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One More Post

Thu, 17 May 2012 05:46:57 GMT

Well, it's a year later, and I don't know who's still stumbling across this thing. For anyone out there who happens to do so, this post is for you.

I discontinued this blog because I didn't really like giving updates of my personal life. It was a way to keep friends posted on the events of my life while I was hard to get ahold of, but that stopped being necessary.

The purpose of this post is to direct readers to my new web presence: www.pandastan.com. In addition to the home page, which is focused on my novel, Pandastan, this new website has pages devoted to all my creative projects: songs, videos, paintings, drawings, essays and more. I didn't want to continue interacting with the internet in a blog format, and this blog is really all about my Peace Corps experience anyway. I wanted to leave it like that and invite people to explore the website I created if they have a mind to.

That's all. I intend to keep adding material to the new website as it's created, so if you have a soft spot in your heart for the things I say and create, add the link to your bookmarks and check in on it from time to time. Thanks everyone! Ta-Ta.

Final Blog Entry

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:02:58 GMT

Hello all, as the title of the entry indicates, this will be my last. I don't really like keeping a blog, and this whole thing was conceived mainly as a way to keep people I know in America informed about my life, since communication is so difficult while I'm here. My COS date has been moved one day to July14, after which I'm going to spend a month traveling with some friends on my way back to the US. We'll hit up Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to get our Indian visas, proceed to Delhi from there, take in a few of the sites for a week and a half, then fly to Bangkok, figure out something to do there for another week and a half, then continue on to Portland. (We axed China from the itinerary to cut down on costs).

So, Portland people: I will be flying in to town on August 16! I plan to stay there for a week or two, so I would love to meet up with you all at that time. From there I'll be staying a few weeks with with my Dad in northeast Washington, and then a few weeks with some friends in Couer d'Alene, Idaho. I've got a wedding to go to in Montana in October, and would like to visit some friends in Moscow and Helena. By October or November at the latest I will hopefully have developed my plans for the future a little bit. I am leaning towards setting up shop in Portland again, and then... ? We'll see.

In other news, I found a much better website for posting content online, so I decided to go ahead and repost my songs on it. I put up 16 of them all together. Those are all the original songs I wrote while in Peace Corps, which I think is a pretty good haul. That's five additional ones from the 11 I originally posted links to on this blog. I mentioned three of those in my last entry: “Ladycop,” “Mzungu,” and “I'm Feelin' Fine.” In April I wrote two more: “The Wheels of The World,” and “We Should Bump.” Here's the link if you're interested in taking a listen: http://www.mediafire.com/?sxakt7hje8rlk

I also have a new set of photos up: https://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/ChitimbaMemories I have had requests before for some more pictures of the village where I live, so these are some photos of the area, and some of my friends who live here. I've resisted taking many photos until now because it makes me stand out as an outsider, but since I'm about to leave, the time was finally right. There are some shots of the lake, the surrounding landscape, the roadblock, Elijah's restaurant and the lodge nearby. That pretty much wraps things up as far as pictures go.

By the way, the guardian shelter is finally complete. (There's a picture of that too.) I closed out the grant on my past trip to Lilongwe, and that was the end of it. The handing over ceremony will be an Saturday. I have also taught my last day of class, so all my projects here are done.

What to do until July 14? Well, I just finished hosting a sort of going away party at my house for Peace Corps friends. My site mate and I decided to go with a Billy Joel theme this time. There were some excellent Billy Joel themed costumes and some inspired sing-alongs. All in all the party was a rousing success. I chose the song . My contribution to the theme was to learn to play “Movin' Out, (Anthony's Song)” on guitar since I will be moving out soon. I replaced the lyrics to reflect my own departure from Peace Corps. The resulting song is called “Movin' Out (Lemondi's Song).” In Malawi, “R”s are more often than not pronounced as “L”s. The people here believe those letters are interchangeable. They also like to put “ee” sounds on the ends of words. Hence, Raymond becomes Lemondi, which is what people usually call me here. Anyway, if you want to hear that song, I posted it too: Movin Out - http://www.mediafire.com/?ez40881y598e5at

Aside from the party, I'll be spending all my time editing my book, Pandastan. I finished writing it a month ago. It finally clocked in at 492 pages. That was a little bit longer than what I was shooting for, but it's a big story, and when I tried to rush the story along to cut down on the length, I would end up rereading what I'd written later, and it came across as (surprise, surprise!) rushed.

