happy happy

oh my, i have sounded a tad disheartened lately, haven’t i?! (the reassuring e-mails telling me to ‘hang in there’ were a tip off! hehe) no, i’ve not come unhinged yet! ... this year. and, i should mention, i hated call-in shows just as much at home ;)

let me counterbalance my projected dis-ease with a list of recent positives; for all of our sakes:

Jesman served me chicken last week! (no, i’m not being facetious ... okay, maybe a bit)

he entered the kitchen one afternoon with a recently plucked bird:
“oh Jesman, is that for me?!”
laughing: “oh no ... you don’t eat chicken”
ummm: “oh yes i do ... i don’t eat beef or pork, but i eat birds”
still laughing politely (it’s his way): “oh oh oh, i thought you were a vegetarian?!”
little-smelly-fish: “no, no. i love chicken! i actually eat fish too, but i don’t like it very much”

and so i was served chicken for lunch. :)


i bought a cute little Nokia phone for my travels (hence my phone number here.) it’s GSM, so i’m going to get a new pay-as-you-go SIM card in the UK, another when i’m home in T. in August, and one in NZ. i loved that i could buy a cheap, simple, sturdy phone here without having to pay for a camera, MP3 player or colour screen, none of which i need.


when people burn leaves here (which is every day at this time of year) the smoke smells a bit like marijuana ... which is quite plentiful here anyway. speaking of sin, Malawi Gin is very inexpensive and quite satisfactory.


and speaking of sin once more, i’ve a funny little story:
when Gord and i first arrived at Malamulo, one of the first things asked us by one of the Seventh Day Adventist missionary doctors was: “did you bring prophylactics?” we just STARED at each other in bewilderment .... until she started naming off anti-malaria drugs! (any kind of ‘protection’ is a prophylactic to a doctor, apparently! ha)


i am cared for like a son by my friends Yvonne and Léo. she is a doctor (the one quoted above, in fact) and he’s the head of maintenance. they’re from Mexico and are very cute. they also have two dogs (‘dingo’ and ‘fortuna’) who i love, and a cat who loves me ... hehe


i have a nice view out of my front window just now: the red-brick foundations of my balcony, flowers blossoming in my garden (poinsettias, pink ones, and something that looks like a more-fully-developed baby’s breath), the sunset hitting the trees, and then the hazy valley off in the distance and the orange-to-blue late afternoon sky .... ah me


i have been reading like a ... well, like a thing that reads a lot, as you might have noticed from the ever-changing right panel of my blog. i’ve also used my plentiful time to incorporate yoga and the alexander technique into my daily routine (i’ve recorded set practices for myself in GarageBand, background music and all! 8) i try to exercise daily as well, but my no-protein diet doesn’t allow me to show it very well

how i use my iPod. part 1

i maintain a playlist called new and underplayed. i place most of the new music i download/burn onto this playlist, and also occasionally add an older album or song from my collection.

there are then three paths a song can take. either i:
- delete the song from my iPod completely
- delete the song from the new and underplayed playlist, but keep it on my iPod (delectable collectables)
- or i listen to the song until it’s play count hits 10, at which time i deleted it from the playlist

by this time, the song may have received a rating from * to *****

there are those who call me .. organizmo?

the banded ones were all dressed in white gowns –- a gay survival from the Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms –- days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average.

a trilogy of miscentry ... fin

i now know what it feels like to be a celebrity. everyone here STARES at me constantly, and those who speak English inevitably want to ‘be my friend’

if the new American Dream is to win the lottery (which I assert it is), then the new African Dream is to befriend a Westerner who will magically transport them away from here and pay for a life of luxury in Europe or America .... or maybe i’m becoming cynical

Africans love sugar ... even crisps (potato chips) are sweet and have added sugar. ‘glucose’ cookies are also quite popular. on a related note, cooking oil is a cook’s best friend ... fried = deep fried .. and so fried eggs look like they’ve been tempura-battered

there are lizards (geckos?) EVERYWHERE ... in my house, on my house, running past my house ....

one of my evening pastimes (especially since i ran out of videos to watch on my laptop) is listening to the BBC World Service on my little radio. unfortunately, the evening hours are occupied by the programs World, Have Your Say, and Africa, Have Your Say (call-in shows.) a quick note to the world: have your say with your friends please, not on my radio! you are completely biased, know very little about the world at large, and never think your arguments through

[deep breath]

do i sound negative? i hope not .... at the same time, i’m looking forward to returning to civilization in three weeks! :)

Mm2 / count. cont.

i sleep under a insecticide-treated mosquito net every night. they are the most cost-effective non-medical method of preventing malaria, and yet most Africans can’t afford them (they are C$7.00 here)

roosters don’t only crow when the sun comes up (surprise, surprise, city dwellers!!) ... that said, they never miss a sunrise because they basically crow 24 / 7 [twitch]

poinsettias bloom in May in Malawi ... in my garden

African B.O. is very .. ‘oniony’

traffic lights are called 'robots' in sourthern Africa (???)

