intomalawi-blog - Tumblr blog

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Special thanks to In Context Solutions for pulling together to start raising money for Adziwa Orphanage. $175 raised to date AND they will be hosting a building wide bakesale in Chicago next week! LETS DO IT FOR THE KIDS!!! 

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Liwonde Safari Camp

No electricity. Where the heart goes to be inspired 

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MUMBO ISLAND - Cape Maclear

Lake Malawi March 2015

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Liwonde National Park - Malawi March 2015

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Thanks to some awesome people in Sao Paulo we collected enough shoes for the entire netball team to be fully uniformed during every game! Don’t mind my work shoes - I had to skip practice that day! 

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Mom and Dad came all the way from Brazil to deliver shoes, books and clothes to Adziwa! Thanks to all the wonderful people who held drives in their schools to make sure the children had shoes! Left to right: Denise (mom), James (Adziwa project manager), George (Dad), Brown (Bank Manager)

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25 pairs of sneakers collected for the Netball team in 24 hours! We've made our quota! All extras will go to the Adziwa Orphanage. Thank you Mom for organizing

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Netball ladies - Banki Mmanja team! We lost but we put up a good fight! -- For the most part all women work at the bank, from janitorial staff to directors and managers. This is their happy place, laughing, drinking soda, eating snacks, laughing at one another and dancing with every score! Here's the catch though- we don't have enough shoes, so for every woman wearing sneakers on the hot tar, another is barefoot on the sidelines. I ended up leaving my shoes with the ladies for their second game. We've already started a donation drive for used shoes in Brasil- my parents will be bringing them in 3 weeks. If you are in Brasil and would like to support, please let me know. By the time I leave Malawi, I want the lady's team to have at least 10 team shoes. If you would like to contribute a cash donation- sneakers in Malawi range from 5,000-10,000 kwacha or 10-20 USD.

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There are not enough words for an African sunset. We drove straight west from Salima back to Lilongwe, chasing it over the horizon, windows down, Damien Rice and Ben Harper on the stereo, watching droves of people walking, on bikes, laughing, sitting- all along the road. Time stood still. The only vestige of its passage were the quietly changing colors in the sky.

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Senga Bay, Malawi - Feb 2015. Day trip to Lake Malawi for some fried Chambo, a cold green and some great company.

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100 dollars raised in 24 hrs (THANK YOU!) and 100 matched! All proceeds are for Adziwa Orphanage!

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ADZIWA Orphanage, Cauma, Lilongwe Today I had the pleasure of visiting an orphanage supported in part by our bank. During the headline news floods that tormented Malawi in January, Adziwa lost several buildings. The tin roofs on almost half if their 23 structures were blown away or simply destroyed. Adziwa houses over 500 children from birth through age 18. They need in kind food donations ASAP. I will be publishing the Adziwa story in a podcast this weekend, so stay tuned! I urge you to support us, every penny counts! If you are feeling giving right now, please donate using the paypal link in the top left corner. I will be matching the first 150 USD donated and managing disbursement jointly with Adziwa and our bank project managers.

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Check out my first podcast! Many of you may be wondering what EXACTLY I’m doing in Malawi and what EXACTLY my organization does. So listen up and stay tuned for more short-podcasts from the warm heart of Africa

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Typical Malawian meal for lunch with Dollas at the office today. Two perfectly salted flash fried Chambo (tilapia), Ncima (corn-starch meal base), pumpkin greens stewed with ground nuts and tomatoes and tomato soup. All for under 4 USD. She had to teach me how to appropriately and single-handedly mush the ncima with the sides and fish without making too much of a mess. Several visitors walked in while we ate to see the newbie fumble her way through the meal and have a good laugh. I held my own and brought my spicy coconut chicken curry for the staff to try. Spicy foods are uncommon in Malawi and folks don't seem to enjoy it too much. On the other hand, the Ghanians on staff thought the curry was weak. Perhaps western African cuisine and I gel a bit better- but for the Chambo alone I'm in it for the long haul in Malawi. If you know me, you will know this is my paradise. This chambo takes me back to childhood in Bangkok and Jakarta, eating sticky rice balls filled with salted fish. There are some flavors that bring you home, I've found one in Malawi that will keep me there.

