My first Malawian week!

Well I have so much to update you since my last blog post. First of all, I am in Malawi and I am having such a great time out here. Let’s start off with travel…

The journey was relatively decent, obviously a lot of sitting and being bored but nothing major went wrong. We flew to Addis Ababa first and I was sat between an American man that looked like he wanted to kill me and a mixed up South African! We met Claus and Jess in Ethiopia and travelled on from there. Lilongwe airport is seriously tiny… think Sandown and you are thinking way to big however they have massive jets landing every so often. We had been told to bring a brolly and they weren’t joking, we stepped off the plane into the pouring rain (I’m not sure we actually flew anywhere if I’m honest!

We all got a taxi to the place we would be staying for the week – Mabuya Camp. The drive was awfully slow and all we wanted to do was sleep and wash. However once we arrived at the camp we were met by 8 excitable Aussie girls so this ruined our plans of setting a good first impression. We all sat in a big group – all 24 of us and chatted to Matt about what we were doing here. Instantly there was such a bond with everyone and banter has been flowing ever since. The camp is amazing, full of tourists and Is like a halfway house between Malawi and the western world. There is a pool table, swimming pool, bar and western food to eat. So it has been a transition period into Malawian culture.

We have been doing lots of orientation work to do with Malawian history, politics, culture and language… most have been boring but we had a fantastic talk by a Malawian politician that was working on a human rights report for the UN. She was so fascinating to listen to and told us some useful knowledge about the area we are now in. The language is very complex, I can only say one word – “Yebo” pronounced, “yewo” and this means thankyou. Let’s hope that Anthony is equally as bad as me and we will just get by on English. Getting used to the currency is tricky as it is around 250 Kwacha to the £1 therefore everything seems so expensive, spending several thousand on chocolate! But generally things are nice and cheap here, you can get Coca-Cola for 40p!

The evenings here are AMAZING. We spend hours playing pool and different card games. A beer costs around 70p so needless to say we have been letting our hair down a bit! There are 24 of us in total and we have only know each other for 5 days but I honestly can’t believe how close we have all got. Everyone here is brilliant and so cool to talk to. We have all struggled with names of everyone but eventually I am just about there. We are separating into our pairs tomorrow and I will miss so many people here, I wish we could stay together for longer however we are about 50km from some of the volunteers so we can meet quite a lot. I know it is bad to pick favourites but I think everyone agrees here that Claus, the Danish guy, is awesome! His English is very good and is the most sarcastic guy I have ever met, his one-liners are fantastically funny and he quite clearly doing quite well with the ladies here.

Lilongwe, the capital city, is very western with a huge supermarket very similar to Tesco (obliviously not as good!). But the one thing that has most surprised me is how quiet the city is, I was expecting similar chaos as Dhaka but it is as quiet as Newport would be!

The people that own the camp here are from Hampshire, so I travel over 5000 miles and I am still around local people. They also own the diving school in Nkhata Bay (my placement) so I am trying to become very friendly with them so I can get discounts on diving sessions – fair game I would say! Anthony and myself have been asking everyone about Nkhata Bay and they all have the same response, “You are going to LOVE it!” so I am fairly excited to move to my placement area tomorrow.

I have to be up at 4:30 tomorrow morning, something I am not looking forward to as I can’t go for my 6 am swim anymore! Ohh and one more thing…. I HATE MOSQUITOES! I HAVE BITES EVERYWHERE AND THEY ARE SO ANNOYING!

So this is a fairly quick update on how the first week has gone. Once we get to Nkhata Bay I will hopefully be able to go on the internet a bit more. I am sorry if this doesn’t make fully sense as I am recovering from last nights party (one of the girls had their 18^th last night… was quite messy!). I have probably missed so much but this week has been such an experience that I can’t remember everything.

Until next time…