P.S. “two wrongs don’t make a right ... but three lefts do!” <= did i invent this quote? *cough* “chip monk”

Malawi miscentry

there are certain things to which i have become accustomed, which will no doubt be of interest to those who have not visited Malawi (or Africa in general):

the women of Africa do indeed carry everything on their heads. the most curious items i’ve seen balanced on a woman’s head to date are:
- an unopened umbrella (balanced horizontally, that is)
- a tea pot (the song comes to mind: “i’m a little tea pot short and stout ...”)
- a purse strap, the purse hanging behind the head (it's the new fashion, ladies!)
more usual items include buckets of water or fruit, bunches of firewood, and sacks of grain.

speaking of women, it quickly becomes apparent to any visitor that they do most of the work here. women are in charge of taking care of the children (in fact, it’s seldom that you’ll see a fertile-aged woman without a child strapped to her back), fetching the water, collecting the firewood, washing (and making) the clothes, cleaning the hut, and on and on. their busyness is so marked that you almost never see a woman sitting still unless she is behind a food stand. the men on the other hand? well, they ... hmmm .... stand around with other men, sit around with other men, drink beer, eat sugar cane ... what else .... annoy tourists with their pleas for money?! in all fairness, being a man here is no doubt frustrating; they are in charge of ‘providing for the household’, and with unemployment so high it seems they are pathetically reduced to the above activities.

the worst job in Malawi: making gravel. driving in to town you see dozens of men sitting on the side of the road beside a pile of rocks. they sit there all day banging larger rocks together to make smaller rocks. their payment: 35 cents per bucket of gravel! one hopes that they manage to produce multiple buckets in a day.

the main form of transportation here is the ‘mini-bus’. these are mini-van-sized vehicles astoundedly packed with four or five rows of seats. a mini-bus never leaves for it’s destination until it is completely full ... ‘completely full’ means at least four people stuffed into each row, with the conductor either sitting on someone’s lap or precariously hanging out the window. my record for ‘most crammed mini-bus’: 27 people, with their belongings! typical belongings include live chickens (“excuse me ma’am, but your chicken is pecking at my foot”), boxes of day-old chicks (cute, until you realize that they are a delicacy), and sacks of grain.

have you noticed the references to ‘sacks of grain’? the main food staple here is called nsima. it’s made of corn flour and water, has the consistency of five-day-old instant mashed potatoes, and tastes like ... paper? the locals eat it almost exclusively, sometimes with ‘relish’ (fried, chopped plant leaves) for vitamins and beans for protein. fish is for rich people (tiny, dried fish which smell terrible), chicken is for very rich people, and beef is for foreigners (there is no pork here, likely due to the considerable muslim and seventh-day adventist populations.) another delicacy: mice, roasted over an open fire (most of the hair is singed off ... and everything except the tail is consumed!)

having told Jesman (my cook) that i’m not a fan of nsima or tiny-smelly-fish, my typical meal consists of rice, beans, and ‘relish’ ... as a result, i’ve taken to carrying a bottle of spicy sauce with me everywhere! still, i can’t complain; Jesman makes me special treats every now and again including pasta, pizza, and chips. if there’s a visitor he will even make muffins or cake. these are such a rarity here, however, that they have not yet invented different flavours of cake! as such, i quietly joke with my friends when we see that we have ‘muffin-flavoured muffins’ or ‘cake-flavoured cake’ for dessert.

and lastly: names! i am terrible at remembering peoples’ last names here as they all sound the same to me. for example, i work with misters Kuyenda, Chiwanda, and Katumbi. some have African first names, but many have taken on highly proper British names such as Evans, Wales, and Pius ... speaking broken English with a guy named Wales is almost as funny as hearing a French guy rap! hehe. some others have taken on rather humorous English names like Friday and Happy (more about Happy, later)

oh, and one more thing: i remarked to Andréa last month that “Malawi is like [my cousin] Chris. time does not work here!” at present i am waiting for a friend who agreed to come by my place at 10am ... it’s already past 11:30. i’ve also learned that “tomorrow” actually just means “not today”, and one of the doctors mused that she was once called in for an “emergency” only to have the patient saunter in four hours later!

my Malawian friend just arrived and i tried to explain to him that for Westerners, 10am means 10am, not 12pm, or “whenever you get around to it.” .... i did not mention Chris. ;)