becca

So since the last time I wrote, we have played and cleaned 16 babies, survived 2 malaria scares, traveled to Lake Malawi, lived with bats, wasps, mosquitoes, ants, avoided creepy men in straw hats, ate sri lankan food, celebrated Tanya’s birthday, bargained with many many men to buy curios, and drove in dozens of minibuses and visited lots of people that have all blended together to form one long week of memories and blurriness.

Time is so strange in this land.

Anyway, so last week we volunteered at the Crisis Nursery all week. On a physical level it was cute and wonderful to play with the babies and volunteer, but even more than that, I took it as a learning experience. Everywhere I go in this country I am bombarded with new experiences and sights and realizations. Its slightly overwhelming. Its kind of like when I first met these girls at Clark freshman year and we just kept talking and learning about the differences between our lives. I imagine that this overwhelming, sensory-overload is a common feeling for many international students. Regardless, it is something I am entirely unfamiliar with as an American that never strays far from home… it is overwhelming and tiring and makes me want to go home at times. I kind of want a break from not only mosquitoes, unsteady internet and phone, and hot burning sun, but colonial racial divides, and just being azungus… hmm… crash course on Being a Minority 101 I guess…..

oh right, back to babies… very cute little things they are. The nursery is funded by the Ministry of Hope Church in North Carolina and other churches around the world. Even with all this funding, and being in the capital city with all it has to offer, it is still lacking significantly. The staff consists of women who are called “mothers” who take care of 4 babies during their shift. Unfortunately, most of their training is just their experience being a mother… nothing really formal or skills to enrich or stimulate the children. There are also other staff members and it creates an overall atmosphere of disorganization where children may not be fed, changed or played with for hours.
If this is what it is like in a well funded organization, I don’t even know what to expect in a village.
I don’t know anything about villages. Hopefully this week at consol homes in the village will help me with this understanding. We don’t know what to expect, but I am excited… hmm…

on a slightly less reflective note, we ended our week by taking a one day trip to Senga Bay for Tanya’s birthday. This small town/ village is very very cute. It is dotted with large colonial homes and guesthouses for people taking a holiday. Its hard to get lost in Malawi because most towns, villages and cities are connected by one main road. So we see a sign on the main road that says “Carolina’s Lake Resort” and turn down the dirt road. Little did we know it was about a mile drive down a bumpy dirt road going through a village. To the left we could see “dots of blue” as Tanya kept pointing out and all around us was just an idealic, quiet, village life. After suspecting we were going the wrong way, we finally reached Carolina’s… a white, colonial house with a bar and lounge area… all on the beach and we couldn’t have been more excited. After checking in, and going straight to our rooms to change into our suits, we start to realize the reality of the rest of our night… we had a cute little balcony that was connected to the adjacent room, so we tried to lock the door and ended up breaking the lock…. Oops.. so ya… we slept with a broken door… but i’ll get to that later.. first we enjoyed a long day in the sun and on the beach being harassed by salesmen selling everything from fish, to trips to the island, to paintings. We played with some of the local kids and then Tanya and Shohini decided to jump on a log and pretend it was a boat… they saw the local boys doing it and thought it looked like fun… needless to say they are quite sore from the exercise..
Our evening ended up being full of Sri Lankan food and cricket (the game on tv) because we happened to find ourselves at a hotel with a Sri Lankan chef (thank Gd). The food was sooooooo delicious that we decided to take home the leftovers (too bad we forgot them the following morning when checking out).
So during the second cricket game some strange drunk man in a straw hat was creeping around, but the Sri Lankan man was keeping us safe. Since we woke up at the crack of dawn we were exhausted by 10 and I’m sad to say we didn’t even make it to Tanya’s birthday at midnight.
When we went back to our room at night, creeped out enough from the straw hat man, we got even more scared because we heard noises in the communal bathroom and didn’t know who it was (of course we assumed it was straw hat man). Tanya and I NEEDED confirmation as to who our neighbor in the lodge was, so we stood with the door cracked open to see the man when they came out of the bathroom. So we stood at attention… and kept standing and waiting for this mysterious creature… I must note that as Tanya and I thought death was approaching on the other side of the bathroom door, Kim said “guys, we have to blog about this”….. great… thanks kim.
Anyway…. About half an hour later after still standing and waiting for him to come out of the bathroom, thinking of every possible reason why the man might be in the bathroom for over half an hour, shohini got up the courage to knock on the bathroom door (which by the way didn’t lock)… and we quickly learned there was NO ONE IN THERE. We had been standing around like idiots (having to pee) waiting for some phantom creep in a straw hat to appear… after all the hustle and bustle of the bathroom man died down we pushed our beds together and crawled under the mosquito nets. Shohini and Tanya shared a bed because the fourth was our faux lock for the unlocked door.. ☺ so from my bed I saw our neighbor step onto the balcony for a late night cigarette.. and to everyone’s splendor, it was a fellow azungu! So we quieted down, trying to ignore the loud squeeking of bats in our ceiling and fell asleep… oh, did I forget to mention the millions of bats that we were apparently disturbing in the roof of our room… ps Tanya is terrified of bats…. Twas a grand ol time really…
We went to sleep at 11:45 and woke up at 4:30 am to watch the sunrise over the Lake…. DEFINITELY WORTH IT.
We went back to sleep for some time and spent the rest of the morning eating our FREE breakfast that you KNOW we were excited about and then stopped at a market on the way back where we were once again harassed to buy anything and everything.

It was a very nice weekend and now we are at a new hotel that provides “free wifi internet access”….. too bad we live in the outhouse with the chickens where the internet doesn’t reach… but more about that next time. Tomorrow: Consol Homes- Nametete.

*********Disclaimer to Parental Units***********:
NO ONE WAS REALLY THAT SICK. JUST A TUMMY BUG. NO MALARIA. Also, WE ARE SAFE. I SWEAR. Clean? Maybe. Safe? Yes. Smile! See you all soon!