Month 2: the adventures continue

Namandanje Village

The bluest sky overhead. The reddest dirt billowing up over the road. The greenest bushes and brownest grasses I’d ever seen, flanking the road on both sides.

Namandanje

Walking around the village of Namandanje, I couldn’t imagine a more glorious display of God’s creation. The stillness of a place that’s yet untouched by the messiness and busyness of Western living. Just families, farms, and a small village center. 

This was the backdrop of our overnight clinic this past week.

Nurse Jean, Nurse Eleanor, and Vegas - O/N clinic dream team!

We left early Wednesday morning to serve our most remote clinics – Chamba (which, fun fact, means marijuana in Chichewa. Not to be confused with Chambo which means fish or Chombe which means tea.), Chikweo, and Chipolonga. 

A good book (The Pilgrim's Progress), good conversation, and good food made an electricity-less evening pass quickly. It was a refreshing trip!

Chipolonga clinic 

Other highlights of the week included preparing for the PUFA study acceptability trial (essentially me finding out if children will like the taste of a new recipe of Chiponde as much as the current Chiponde. The trial starts tomorrow, and my goal is to complete the 160 kid trial in three weeks! Let the fun begin!), going to see the Black Missionaries perform a live concert with my housemates (they are the most popular band in Malawi -and pretty good! - so the concert was packed. Survived my first encounter with crowd control tear gas, and got to dance along to some of Malawi's best reggae, all in one night.), and driving out to Zomba to hike on the Zomba Plateau. The road to Zomba is under construction, yet amazingly we managed to follow all the dirt detours and arrive without a map. We enjoyed lunch at the top once we’d finished our hike – definitely a fun day trip for anyone living in Blantyre. 

taking in the views on Zomba Plateau

Zomba Plateau hike with Lauren

One last thing: This past week I had to miss special days for two of the people I love the most (and who've joined me on many an African adventure!) - my dad and my baby sis. Happy Father’s Day and happy birthday Kels! I love you both and can’t wait to celebrate with you in July.

mandatory Daddy-Christy safari selfie in Botswana

Zambian new years with Kels. Can't believe you're 19!

Chikwawa Pass

Friday morning we got off to an early start to drive to clinic (surprise!), and yet somehow I was still wide awake an hour down the road when we found ourselves stuck behind two giant sugar transporter trucks on the narrow mountain pass (one broke down going down, and the other got stuck trying to get uphill around it). With a pretty steep drop-off on one side, and a narrow, deep ditch on the other side, I thought we might be there all day. So naturally we all got out and Lydia and I embraced the photo op and begin snapping away while the nurses and our driver Vegas talked with other onlookers.

The view from Chikwawa Pass!

Surveying the scene 

The view from Chikwawa Pass truly is one of the most magnificent, grand views in Malawi, so it was a perfect place to get stuck! A crowd gathered, and Vegas decided that he would attempt the impossible – driving sideways in the ditch to get around the trucks. After a minibus got through, we knew Yellow Cruiser could too. Vegas got through without a hitch, and we were on our way. Fun little adventure for 6:45 in the morning.

Lydia and I enjoy the breathtaking view

Clinic went well, and then Friday later afternoon, I headed to the POST OFFICE (the sign is in all caps covering the whole front of the building, super helpful for finding it) and sent four postcards! Mail is one of my favorite things, so if you send me your address, a postcard will be heading your way soon!

I also love getting mail, and my address here is:

Christy C----

Project Peanut Butter

PO Box 32664

Chichiri

Blantyre 3, Malawi

Other highlights this week included the Malawi v Kenya football match (Julie and I were able to make it out to the second half of the match after a long day of clinic and despite a pathetic final score [2-2] it was a lively game), getting to cook one of my all time favorites – Sherri’s Greek Pasta – for my housemates, prepping for the PUFA study which will be launched in the next 2 weeks, and welcoming two new PPB volunteers.

This song sums up how I feel about the first half of my time here quite nicely….and it also plays on the radio here nonstop!

Keep on keeping on!

The road to Chikwawa district clinics - I call it the Shenandoah of Malawi

Today I saw two exceptionally random bumper stickers; here they are for you:

1.      "Every problem has an expiry date."

