Life in Malawi

So we are in Blantyre... have been now for a week. We arrived last Monday so Bryan could meet an orthopedic surgeon. He prescribed physical therapy for a week, then after 4 weeks of exercising at home go back and reevaluate. This is not a bad deal but we had decided to actually pack very light for a short trip into the city, and well now we where running out of clothes... so I left Wednesday afternoon for home to talk to the neighbors and pack some more clothes. It was a short trip, I left the next morning to come back.

We are enjoying the electricity (which goes off every evening) and the running water (which is only on from 3 to 5 am but luckily we have a tank to store up water). Showers have not exactly been anything close to warm, but at least I do not have to pour it over my head cup by cup.
We had a list of things to look for while we are here. One thing was plants, seedlings of: strawberries, mulberries, mint, peach, and we found some grape vine! We also picked up some seeds, marigolds (to keep the bugs out of our veggies) and a packet of mixed eatable flowers. We found some very good nurseries, even a local nursery market with very good prices. Getting our little plant collection back to site will be interesting... We also where looking for a cat, because we have mice in our house which being in the house automatically promotes a mouse to rat status according to villagers. They say the only way to get rid of them is a cat. So day number 3 in the city we found a man with a box of kittens, and so we now have a kitten. It was so very small when we got it, one month. We have started calling him mavuto meaning troubles. We are still looking for a dog. We do not really want a village dog, but maybe somewhat of a pure breed. There are a lot of german shepherds here, they are good to train so maybe we will find a pup somewhere.

Pictures, here they are… lets start with the extension of the yard. While I was in America Bryan had our fence extended so we will have room to garden. In the first picture Bryan is standing at the back of our fence and in the second the picture is taken from where Bryan was standing of me.

So we have more room, now we are filling it. We start by building a summer hut and then a chicken collar with fenced in yard. We even got hybrid egg laying chicks, 17 of them… but they came sick with Newcastle disease and so now we only have 8 left.

Here are some pics of what we have been doing or seeing lately. Top left we went to a village to see the mushroom farming the women are successfully doing. Top Center; women cooking the largest pot of nsima I’ve ever seen and scooping it out with a bowl into a basket! Top Right; is me learning to cook nsima on a much smaller scale… not I cook it every day. Bottom Left is our neighbors cooking tobwa a home made beer that they drink before it becomes alcoholic (within the first 5 days). Look how much they made! It was for a becoming of age ceremony for the neighbor girl. Finally the last image is Bryan and I at a wedding party being the money changers and counters. At Malawian wedding parties you have to pay to dance.

Finally we have the creatures around us… A large chameleon we keep finding around our yard, Bryan holding the dead black mamba and its head on the end of the panga knife… he killed it, one of three within a week. The kitten is our new baby, and lots of trouble… the dog is a fellow Peace Corps volunteers, she is a very big dog, a ridgeback. The center photo is our dove collar and some of the doves. We have 2 breeding pairs and 2 very young chicks.