Post 4 – Lilongwe (May 15)

We landed last night and are staying at the Golden Peacock which is a pretty fine establishment. Everyone gets their own bed, mosquito net and there's 6 showers (definitely a cut above the EWB house). No internet access, but we are in Lilongwe so the fact that you are reading this means that I succeeded in finding myself an internet cafe (so I'm writing this yesterday night if I haven't confused you enough yet).

Scavenger hunt! We partnered up and headed into the town to find a bunch of stuff. Mike and I (yeah, I know) spent about an hour just finding our way into the town, and then getting our hands on some cash. After talking with a few people, we determined our options were the bank ATM, or the black market trader near the bridge... and given the local wouldn't go anywhere near the black market guy then we decided it wasn't a good choice. (Turns out there was a Bureau de Change) that had pretty decent rates, but we didn't find out about this until we talked with other JFs. Now we had local money so our bargaining leverage was greatly increased.

Other things on our list were cell phones, potions from the witch doctor, malaria cure, and a ton of wierd stuff from the market that was not in english. Luckily we found a couple really nice local men who were just hanging around and were super stoked to show us where to buy stuff in the market. We got a couple chitenges (multipurpose cloth things), white beans, cassava, avacoado, bread, some Fanta, banannas sandles and a sweet serving spoon.

Oh and also on the list was this beer called chibuku, which comes in a 1L carton, and is made from maize and sorghum, and not only tastes gross, but also has tons of floating grains of stuff. Really rough when you get to the bottom of the carton, because the top of the carton where you put your mouth is soggy, and all the floaties are more concentrated as you get to the bottom. To top it off, the slogan is “Shake, Shake” and everyone who saw us white guys (azunga) carrying it got a pretty good laugh (though we got more people talking to us and shaking our hands than before we were carrying the beer). And the guy who sold it to us very sincerely stated how he appreciated that we were drinking the beer and trying his culture.

Still don't have my cell phone yet, but I've heard of a couple good places to buy it, and I'm in no rush because I'll need a Zambian SIM card anyway. Sounds like the thing to do is buy a phone with a flashlight, especially for when you're in a smaller village. And we didn't manage to get to the witch doctor, though another group found him and bought some magical headache cure. I also want to go back and buy some toilet paper (if I run out of other topics, I may discuss the different toilet techniques in a later post) and water purification tablets (think I managed to leave mine at the EWB house). And of course to put this post online.

To cap off the day, I had nshima tonight for the first time! We went to a couple of the local OVS host families for dinner. We had nshima (maize flour rolled into balls) with a ton of relishes (chicken, beans, rape, pumpkin seed and mustard leaves) as well as rice, oranges and banannas. The technique for nshima is pretty cool: you take a chunk of the nshima in your right hand and roll into a ball. Then you make a depression in the ball, so it looks a bit like a scoop. Using your scoop and thumb, you scoop relish into the depression and then put it in your mouth. I thought it was pretty good, but let's reevaluate how I like it after 3 and a half more months of nshima for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Looks like tomorrow we have some more serious sessions going on, and a sector meeting (which means I'll be chatting strategies with Thulasy and all the IDE team. Hopefully party it up a bit that night, and then next morning board the bus for Lusaka. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I think we are at the IDE head office, and chilling in Lusaka, and then its off to the real work. I'll try to have a post or two online before I leave Lusaka, then I'll be 80km from Monze which looks like the nearest town that has internet and an ATM. Good news is that buses pass by fairly frequently, since I am on the main road in the Southern Province, but I won't expect that blog posts will be all that frequent. Instead look forward to checking my Twitter for news, as I can start updating that once I get myself a cell phone...

...Mike