Baking in Blantyre

birthday dinner for Ellen!

Last night, my housemates and I (Ok, we actually live in 2 houses, but they’re behind the same wall!) celebrated my roommate Ellen’s birthday at Casa Mia, a delectable little Italian restaurant just a short walk up Kabula Hill from our house. It was Ellen’s first birthday in Africa, and between the streamers Julie and Christina put up while we were at clinic, the homemade celebratory kettle corn, and a birthday dinner, I think it was a memorable one!

Today was my day off which meant I could sleep past 5, hooray! After breakfast and getting caught up on research prep for a couple hours, I was off to Shoprite (the main grocery in Blantyre). I really love grocery shopping, especially in different countries. It’s fun to see what’s popular and what isn’t sold at all. For example, there’s no greek yogurt here, or lunchmeat that doesn’t look like pink bologna. And I bought what I thought was cream cheese but it’s actually some sort blended cottage cheese. I’m hoping its bizarre flavor will grow on me (What does one do with blended cottage cheese?!).

There is however, almost everything you need to bake oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which was the reason I went to Shoprite in the first place! Anyone who knows me well knows that baking is one of my love languages. I get so much joy from baking for people, so I decided to try my luck at baking in Blantyre.

And although this isn’t exactly a food blog, these cookies were my first Malawi baking attempt (and a success, according to my roommates!), so I want to share the recipe with you! I only had a 1 cup, a ¼ cup and a ¼ teaspoon to measure everything with, so I ended up winging the measurements a bit. I also modified it a bit from the original recipe; my changes are in parentheses!

first baking in Blantyre, a success!

Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip, and Pecan Cookies

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups flour 

1 cup regular oats

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup granulated sugar (only used ½ c)

1/2 cup brown sugar (brown sugar here is basically white sugar that hasn’t been bleached, but it was fine)

1/3 cup butter, softened (I used ¼c  butter and then a couple Ts of mashed ripe banana since we had one that needed to be used)

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract (I used closer to 2t)

1 large egg

1/4 cup chopped pecans, toasted (No pecans here, but I chopped up roasted unsalted almonds which worked great!)

1/4 cup semisweet chocolate minichips (No chocolate chips here, so I chopped up a dark chocolate bar and threw it in)

(I also added about 1t of cinnamon. Cinnamon, in my opinion, brings out the best in anything you bake!)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 4 ingredients (through salt), stirring with a whisk; set aside.

Place sugars and butter in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended. Add vanilla and egg; beat until blended. Gradually add flour mixture, beating at low speed just until combined. Stir in pecans and minichips. Drop dough by tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350° for 12 minutes or until edges of cookies are lightly browned. Cool on pans 2 minutes. Remove cookies from pans; cool on wire racks, and enjoy!! Yield, 3 dozen cookies (mine made 30 cookies).

Two other nuggets:

monkeys running through the golf course

This afternoon I went for a run down to a golf course (my roommate suggested it as a pretty place to run - she was right!), and despite the hills and my slight fear of being hit by a stray golf ball, it was great! Best part was the monkeys running through the course as well!

home sweet home!

This is my room on Kabula Hill! With many of your smiling faces featured on my wall of photos. I can see mountains out the window - it's gorgeous!

Clinic and cows

Mark, Christina, Julie, and Ellen braiing at Kabula!

After a lovely weekend that ended with a fun braii with the PPB crew (I didn’t remember that it was Memorial Day weekend, but I guess we could say we were celebrating!), I headed to my second clinic today. I went with Ellen, our 2 nurses, and our stellar driver Horris out to Nkhati, one of our smaller clinics, tucked away at the Nkhati Health Post off the main (dirt) road that makes up the hub for market stall and shops in this rural, rice-and-bean-farming part of the country. The nurses thought that some mothers wouldn’t bring their kids today because it’s harvest/planting season and they are all very busy in the fields, but we were able to see all the returning kids and even enroll a number of new kids this morning! One Granny even brought her grandchild to clinic since the child’s mother was harvesting. I was impressed.

After getting the MUAC (middle-upper arm circumference, it’s a measure for child malnutrition) for the kids as they came in, I helped with a few squirmers at the baby scale. One rather chubby kid kept climbing off the scale and crying, but I managed to calm her down :) Thankfully I managed to not be manning the scale when one tiny baby laid down and just peed everywhere.

The last mother at clinic finishes feeding her child Chiponde before heading home

Once all the kids were seen, we packed up and headed back towards Blantyre. Not only did we get to drive through a river (Oregon Trail throwback!), we also got stuck in rural traffic – a herd of cattle that clearly had the right of way. Definitely makes the ride home worth staying awake for!

Gridlock on the way home from work...

This afternoon, after a nap (moquitoes buzzing incessantly inside my mosquito net and trains lurching through the city late last night meant a nap was definitely in order today), a run, and some data entry (my 5-minute attention span could use some serious endurance training for data entry. Each measurement has to be recorded in a database – for every single visit the child made to the clinic – and then double-entered into another database), I had the exciting task of helping pack stool and urine samples from a past study. The glamours of public health work!

Here are a couple pictures from the football match on Saturday!

Malawi v Zimbabwe!

Chrtistina, Julie, Alex, Emron, and Mark at the match!

