we worked hard and played hard. They had a pool and transport into the big city was easy so we had the entire afternoon to relax and goof off with the other volunteers and family.
After two weeks there I never wanted to see an apple and I will forever look at apples differently, always gauging them by size and quality. That was our last stop in France, so we had to go back to Spain and catch our cruise ship in Barcelona Spain. We took three days in Barcelona and enjoyed the Mediterranean beach, the Barcelona museums and La Ramble (the main shopping street with a huge daily market) and the Spanish wine and pork.
We left Spain on the Disney Magic 2 week trans-Atlantic cruise ship. Mark had never been on a cruise and was delighted with the amenities and attractions on board. There were five ports of call and 8 glorious days of ocean sailing. The food, the shows, the gym, the pool, the sun, and the nice people we met on board made those sailing days fly by too quickly. You really can’t beat a two week cruise, across the Atlantic to travel back to America, not to mention it was cheaper than a flight! We docked in America on September 25 and I flew home for the first time in a year and two months.To be home was amazing. I was greeted at the airport by mom, dad, Nick and his girlfriend Misty. They took me out to dinner where I enjoyed my first American meal of spicy chicken sandwich warp with fries and ranch dressing. Can’t get more American than that. I was able to see a lot of friends and family while home, but certainly not everyone. Most of my days were spent relaxing and starting a job hunt. Surprisingly I found a job less than two week after the day I started applying for jobs. I was hired on to a non-governmental organization called H.E.L.P. (Hope, Educate, Love & Protect) Malawi where Mark and I were both hired as International Program Managers. I left America exactly one month after arriving, back to Africa.
As of late October I have been in Malawi, and it is great to have my best friend here with me. Mark and I have been able to travel around a little bit and are starting to enjoy life in Malawi. We have gone to the lake twice and enjoyed the crystal clear warm lake water.Well, this was my 2011. Not too bad. I was in 13 countries this year, shared a beer with people from all over the world, spoke 4 languages to varying fluencies and had the time of my life. So here is to an amazing 2012!!
Friday, November 25, 2011
The holiday season away from home, again
This is my third consecutive thanksgiving away from home, and going on my fourth Christmas away from home. There are many things that I enjoy about living abroad, however the holidays are not one of them.
You have to learn how to make traditional traditions and different family traditions into a special day. Holidays need to be celebrated. They are major mile stone in the year. It would be easy while away to not celebrate the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, but I need to celebrate those to bring more stability and familiarity to my life away from home.
This year for thanksgiving I will be spending Saturday with several other Americans, trying to make a traditional thanksgiving feast. Instead of turkey however we are doing chickens, there will be mashed potatoes, green beans, cooked carrots and hopefully if we are lucky pumpkin pie. It wont be the same as sitting around Aunt Betty’s table but I will still be with good people, sharing good food and giving thanks for the things I have.
You have to learn how to make traditional traditions and different family traditions into a special day. Holidays need to be celebrated. They are major mile stone in the year. It would be easy while away to not celebrate the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, but I need to celebrate those to bring more stability and familiarity to my life away from home.
This year for thanksgiving I will be spending Saturday with several other Americans, trying to make a traditional thanksgiving feast. Instead of turkey however we are doing chickens, there will be mashed potatoes, green beans, cooked carrots and hopefully if we are lucky pumpkin pie. It wont be the same as sitting around Aunt Betty’s table but I will still be with good people, sharing good food and giving thanks for the things I have.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Lake Malawi
Malawi is known as the “Warm heart of Africa.” It seems as though everyone you meet is excited about life and willing to open their heart and home to you. There are many things to do and see in Malawi, I however have only been here a short while and have seen very little but something I am glad I did early in my stay here was go to Lake Malawi.
Lake Malawi is one of the largest fresh water lakes in Africa. It provides fresh fish for thousands of people who are fighting protein deficiencies; it is also a major tourist destination. I went to a lake side sleepy village called Cape Mclear which is on the cusp of the national forest and the lake.
Inside the national forest there is an amazing place called otters point which is a secluded section of the lake that has a rocky/boulder shore line. Mark and I met with some of our friends and colleagues there and spent the afternoon in the water, swimming among the fish and jumping off the rocks. It was a grand time. We also taught Able, the head teacher of Nanthomba primary school (the school I work with) how to swim.
All in all it was a fantastic day and a good get a way.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
First day of work
It has been about three weeks here in Malawi now. As in all jobs the first few weeks are difficult, learning the ropes, finding your way around, and memorizing everyone’s names can all prove to be very overwhelming; but I’m starting to settle in, find a routine and make new friends.
My first day on the job in country I got a tour of the school I will be working at, met all of the teachers and played around with some of the students, or as they say here, learners. Next I got a tour of a fantastic health center with maternity ward 4 Km up the road the HELP has helped to build. I met Frank and Impatso, the local nurse and midwife. They showed me the vegetable garden they want to use as a nutritional showcase for malnourished children and mothers, and I even saw a first time mother, hours after delivery holding her first born baby son.
As the day was wrapping down I got to take a real “out of the Lion King” style safari. A group of us jumped into a safari vehicle and our amazing guide, Henry showed us several groups of elephants, including baby elephants, warthogs (little known fact, baby warthogs are the cutest thing in the world), bushback, impala, monkeys, baboons, and tons of other animals. Just as the sun was setting we parked our car, jumped down and shared an ice cold beer and popcorn watching the sun set over the mountains down river.
When we got back to camp we had a delicious dinner while overlooking the Shire River listening to the hippos in the distance. I must say, that was the best first day of work I have ever had!
My first day on the job in country I got a tour of the school I will be working at, met all of the teachers and played around with some of the students, or as they say here, learners. Next I got a tour of a fantastic health center with maternity ward 4 Km up the road the HELP has helped to build. I met Frank and Impatso, the local nurse and midwife. They showed me the vegetable garden they want to use as a nutritional showcase for malnourished children and mothers, and I even saw a first time mother, hours after delivery holding her first born baby son.
As the day was wrapping down I got to take a real “out of the Lion King” style safari. A group of us jumped into a safari vehicle and our amazing guide, Henry showed us several groups of elephants, including baby elephants, warthogs (little known fact, baby warthogs are the cutest thing in the world), bushback, impala, monkeys, baboons, and tons of other animals. Just as the sun was setting we parked our car, jumped down and shared an ice cold beer and popcorn watching the sun set over the mountains down river.
When we got back to camp we had a delicious dinner while overlooking the Shire River listening to the hippos in the distance. I must say, that was the best first day of work I have ever had!
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