First of all I would like to apologise for the length of this post, but I haven’t had any internet access in 2 weeks and those 2 weeks have seen quite a lot happen in my life! So let’s go through the basics: We now live in a small rural village called Fulirwa in Chilumba in the far North of Malawi (about 75km south of the Tanzania boarder). Fulirwa isn’t what you would call “massive”, in fact it doesn’t have any shops and we have to travel to Uliwa to do our shopping, which is a 15 km’s away across a dirt track. I now teach at Fulirwa Common Day Secondary School which is very small, there are only 4 classrooms, a small library and a staff room! Before we arrived at the school there were only 6 other teachers (one of whom was away looking after his critically ill wife) so the teachers are very happy of our arrival as they were incredibly overworked. On the first day at the school we were given our subjects to teach during the next 5 months and I ended up with Maths form 3 (I was quite unhappy about this as this is equivalent to AS level in the UK and I got a grade D!), English form 1, Life Skills form 3 and Business Studies form 1 and 3 (very chuffed with this!). Overall I now teach 20 periods in a week plus a lot of planning for each subject so my days are nicely full whilst still having some time to relax in the evenings. Teaching here is quite tricky as you have to be prepared all the time, you can’t just have a “dossing” around lesson on the computers because there are no computers, and you can’t just tell them to finish the excercise in the books because they don’t have the book. You can’t give them lots of worksheets because there are no worksheets so you have to make sure you are 100% planned for each lesson, but it’s fun!
Our house is on the school site and looks quite western from the outside as it is made from brick and has many windows. Also on the inside it feels fairly western with big spacious rooms and a layout that you would find in the UK. However there is a major difference, there is no running water or electricity so the house has nothing in it…. No sinks, toilets, showers, baths, lights, tables, chairs. You name it and it’s not there! We are slowly filling the rooms, now we have a bed each in two separate rooms and many pots and pans. The boar-hole that we are using to drink, wash and cook from is about 1 minute away (5 minutes on the way back with a heavy bucket of water!!) At the start I found it difficult to carry the 12 litre bucket of water back but now I have been converted to carrying the bucket on my head which is surprisingly easy and avoid spillages! We cook on a coal fire outside of the front of house and we are now fairly decent at cooking – much better than the first day at least when I struggled to eat a bowl of rice that I cooked! My last attempt of cooking was delicious actually – boiled potatoes with a tomato, pepper, onion and spice sauce! I thought it was a bad stereotype that the Irish love potatoes but I can tell you it is 100% true as Anthony would eat potatoes all day, everyday if he could! Of course things aren’t always plain sailing and there are things that we are still having to adjust to… for example we are going through quite a lot of candles – about 2 a day which is quite annoying. And the only jam we have found in the town is sold in cans which tastes disgusting so we have changed to honey which is much more expensive and less nice. Also we have found it difficult getting eggs back from Ulewa to our house as they don’t come in boxes but just in bags and the journey home is a 20 minute drive along a very bumpy dirt-track… it ends in disaster most times! But these problems make a trip more fun, when coming to Malawi I didn’t want to be able to live an easy life, I wanted a challenge and a challenge is what I am getting!
The second day we were here we were introduced to all the 100 pupils in the school. They were all crammed in one small room and as we entered they started to sing some traditional African music to welcome us. The singing was absolutely beautiful, you know when you are just overwhelmed with awe, I could have listened to it for hours! Then we were introduced by the headteacher (who is possibly the nicest man in world) as “Mr David, from England and Mr Anthony from Ireland”. We have since got the children to use our surnames as “Mr David” is rather odd. After the formalities of the introduction we were treated to the students singing the national anthem which is very pretty – particularly sung by the pupils who were singing their hearts out!
As we are now more rural less and less people can speak English, this was a problem at first because my Chitumbuka was very poor – I could only say two words, “thank you” and “hello”. But over the past week I have been practicing at any point I can and I have improved dramatically however there is still more I can do! I can now hold the start of a conversation with someone, saying hello, how are you and being able to reply: “Matandala”… “Diné makola, yebo”. Also in my armoury I can ask how much something is: “zilinger” and a fair few other phrases. Back in Nkhata Bay it was very rare that someone spoke the local language to you but now I am used to it and I feel more in-touch with my Malawian side when I talk to a local in Chitumbuka!
Over the past week I have had my first experience of a traditional Malawian meal which I had been avoiding since being here. We were invited to the headteacher’s house for dinner and we had Nsima which is made from maize and water. It is a strange texture – I compared it to a cross between a cake and jelly as it does ‘wibble’ a bit! It doesn’t taste of much at all and is quite bland if you don’t mix it with some spice or vegetables. But overall the meal was lovely and we shared time with the headteacher whilst drinking a mug of cocoa and talking about a Malawian life. He is the most incredible man as he spends so much time working at the school but also he looks after 9 children, 15 chickens, 3 dogs, 5 guinea-fowl and 1 cat. He also spends quite a bit of time farming and trying to feed everyone which is so selfless of him. He spoke about wanting to get a degree before he retired but for him to do this he wants to be able to use the internet, so Anthony and myself have volunteered ourselves to help improve his computer skills – the least we can do after he has been so generous to us.
