pandastan

Well, I was out of site the entire second half of March and I'm glad to be back at site and done traveling for a while. That ought to be the longest trip I have until I leave Malawi for good. Speaking of which, I have my COS (Close of Service) date now: July 15. My intake group had our COS conference in Mid-March, where we got our dates and started our logistical preparations for leaving Peace Corps. Seventeen out of twenty of us are still here, but only seven of us will stay all the way until July. The rest are leaving this month, because they are being replaced at their sites and the intake schedule was shifted by three months. Even though I have three and a half months left though, time is squeezing on me and I will be out of here before I know it.



After COS conference, I had to stick around for a few things. First, there was the VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee) meeting. I can't remember if I discussed that on this blog or not. It's basically a handful of volunteers elected by the volunteer community at large to liaise with the office and represent volunteer interests. Anyway, this was my last meeting. I resigned from the committee and headed down to Blantyre for a recording session. Peace Corps Malawi is planning to put together a CD to celebrate Peace Corps' 50th anniversary this year. I was invited, along with a few other volunteers, to record some of the original music we've written during our time here.

I had the chance to record six of my songs. Four of them are songs I've posted links to recordings of on this blog: Consider Me, Iwe, Bwana, and This Is My Time. I changed the title of This Is My Time to “For the Girls of Camp GLOW,” so it would be clear what it was about to anyone listening to it without knowing what it was beforehand. I also recorded two songs that I haven't posted links to: Ladycop, and Mzungu. I stopped putting the songs up because the website I was using seemed to be having problems and not working properly. I was tired of dealing with it, and not really sure how much interest there was to have access to them. Anyway, I've written three songs since I stopped posting them: the above two mentioned, and another one called “Feelin' Fine.” I was going at a clip of about one per month at first, but that's just three over the last five months. My creative energies in that time have been diverted somewhat from songs and into the novel I'm writing. My goal is to finish it by the time I leave here, so I've really been cracking down on it. If I stay focused, I should finish. I'm at about 390 pages now, and estimate there are another 80 or so to go.

The recording session went okay, but I was a little disappointed with the final quality of the masters. Some sounded better than others. The guitar on Iwe sounds distant and murky, and the guitar on Consider Me and Bwana sounds too tinny and abrasive. In the case of Bwana, it's almost unlistenable on the wrong speakers. Consider Me is mostly okay, but also, on the wrong speakers, the way the guitar was mastered actually hurts your ears. But, whatever. I've done what I can. I heard a rumor someone in Peace Corps is going to try and remaster some of these things. I don't know how many of those songs they'll want to put on the CD – maybe none of them when it comes down to it. Either way, I feel happy that a number of people here in Peace Corps have liked the songs of mine they've heard, and liked them enough to want them recorded.

All this traveling though: I won't miss much about traveling in Malawi. It's great when you can catch a hitch. But I'm not a superstar when it comes to hitching. I must somehow not look like the kind of person people want to give a ride to. Sure, it turns out that most of the people who do look that way are women, but there are a handful of men in Peace Corps that seem to have hitch-hiking magic. Not I. On the way to Blantyre, I attempted to flag down hundreds of cars for an hour and a half until we gave up and went to catch a bus. Of course, there weren't any seats left on the bus, so it looked like I was in for five hours of standing, crammed in with other standing people a la a crowded subway. But instead, I staked out a seat on this plastic precipice dividing the stairwell of the bus from the cockpit. There was a plastic divider between the driver and the rest of the bus, so I hunkered up against the divider with half my body and then lay down on the shelf, because I was tired. There was enough room for me not to fall off when the bus rode straight or took a right-hand turn. For left-hand turns, I held on to a metal bar alongside the plastic divider to keep from falling off. The neat part was that my head was right up against the front windshield, so I had a view I'd never had before: the landscape rolled by unobstructed, but it was either upside-down or sideways, depending on how I had my head turned. It seemed very magical to see it from that vantage point, almost the way I imagined the world would look to someone who could suddenly see for the first time.

I will miss chances like the one I just described, but those aren't the norm when you get on the bus. On the other buses I flagged down, I was looking at standing room only again, but these buses being classier outfits than the previous one—they refused to let me lay down or even sit on the plastic precipice. So I had many hours of unhappy travel. The SIM card on my phone got fried while I was in Blantyre, so I had to make another detour to Lilongwe to get a new SIM card without having to get a new phone number. Then I went up to Nkhotakota to visit a good friend of mine on the way back north. I only meant to spend one full day there, but I ended up feeling so comfortable there that I stayed the whole week. Sometimes you just need to spend some time with a good friend and leave the rest behind for awhile.

I'm back at site now, so it's the home stretch. I just need to wrap up the loose ends of my projects, finish my book, and get my ducks in a row, and I'll be out of here. I'm planning with some friends to spend a few weeks as a tourist on my way back. We are planning on stopping off at India, Thailand and China. It doesn't cost me any extra money on the flights, so it's just a question of food, lodging, and entry visas. (India doesn't have an embassy in Malawi, so I am still not sure how to go about getting the entry visas for that trip – we'll see). However it goes, I should be back in the US in mid August, and I plan to spend a few days in Portland, so I would like to meet up with you if you are someone who knows me, lives in Portland and would like to hang out a spell when I'm back. After that, I will head off to visit my Dad for a bit. Then – who knows? If anyone reading this would like to offer me a job, let me know! If I don't get anything lined up by September, I am thinking I will move to DC and try the job market there. It seems like my best bet. But I'm open to suggestions from anyone who has a better idea.