back(b)logged: May 28

Backlogged blog thoughts: will try to post these as I can!

May 28:

I arrived in Lilongwe after a 24 hour transit between North Carolina, NYC, and Johannesburg.  I spent my last days in the US as anyone would: packing frantically.  I partially moved to my new place (ie: bed, dresser and kitchen items for the summer subletter to use), but mostly did a shuttle run between my bedroom and the attic at the place I lived this past year.  I got quite skilled at balancing and hoisting heavy boxes up the narrow ladder, up to the incredibly humid attic crawl space.  I was lucky enough to have a few friends help me move the big furniture items to the new place, which we celebrated with some Merritt’s BLTs (as if UNC students needed another excuse to indulge there).  I sent a flurry of emails to take advantage of my last wifi juice in the US before leaving the house at 3am to drive to the airport and start the trek.   The two guys behind me at check in were speaking Swahili, and were surprised when I indicated that I understood what they were saying.  They were college students heading back to Kenya to visit family for the first time in seven years.  It made me a bit sad that I wasn’t going to the Swahiliphone world.

I arrived in Malawi after a pretty uneventful set of flights, tired more than anything else because I wasn’t able to sleep much on the 16-hour flight between NYC and Jo’burg.   Looking out the window from the left side of the road during the ~30km drive from the airport to the UNC guest house felt more normal than I had anticipated.  What struck me as I saw them were the following: ubiquitous close tailgating (and the broader difference in concept of what personal space is), the relative social acceptability of gently picking one’s nose, and being in a land where it’s practically a human right to have a toothpick after a meal (grisly meat, although almost always more flavorful than what you get in the US, is at a new level here).   Like in Tanzania and Kenya, round-abouts are favored more than traffic lights, and a car honk is more of a “hey- I’m here” rather than carrying a message of annoyance or anger as it tends to in the US.  Even on the major highways, which usually have just a single lane in each direction, people walk or bicycle along the shoulder, or in the road if the shoulder has eroded away.  Hence, lots of honking and gentle swerving, and zero autopilot mode when in driving here.

 A pic my copilot took when driving back from a hike a few weekends ago: a different take on road-side food offerings

That evening, I went on a jog with two other students who have been here almost a year.  I learned that along the trails and footpaths here, there are bridge tolls (equivalent to about $0.06) that are charged by whichever local person or family has secured such rights to the bridge.  We stayed close to the guest house & hospital to avoid these tolls, and because the sky was already replacing its pale blue with a sherbet striation of orange, pink, and purple.  (Nora, we could even see Venus!  Hold back your excitement…)

Overall, settling in went smoothly.  I slept well that night after diligently tucking in my mosquito net.  I’ve since become incredibly lazy about using it.  Since I don’t move around much when I sleep, I don’t ever get close enough to provide a muzzy with a blood meal through the net.  Perhaps I should be more concerned, as mosquitoes have about a 2 mile home radius, and I’m only a few hundred meters from the main public hospital that sees plenty of malaria admissions daily…but when I leave the royal blue net a bit slack, it looks like I’m underneath a skirt of jellyfish tentacles, which is probably the only time to be mildly excited about being underneath a set of 5+ foot long tentacles. 

Anyway, I’ll try to outline some impressions from being at the hospital in the next posts.   Until then, keep on keeping on.