Muli bwanji? How are you?

29 March 2018

After the initial culture shock, I have now settled well in Malawi. At the moment I’m working a lot on the computer so I’m not in the project very often, but the days I spend in Chinsapo are always very nice and varied. When I hadn’t been in the project for a few days the women immediately asked where I had been and said that they had been missing me.
One day I took my camera with me to take a few up-to-date pictures of the project and the local people. The presence of my camera caused a short work stop for about 45 minutes, because everyone wanted a picture of themselves. My room mate Linus had already told me that Malawian women love to be photographed. He has to take pictures of a colleague’s daughter again and again because the in-built camera of his cell phone is better than hers. It was very funny to see confirmed, what Linus had told me.

I also made my first small trip inside Malawi: For one night we went to visit other volunteers in Salima by Lake Malawi. The climate and landscape there are completely different from Lilongwe. While the weather in Lilongwe is rather hot and dry, Salima is more tropical with high humidity. We spent the two days mainly in the lodge Cool Runnings, which is owned by a British woman who runs various environmental projects around Salima. Since the lake is so big you feel like you are by the sea and the holiday feeling sets in immediately. I didn’t go for a swim, because the fear of schistosomiasis was still too strong. In addition, there was a crocodile in the lake, which is said to have broken out of a nearby crocodile farm.
But they are not entirely sure about this as the owner has not officially admitted it yet. Welcome to Malawi.

Fun fact: Nsima. Nsima. Nsima. Every day. The national dish is really the food number one and the favourite food of most people. They often have Nsima up to three times a day. And even if something else, such as rice, is offered most people stick with their Nsima.