OH! One other thing. I’d like to teach our gardener/housekeeper here how to compost so that we don’t throw all of our food waste into the burning trash heap….anyone have pointers on how to do it? I remember that citrus shouldn’t go in and eggs shells can…but any other advice/creative ideas for how to get it started would be great!

Hello from Kabula Hill!

After a delightful first two days on Kabula Hill, I decided it was high time I posted about life here in Blantyre! I realized I could have just piggy-backed off my last blog and called this ‘Highlights from Kabula Hill,’ but alas, the title, which is named for the peanut-based ready-to-use food we distribute at feeding clinics (Chiponde), will have to stay.

Although I will hopefully begin my studies soon, I will also get to spend a good part of my time here working in the PPB feeding clinics, which I am beyond thrilled about. Yesterday was my first day at clinic, and I went to Namasalima, a smaller clinic about an hour and a half from Blantyre. We were met by many smiling moms with little smiling toddlers tied tightly on their backs with chitenges. Admittedly, the kids all stopped smiling and started screaming when a mzungu like myself tried to measure their MUAC and height, but they were precious nonetheless. Everything I’d heard about it being hard to measure a 3-year-old’s height horizontally on a height board? Absolutely true. But it was so wonderful to see kids who were healthy, especially those who had been cases of severe acute malnutrition and were completely recovered!

We distribute packets of Chiponde, and return to each of the clinics every two weeks to check the progress of the enrolled children and enroll new kids. The commute to and from the clinic was beautiful – we passed Mt. Mulanje, and there were tea fields in every direction as far as the eye could see – it was gorgeous!

sunrise over the outskirts of Blantyre!

In the afternoon (since our day starts at 5am, it also finishes relatively early!) I had a chance to run around our neighborhood a bit, and whew is it hilly. Think downtown Seattle without tarmac. Or sidewalks. It’s been perfect weather though, so I hope that over time I’ll adjust to the hills (Williamsburg did not prepare me for this…) and get to explore more of the city.

The team I’m living with is a really fun group- including the guys who are building the new chiponde factory (we went out to the site today and got to water some bricks in one of the walls, so I feel like I’ve made a worthy contribution to the building!), another PPB volunteer (who also served as my unofficial clinic teacher on Friday!), and two girls who are here to work in clinics and run everything up at Kabula Hill. It’s a really fun bunch, and they have all been incredibly helpful and patient with all my questions!

In addition to living with a great team, getting to eat great food both at home and out (best Indian – almost as good as Mahak’s!), learning SO much about PPB, and going to clinic, today we got to go to a Malawi v Zimbabwe football match! It was SO much fun. Despite half the stadium seats being condemned from being structurally hazardous (it was no Ndola stadium…), the seats that were open were perfect, and the boys ran into all sorts of people they knew from the factory. It ended in a draw, but was a fun match.

So far I’ve already crossed 2 items off my bucket list, but as I think of more Malawi adventures, I’ll add them to the list! If you have suggestions, let me know! More pictures to come when I have a stronger internet connection!

Blantyre Bucket List 2013

Go to a Malawi Flames football match

Watch a sunrise (turns out I’ll get to do this every day on the way to clinic!)

Lake Malawi trip

Go to a Malawian church

Climb Mt Mulanje

Back to Malawi...for the first time

Sitting in the Joburg airport Mugg & Bean café, I am jittery with excitement about being back in Africa. It’s either that or the jetlag-and-cappuccino combo I’m working with right now. I am, in the words of my mother, an "African-hearted girl", and I'm thrilled to be back!

This time, instead of returning home to Lusaka, I’m on my own, heading to Blantyre, Malawi for 9 weeks to work on child nutrition research studies – specifically on maternal social support and infant feeding, and a new ready-to-use-therapeutic food used to treat child malnutrition. I’ll be living and working with the folks at Project Peanut Butter.

Traveling to Malawi has a special place in my heart, and here’s hoping the rest of my travel to Blantyre is less eventful than the last time I tried to go to Malawi in ’09. Forever in the books as the greatest Craig family vacation adventure (followed closely by Zanzibar ’10 and Ascension Island ’13…), our trip to Malawi was something no seasoned traveler could have anticipated. Our extensive packing and preventive checkup on our Prado left us assured that it would be an uneventful drive, but a jack-knifed truck blocking the road, some guys’ homemade toll collection to let cars around it (which, as I recall, my dad avoided by acting like he only spoke Spanish), and then finally our car deciding not to start after a pit-stop in the bush suggested otherwise. 

The great part about being stranded in the bush with no cell service in 92 degree October sun is that it’s not raining. The downside is that there is no cell service and it’s 92 degrees out. Long story short, after a full day on the side of the road, we rode in the back of a flatbed truck to a little tiny town called Nyimba with our Prado in tow, stayed in one room of an equally tiny guesthouse without running water, and made our way back home the next day, taking the last 5 seats on a bus to Lusaka. 

I learned two things on that trip. First, I have the best family. How many families do you know that would have a total blast being lost in the bush in October and still love each other after a night in a boiling hot room all crammed into 2 small beds? Love them. Second, I learned that despite the most meticulous planning and preparation, things just don’t always go according to plan. Thank goodness we have a God who’s bigger than all that who's ultimately in control. I hope I can remember that this summer through all the challenges and adventures this trip will bring!

More to come soon!