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Its always darkest before the dawn.

Its a cliché, but what are we as a global society without universally translatable truths?

Work (more broadly, life) here can be hard because applying the western interpretation of productivity and standards to Africa is akin to adopting a child. Good intentions, love, resources etc. does not a healthy and well-adapted child make. The world here is not meant to have our western reality cut and pasted in. The internet was out in the office until 10:30 today. Bandwidth hasn’t been good enough to connect to skype and have conference calls since last week. The power went off over 20 times, the generator kicking in minutes after. My laptop broke and there are no vendors here who can fix the hardware. Western clothes ware faster here because they dry under a beating sun and they are scrubbed and scrubbed by calloused hands. We come with arms and hearts full, suitcases packed ill prepared and naive. We apply hard earned western dogma and stress paradigms to a world too tough and rough to give a damn. And so you slowly stop using format painter and you start to listen, to adapt. Its surprising how quickly humans can evolve when confronted with the relentless pain of continuously running into the same wall day after day after day.

Some days changing the way you look at the world, is actually changing the world.

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THE road to Blantyre, Malawi | Jan 2015 

They say within a couple of weeks your brain adjusts to English side of the road driving. Its a lie, unless you are the one driving. As a passenger, with every turn, you can’t help but assume crash position, even a month later.

Roads in Malawi are shared with cars, bicycles and walkers (not the A&E kind). But really, there are more pedestrians on the streets here than bikes and cars combined. There are also no street lights or proper sidewalks. The barely-2-car-wide roads are THE premiere shared infrastructural resource. Because of the rains streets are crumbling, pot holes big enough to raise tilapia in, sunken bridges. In the developed world roads are tattoos, unmovable. The grid- recognize NYC by the unmarked etch of the subway lines. How can roads be such defining features in one world and barely an imprint on the geography of the land in another? In Malawi roads are tan lines. Infrastructure completely usurped by the elements. And yet, they are the veins, floating bodies, foreign and otherwise, across a mind blowing landscape. On the Malawian roads you see Africa. The haves and the have nots. The clothed and the barefoot. The runners and the fried chambo (tilapia) sellers. The confluence of society.

Nathan and I investigated driving from here to Victoria Falls in Zimbabue. The trip is essentially 15 hours of Zambia. Oddly enough, when you leave Lilongwe, the route makes one, single turn.

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(From 1 week ago) LILONGWE, Malawi | Jan 2015. This is my 1 bedroom home in Lilongwe, its part of a compound with other houses, apartments a restaurant and pool. Its beautiful, but its also where I’ve been ‘quarantined’ for the last 9 days.

Three days after arriving in Malawi I became ill (I arrived Jan 12th) Today, although still on antibiotics, I finally feel recovered. For the last 9 days, I’ve interacted with a grand total of four people, I’ve had functioning internet about 25% of the time, my cell phone stopped working, I spoke enough words to add up to about 10 minutes- more was impossible because of the pain- the least I’ve uttered since I first started speaking a quarter century ago. This is the most sick I’ve ever been, and the most continuous pain I’d ever felt. I also knew I would never survive the 30 hour door-to-door trip home.

So I made house 4 my hermit retreat of seclusion, ramen, yogurt, ice chips and solitude thousands of miles from anything that felt like home. I was the only person who could take care of myself, and I was barely able to consume enough calories to get from bed to bathroom to couch to kitchen and back. And although I still rank the comforts of this experience as the top 1%, I will say this- for those of us who have the luxury to simply rest, to proverbially “sleep it off,” thats privilege.

Wealth, options, access, AGENCY in times of sickness are the best ways to prevent chronic or lifelong illness. For two weeks I only had to manage myself and I will humbly admit it was among one of the most difficult experiences of my life. But when I started to feel helpless I imagined a whole family sharing my house, and a field of crops out back that needed tending, and all the floods and rain tormenting the region, and heat, humidity and the loss of a job and….

Well, it could ALWAYS be worse! But never let that relatively uncomforting truth make the comparison any less cathartic, that’s the lesson of House 4