Note: It has been brought to my attention that the phone number I provided earlier is incorrect, if anyone wants to reach me, call 011 265 99 3213078 (Thanks Mom)

Moving on to Stage 2 of the summer

So I realized that I haven't written on this thing in a while, so I figured that I'd go ahead and write a little update on everything that's been happening. First of all, we have finished the initial phase of our research here and are moving into direct preparations for the survey itself, which should begin in a few weeks. Since this was going to compose a good chunk of my summer and the work I had been assigned, I'm pretty relieved to find out that it was successful - at least in my opinion. As for the rest of this post, I figure I'll go through a couple little anecdotes.

Muzungu, muzungu ... gule wamkulu?

To give everyone a clue as to how remote and isolated I am here, I was recently confused with one of these Gule Wamkulu . A little boy who had never seen a white man before didn't know what he was looking at - I think it means I need to shave and/or get a hair cut or something...

(At one other point a small child was so terrified at seeing her first white man that when I waved she started crying; I guess I'm scary :( ).

New photos up on Facebook

To keep everything steamlined I'm going to be posting photos only on my Facebook page, a public version of which is here: Jon's Facebook Photos . Enjoy!

Free writing from an email

Finally, I wanted to include a little blurb I randomly wrote about being isolated out in Malawi in an email to some close friends of mine:

So where to begin on Malawi - well first, it’s an extremely different experience than SAS. This is much more bureaucratic, working, and isolated than SAS ever got. The major difference seems to be that when I’m here, I’m doing something for a reason, there is an underlying tacit explanation for everything that I’m doing that is much more than just experiencing the area that I’m in. And that’s probably a good thing, since in all honesty, underdeveloped does not sound as exciting as it is. Underdeveloped means there are dirt roads that turn to dust clouds whenever a car goes past, that electricity cuts in and out (causing us to have no way to heat water, cook, see if there are giant bugs looking at us, check email, and a whole host of other things); underdeveloped means that there is no cool nightlife because most people here can’t afford enough beer to justify going out in the first place; underdeveloped means I haven’t had ice cream, ice, a smoothie, swam in a pool, laid out in the sun, or had a normal meal in weeks and that my form of a ‘shower’ is filling up old water bottles with freezing water (maybe not freezing but fucking cold) and pouring it over myself so that I can rinse off and not smell; underdeveloped means that the average road here is in such terrible condition that even cars can’t pass, and when they do it is so bumpy that you wear your seat belt so as not to be thrown into the seat/person in front/next to you, and that the one and only taste of home is Coca-Cola (some things never change Skylar); underdeveloped means a slower pace of life, since what are you in a rush for, it means no schedules, time is only relative, that hours of the day exist but aren’t really used except that the sun sets around 5:30 and you want to be inside by then and that when someone is leaving soon, that means only when there are enough people in transport to justify leaving - otherwise tough; but most of all underdeveloped just means boring and isolated, that most of these people will never see a city big enough to justify what the rest of the world has declared to be a city, and that the profession they are doing is what their children are going to do and that the chance of intergenerational life improvement is so low as to be negligible. And very little of this is their own personal responsibility.

But that’s not what I want to talk to you guys about - the major concern is that it’s not lonely here, it’s just isolated. There aren’t people at night - you can walk around the middle of the downtown area in the middle of the street after dark and not see a car or person more than every 10 minutes or so - when there’s a blackout you can see the ring of the milky way galaxy since there’s no light pollution obstructing your view, but at the end of the day I just kind of have this strange feeling of doing something terribly interesting that most people in the world will never experience, and something terribly boring, like I’m being inefficient with my time since life here just works on a whole other level. I recently finished reading Les Miserables, I thought that the story of Jean Valjean in was beautiful, though I think that one of the major implications of that is that nobody can be that good, that everybody doesn’t deserve what they have and that unless you’re willing to be Jesus Christ himself, you don't deserve the luxury we've been assigned by the lottery of birth.

Best,

Jon

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Part of trip: Malawi - Summer 2009

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