Before we arrived at our school in Fulirwa we stayed the weekend at Matt’s lodge, who is our country manager. The place was a bit of luxury with a bar, king-size beds each, some lovely food and a view you could die for. Matt houses many Malawian children who he cares for and we were introduced to them in the evening, they were all incredibly lovely and we spent many hours with them playing games of “Connect-4”, “Battleships” and of course “Boa’s”. Over the weekend we were joined by Chloe and Elizabeth who live 10 minutes from Matt’s and also Anthony who is about 30 minutes away. Meeting up with them was great as they gave us some good tips for living the basic life and also where to get all our shopping from. We now live about 20km away from Chloe & Elizabeth and Anthony & Lycarion so it is a nice community of the Brits (and one Irish who is fairly British!!)
All bets were lost in the “1st person to get malaria” race as most people bet either Anthony or myself due to the insane amount of bites we have both received! However Elizabeth feel ill with malaria during the week which was quite scary but she was incredibly brave and within 3 days she was back to her usual self. But the whole episode has bought up how careful we need to be but almost how lucky we will be to avoid malaria.
February and the move up north has bought incredible heats. Temperatures must be hitting mid-to-high-30s, surely and I have been sunburnt a fair few times now. I hear that it is freezing back home with much snow across the whole of the country – at the moment I can’t imagine anything cooler than 20 degrees!! The hot days has bought problems with my sleeping, and although I now have a lovely mosquito net that works, my sleep is poor as it is so hot! Another thing that we have noticed since the move is the brightness of the moon! I have never seen the moon so bright and it is bright enough to form very visible shadows and I don’t even need a torch whilst walking to the toilet and back.
We already had a trip to Blantyre planned this weekend for Hannah’s surprise birthday weekend, I was so excited in the run-up to the weekend as I was desperately needing a shower and some nice western food! However I am not looking forward to the trip down to Blantyre as we are going on an overnight bus from Mzuzu that will take about 13 hours of driving – ouch. But after only 2 days of teaching we were told that the next week was a school holiday for most schools across the country – we couldn’t believe it, this meant that we had over a week off from school to do what we wanted. I don’t actually know what we are going to do next week but our possible choices are to climb Mount Mulunje which stands at an impressive 3,002m tall or go on a safari down by Blantyre. Apparently the mountain is quite challenging and will take 1 day to climb, 1 day of roaming around on top and then 1 day for the descent! I don’t mind which one we choose as both of them will be incredible and hopefully I will get some really lovely photos. Also we are planning to go to Nhkotakota to stay with Jen and Julia for few days which should also be good fun and I am looking forward to some proper food that doesn’t involve potatoes for once!
This week I have been planning my birthday which I am dead excited for. I have organised a trip to Nkhata Bay and 17 of the other volunteers are coming for the weekend of 24th and 25th February. I have managed to book the 18 of us into a lovely place in Nkhata Bay that is quite touristy but has an awesome bar and a good night-life all for MK1,300 (£5) per night, pretty decent I feel. It should be good to go back to Nkhata Bay, but this time as a tourist… I will definitely have to visit our favourite restaurant with the lovely waiter, and I will need to go back to the shop where the lady was trying to set me up with her daughter (just because they gave me free biscuits of course!) Hopefully it will be quite a decent birthday and I won’t miss home too much, it seems crazy that around this time last year I was in Bangladesh celebrating my 18th birthday – so much has happened in 12 months.
I have now been in Malawi for 6 weeks and I have been thinking through all the things that have changed in that time. Quite an awful lot! I have lived in 5 places and got to know countless of lovely people. I have spent all the 6 weeks with Anthony which has been very intense but as of now we haven’t fallen out which I think is pretty remarkable. My eating habits have definitely changed and I am quite happy to finish off a whole plate of rice without thinking about it. I have also discovered a craving for biscuits and eat 1 pack a day on average!! I now like eggs and eat around 2 a day, which is more than I have eaten in the rest of my life. I have already read two of my fours books that I have bought out to Malawi and I am looking at Anthony’s Kindle with great envy as he has around 100 books on it! I have got to the stage where I am comfortable spending a week or two without the internet, where I couldn’t spend more than an hour or two without going online back at home. There are many things I do miss though – football is a big miss and I am so out of touch with what is going on in the Premier League! I feel like I don’t know any world events that are going on and I am considering buying a radio so I can listen to BBC World Service. And also I miss chocolate massively – how I wish I could devour a whole packet of Penguins right now!
The next 2 weeks for me are going to be fantastic I feel with lots of travelling and seeing all my Lattitude friends around the country. I will update you guys on how things are going as and when I can. All I can say is a massive thankyou for actually reading these posts, I have been watching my blog views go up and up and I can’t believe people are actually that interested in what I am doing.
So for now I will say goodbye!