Unfortunately, I hit a snag. I had set the margins of my pages along the lines of a few other books I had lying around to come up with a rough idea of how many pages long the book was. But apparently, the books I had lying around were printed on smaller type than is typical. My pages had around 360 words per-page, but after a little internet research, I found that apparently the industry standard is closer to 250. What this means is that instead of 492 pages, Pandastan clocks in at a whopping 715. I did some more research, and found that most publishers are reluctant to produce anything with more than 120,000 words if it comes from a previously unpublished writer. Pandastan contains 179,000 words, so to make a long story short (ha ha) the story was too long for one volume.

By a stroke of good fortune, there was a very clear distinction between the first and second halves of Pandastan. This applies to a lot of things in the book, including the themes, the amount of time that passes, and the characters' concerns and activities. There's also a convenient mini-climax at the end of the first half. Also, lengthwise, the first and second halves really are about identical (89,000-90,000) words apiece. So in order to improve my chances of getting this thing published, I spent the last month converting the it into a two part book: Pandastan, Part One, The War on Pandas, and Part Two, Lewna and the Pandahead. That process is complete now, so all that is left to do is continue with the editing process to try and polish it off and trim off the fat where possible.

On the bright side, if I somehow beat the odds and get that incredible dog published, I'll already have a fully written sequel ready to go if the response to the first one was positive. I enjoy what I've written, but as to whether anyone else in the world will like the book besides me… I have no idea. Well, if nothing comes of it, or something comes of it, I've given it my best.

Aside from all the great life experiences I've been able to have as a Peace Corps volunteer, (including things I've learned about Malawi, Malawians, myself, etc) I'm really grateful that I've been able to spend the last two years in an environment where my creativity could flourish enough to learn to play guitar, write a bunch of my own songs, and write these books. It's been a great gift in my life. I know how few people ever get the chance to break out of the dreary workaday world, even for a just a few years like I have, so like I said, I'm very grateful. I'm grateful to Malawi, and grateful to Peace Corps, and grateful to the people who helped this become a reality for me. So thank you, world! And thanks to everyone who was there for me.

I hope you enjoyed my blog.

So long!

March Madness

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:05:42 GMT

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.

New Year

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:03:05 GMT

It's been a while since I've updated this thing. I guess the longer I'm here, the harder it is for me to focus in on things that someone reading this blog might be interested or surprised to learn about life in Malawi. I've also been having internet troubles the last two months. I guess if there's still anything specific people are curious about they can ask me personally and that will probably lead to me remembering a lot of pertinent things. But as far as me making these updates, life in Malawi seems mostly regular and expected to me now, so most of my blog updates are bound to be about basic news and anything out of the ordinary I've done.

One thing I've done recently was take a trip to Ruarwe. This is a village on a stretch of Lake Malawi without roads. For about 100 km or so, the mountains are too steep and too close to the lakeshore to build roads there without large expense. There is only one road that reaches this area, a road from Mzuzu to a village called Usisya, but the road does not continue past Usisya. Up and down the lakeshore, there is only a footpath that connects the villages to each other. More on this road later. My village, Chitimba, is about 20 km north of where the roadless stretch begins, in a town called Mlowe. The southern tip of the stretch is at Nkhata Bay, a tourist destination and minor hub on the lake, due east of Mzuzu. Usisya is about 30 km north of that, and Ruarwe is maybe another 15 or 20 km past that.

I rendezvoused with 5 traveling companions in Nkhata Bay to begin the journey. We spent the night there in order to catch the Ilala in the morning. I mentioned the Ilala in an entry a year ago when I was considering taking it out of Nkhata Bay when I spent New Year's Eve there. I ended up not taking it that time, but I did this time. Our plan was to ride the Ilala to Ruarwe, spend a few nights there, then hike to Usisya and take the road back to Mzuzu. The Ilala is the only commercial water transport on Lake Malawi, and it only completes its circuit once a week, so we couldn't wait to take it back unless we wanted to stay in Ruarwe for quite some time.

The ride was enjoyable, especially at first, when we were on the top deck and were able to enjoy the view and fresh air. But it turned out that the top deck was first class, and they kicked us out. Our tickets were for second class on the bottom deck, which is the same as third class, but in second class you get to have access to a room with tables and booths to sit in, rather than just sit on the benches out on the deck. Apparently, you also get first access to lifesaving devices in the case of emergency if you are traveling in a higher class, which of course implies that there aren't enough for all the passengers, and which is not all that encouraging in a lot of different ways. As we left Nkhata Bay, we were approached by a wato, the name Malawians use for the dugout canoes they use to move about on the lake and go fishing. Apparently, someone had missed the Ilala who wanted to take it, so he hired a guy to row him out to it. The wato pulled up to the side of the Ilala and the man tossed his bag to someone while the wato driver furiously rowed to keep up. Then the man jumped onto the side of the Ilala and climbed up, and then crumpled up some cash in a ball and threw it down to the wato driver.

