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Published: January 4th 2010
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SOOOOOOOOOO....I know I failed this time. I have not been on this page in months!! Sorry!
I don't have much to say about December. My birthday on the 6th was nice and quiet, and Thanksgiving was it's usual brand of PC-Crazy. BUT, after Halloween I did a few interesting things. (My Christmas adventure is on the next blog)
For instance, just after Chitipa I had a few days to kill before going to Laura's Girls Camp in Mulanje. Jen's birthday fit in perfectly, so I handled some VAST grant issues in Lilongwe and followed her up to Kande Beach for 2 nights. It was nice to hang out with the peeps in my group. Kande is nice - but there were a lot of those overlander buses there (for tourists that do long overland bus rides throughout Africa), which made us understand why the villagers were not as friendly...They were a little too used to begging and handouts, and some had obviously come across a few unsavory tourists. SO when we told them we didn't want to give them money they yelled a lot of stuff about TIA (This is Africa) and to go back home. That is always
a frustrating thing to hear when you are volunteering in a country to HELP people.
My friends want to take a scuba diving course there, but I am pushing for Cape Maclear or Nkhata Bay because of the beach boys and villagers (of course, I need to check those places out beforehand because they are also tourist hot-spots). In all, Kande is very nice - far from Lilongwe tho - and the owner was cool. They also have horseback riding, and they take the horses into the lake. It actually was the first time I had seen a horse since I have been in Africa.
Then I booked it down to Mulanje to help out with the camp. I taught Nutrition and I even a little tae kwon do. But mostly I just hung around Laura's house and took pictures and helped when needed. We did lots of cool stuff with the girls while I was there. They learned how to make jam and peanut butter. They also learned about permaculture. And we took them to a beehive where they learned bee-keeping (and I got stung - the bees here are SUPER aggressive).
When I got back
to site I managed to teach a few classes of Medical-Surgical Nursing for the second years. We even discussed having a function with our health club for World AIDS Day in December with the health club. I was surprised, however, to find out that when I mentioned inviting Malawi Blood Transfusion to come down to the college to do a blood drive (there is ALWAYS a shortage of blood here) I only had a handful of students out of 70 even willing to donate. I decided to do a survey of this instead, and was surprised at the results (email me if you are interested in this info)... A lot of the students were worried they didn't have high enough hemoglobin levels to donate.
Anyway, I also was invited to go visit the Elephant Marsh by Mel and her friend with Doctors without Boarders. It was beautiful, and I was so happy to be invited. It was a shame that it took me nearly two years to go since it is so close to my house! We only had a small problem along the way... To go to the Elephant Marsh there is not really a specific place to
go. We asked a person at our hospital and they directed us to a village with some boats, but the man there running the show was really awful. He wanted to overcharge us significantly for the ride, and then was unwilling to bargain with us - instead saying that we can just go somewhere else because he had been doing this for 2 decades and didn't need our money. This was very uncharacteristic of Malawians, so after trying, and failing to negotiate with the owner of the boats, we then told the guys that were going to take us out (just local fishermen) what the guy said to us and how much he wanted to charge us...Haha. I guess he didn't think that we would tell his workers, or maybe he really didn't believe me when I told him that I lived here in Malawi. SO, when we started telling the fishermen in Chichewa what the guy said they tried to convence him to go down in price. (He was trying to charge MK5,000/hour) We left and went down the street where we paid MK600 for an hour and a half, and it was closer to the college. It was
a shame because I think what happens is tourists wander out to the first spot we went to and just give up trying to negotiate with this guy since the Elephant Marsh is kinda a ways away from lodges, and definitely any towns...so he can get away with his behavior.
Not too much later I traveled back up to Lilongwe for Thanksgiving. It was a great time! On Thanksgiving we all stayed at the Peace Corps House in Lilongwe and had a lot of fun. Friday a few of my friends cooked up a turkey and we had a good dinner. Then we were all invited to a Thanksgiving celebration on the Saturday after Thanksgiving at the US Ambassadors house. After eating, a couple volunteers and myself headed over to Camp Sky - a camp for secondary school kids that the education group runs every year. I taught a giant class (almost 70 students) of tae kwon do out in the middle of a soccer field for 2 hours that night. It was fun, and I think the kids enjoyed it (I am still waiting for pictures of that!). Afterward I gotta taxi to take me to my APCDs
house for a going away party for her. I was out late! I went back to my site the next day tho.
My birthday was a quiet one. I was REALLY busy finishing my Medical-Surgical topics before the second years had their exams, so I didn't do much on my birthday but RELAX. It was great!
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Mary Lynn
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Such a brave, brash gal!
Always enjoy your posts! Brave is great. Brash is needed to survive down there, evidently! If they only knew how you used to "squeal like a girl" over everything. Good job on scoping out cheaper boats! SKYPE!!!! SKYPE!!!! SKYPE!!!!