going public

Life here is very public. In the ex-pat community everyone knows everyone else and we all know what you did last week and who came to dinner. But all of life here is very public, an accident is a source of entertainment, life happens out on the streets, women breastfeed on the footpath, people urinate by the side of the road a mzungu at the market is a matter for loud discussion.

 

Even church here is more communal and public than we are used to. Giving testimony partway through the service is encouraged, speaking in tongues is normal and the sermon is often sidelined so that we can pray for one another. We’re still getting used to this and I know the doc misses a good bible exposition.

netball

Netball would be my sport of choice, it’s one of the few sports where I look the part – tall! I have played a couple of times with other mzungus but I was hoping to play with a Malawian team as it is a national passion and the national team are 4^th in the world. I have at last found someone who plays and she invited me along to training. The first meeting training had been cancelled but no-one had told her, the next was great and I managed not to embarrass myself, producing some good passes and reasonable defence. It was very strange playing a familiar game in the twilight, surrounded by black players who were all shouting in a foreign language (my Chichewa is going to have to improve!). I was invited to play in a match on Saturday, we had a full team but our opponents had been tempted away to watch the World Cup, however after about an hour enough plays were coerced into playing and we had a match. It was great to be playing netball at last and I enjoyed the exercise but it’s frustrating not to be part of the discussions about footwork or fouls! I can tell roughly what is being discussed from the gestures but am unable to join in the loud negotiations!

busy days

I wrote this blog in my head yesterday, about everyday life and then we had one of those nights – intruders, random phone calls and unsettled kids – aegghh! Followed by an early morning text to say a friend’s child is ill so my complicated arrangements for collecting children from nursery have all fallen apart – argghh!

 

Anyway for those of you who are still interested, a busy day looks a bit like this: early morning squash lesson, ladies bible study group (with cake), lunch at home, quick trip to local market to buy an extra bed (it fitted nicely on the roof of the car and was half the price of a bed in Blantyre market), baby group at a friend’s house (more cake), tea for the kids, Chichewa lesson, out to dinner with the doc’s supervisors (1 over from the UK) bed late! The rest of the week looks a bit the same: squeezing exercise into the start or end of the day when the doc is about; trying to do errands and managing staff and then having  people for dinner or out to dinner and some activities for the kids in between. Doesn’t really sound much different to life at home.

Reflections

I have been looking back through my blog. It's interesting to see what I was writing about 1 year ago as we got ready to move. I am certainly more relaxed than I was then, my time is filled with different things and my worries are much the same. We miss friends and family, I worry about the children's health and I am constantly filling in forms and paying bills and checking that we have enough cash as well as moving money from the UK. So many of my perceptions about life here were wrong. I still know that this is the right place for us to be and my role is to support the doc in his work and look after our kids but it's hard knowing that there is no easy solution for the problems here.

paziquantil jelly

I spent Saturday making lurid coloured jelly in order to get the drug paziquantil down the kids. One of the downsides of spending time at the lake is that if you swim in the lake or indeed shower in the water near the lake you are at risk of bilharzia from a parasite called shistosomes that lives in snails. In order to prevent this most people take the appropriate drugs every 6 months as getting tested is quite difficult here. The problem is that the drugs are enormous, they are like horse pills and for someone like myself (medium weight) the dose is 4 tablets. The kids have to have about 1 tablet each. The best way is to have the dose in 2 halves 4 hours apart. Anyway there were lots of suggestions from friends about how to get the kids to take the drugs, crushing them is not a good idea as they taste bitter. One friend suggested making jelly which kids usually swallow and mixing the drugs in, however when I made the jelly the drugs dissolved and made the jelly taste foul. So the doc offered the kids the tablet broken up on a spoon with syrup followed by a swig of orange Fanta – no problem!! We have been battling for months to get our youngest to take pills, by mixing them up in food and after all that she just took it swallowed it and had some Fanta.