2.     "Delay is not denial."

Not really sure how they tie in to anything else here, expect maybe to say that although I’ve been very much 'delayed' in posting on here I’m not in denial of it. Ha, who knows.

 

touring the PPB factory

mix that Chiponde!

I ended up with a foreign travel stomach bug for a good part of last week, but I still managed to pack a lot into the time I had! Last Monday, we all suited up in PPB lab coats for a tour of the Chiponde factory. The factory manager told us about a currently vacant position, and I told them that really, if I didn’t have to go back to school in the fall to graduate, I would have applied in an instant. How fun would it be to work in a peanut butter scented factory?!

Later last week, we went to the Malawi v Namibia World Cup Qualifying match. It was a GREAT game, very well played by the Malawi Flames, even in if ended with a 0-0 draw. We play again on Wednesday, and if we beat Kenya, we’ll be in the running for World Cup 2014. There are way more people selling things at football matches here than anywhere else I’ve ever been….during the game people walked past us selling Coke, lollipops, samoosas, cellphone minutes, hardboiled eggs, mandazis, cold-ish milk (and people actually buy it!), straw hats, maheu, necklaces, apples, hand-knitted visors, pretty much everything I could possibly need at a Malawian football match. It’s great.

The football stadium! 

so much smoke!

On Saturday I escaped our house for a few hours because the neighbors were burning so much trash the smoke alarms in OUR house were going off. There isn’t trash pick-up here, so it’s a necessary evil, but it was just an unfortunate placement of their trash heap. Although it was somewhat comical, it had been going on since Friday, so I was ready for a respit. I ended up at our favorite spot to get tea and internet and met a fantastic group of British med students - it was fun to hear about their work here and discuss the many challenges of improving health systems...as well as talk about England. Because let's be real, I'm about as crazy about England as I am about Africa, and all the Brits I've met in Africa have become fast friends :)

The gorgeous view from our favorite cafe

As far as my research goes, my proposal unfortunately has to wait on ethical approval here for another month. In the meantime, I’ll keep on keeping on - enjoying my daily work in the clinics, helping with other PPB studies, and my many other African adventures! 

...Like seeing a baby monkey run across my street when I was walking home from church yesterday! 

Sunday Best

The road to Namitambo clinic - so
blessed to be working in this beautiful place! 

My church back in Virginia is like a second family to me, and I absolutely love getting to be a part of the worship team there. And although I doubt there is any church in Malawi that's quite like Relevant, I really wanted to attend a local church while I was here.

This morning, I put on my Sunday best to visit St. Paul's Church, which is part of the Anglican Church of Malawi and is located just up the road from us. I debated whether or not to try to arrive for the service at the time advertised on the church wall. I've shown up to enough church services and events in Zambia on time to know that the advertised start time is usually more of a very rough estimate. But alas, I showed up on time, and much to my surprise, the preacher was already walking in. I quickly grabbed a song book and Eucharist, and took a seat in the beautiful cathedral. 

A few things that made it great:
1. It started at 7:30am and was packed! (and I still got to sleep in 2 hours later than I do during the week!)
2. It was an Anglican church, so it was a total England throwback (minus the fact that the Eucharist was half English/half Chichewa which added a slight element of confusion).
3. I got to be that visitor who stands up and says who I am and gets clapped for.
4. We sang songs we used to sing at International Baptist in Zambia!

5. The only other mzungu there sat next to me and kindly pointed me to all the right pages and prayers throughout the service - it was so nice of her! And it turns out she is a trustee for the organization I'm working for here. Small world.

Sweaty but still smiling after my first solo clinic
at Ndakwera!

On Friday I was in charge of a feeding clinic on my own for the first time! It was both exciting and challenging, but all the kids were seen! We even drove to a nearby village afterward to find one kid who hadn't shown up - and not only did we find her, but she graduated from the program! Yay!

Also, yesterday (June 1) was World Milk Day; who knew?! Lots of milk-drinking and singing around Blantyre in celebration, and we even saw a couple hundred people gathered wearing Milk Day chitenjes!

We're enjoying a restful afternoon in the sunshine and breeze (current temp: 82!), walking to get internet and buy bread, and hanging out at Kabula - before getting back to the clinics tomorrow!