When we reached Usisya, the Ilala stopped to drop off and pick up passengers. Now Nkhata Bay is the only stop we went to that was developed enough to actually have a pier. At Usisya and Ruarwe it just stops and lowers a boat into the water which rows to shore and back. While it was stopped, most of my friends took the opportunity to jump off the roof of the Ilala, which apparently the people who operate it don't mind if you do. Then the rowboat came back with new passengers, one of which was a friend of ours who lives in Usisya, who was going to travel to Ruarwe with us and on whom we were counting on to guide us to the transport we needed when it was time to leave Usisya.

We reached Ruarwe at about 4pm. I had held off jumping at Usisya because I didn't want to be wet for the rest of the ride, but I decided to do a jump at Ruarwe along with our friend who joined us in Usisya. We got our other friends to take our luggage onto the rowboat with them, and we jumped off the roof, which is about 40 feet above the water, and probably the biggest jump I've ever made. Then we swam to shore in time to help people unload the luggage – something you have to do while standing knee-deep in the water. Our destination was a lodge a little bit north of the village. It took about a 20 minute hike on a winding path to reach it and we had finally arrived.

I can't imagine what possessed someone to build a lodge here, let alone to live and work there in such isolation. At this part of the lake, all deliveries of goods and transport have to be either by foot or boat so you have to plan several days in advance for anything you might want. The lodge was beautiful – they had piped water and some garden hoses which they used to keep the vegetation green and lush. There was a waterfall nearby and a little beach next to some rocks you can climb and jump off of. We had a great time and stayed there two nights. Unfortunately, I woke up in the middle of the night that last night with horrible sickness: diarrhea, accompanied by a lot of puking. By the morning I had lost all of the food from yesterday, and hadn't even been able to keep water down, so I was useless and dehydrated. In a few hours we were supposed to start a six hour hike to Usisya.

I made it as far as Ruarwe village and couldn't go on. Luckily, my friends were able to arrange to hire a guy to ferry me to Usisya by wato. It was a four hour canoe ride, my stuff all got soaked, my driver was apparently autistic or just different: he kept babbling and making strange noises throughout the entire journey, and I was very uncomfortable, but grateful nonetheless in light of my alternative. We got to Usisya just as evening was approaching and gathered at our friend's house. She told us there was a matola that left Usisya for Mzuzu every night at 2am. As we waited for it though, we found ourselves in the middle of a torrential rain downpour. The matola would not be running on the poor road that evening. We were stuck.

We spent the entire next day lounging around in Usisya, trying to find someone with a vehicle that was going to Mzuzu and could take us, and hoping that the rain would let up. It rained all day and we couldn't find anyone. Finally we found someone who knew someone in Mzuzu who would come pick us up for about 4 times the regular price. We were expecting him to show up around 5pm, and the rain stopped. As time went by we lost hope though, and started discussing how long we would lay on the stretch of grass we were on before giving up and going to bed. But he finally showed up at about 9pm and we loaded up.

I had heard horror stories about the road between Usisya and Mzuzu before, but I had never actually heard of anyone dying on the road, so I thought I was prepared for it. All I can say is that while it was undoubtedly far more dangerous to travel this road at night, I was thankful that I couldn't see very well. We were in the bed of a truck and started up the dirt road, climbing into the mountains. The nature of this road is that one side is a cliff face and the other side is a sheer drop off. The entire climb up the escarpment is this way and very steep. Since the road was still a little wet, there were many instances where the tires gave out and lurched to the side, threatening to spill us all over the cliff. There were other instances where the truck slowed down to a crawl, trying to make purchase on a particularly steep portion of the road. At these moments the fear was that the truck would give out, stop moving forward and roll backward down the treacherous road and kill us all that way. This constant confrontation with death lasted about two solid hours until we finally conquered the escarpment. I was lucky that my friends had some medicine to help me with my sickness and I was able to handle the ride. But I've never been so concerned that I might die, this experience knocks Mulanje out of the top spot for that honor. I won't be gong back to Ruarwe, as nice as it is there. Another hour of less death-defying driving took us to Mzuzu at about 1230am. We had survived.

In other news, the guardian shelter is finally under way. All the materials have been purchased and the structure's walls are now complete. The roof and ring-beam will be next, then the interiors. But we got the foundation and bricks ready before the rains came, and there doesn't appear to be anything else that can interfere. What I would like to do now is try and put pressure on ESCOM to hook up Thekero Youth Center with the electricity we paid them for last May. I don't know if I'll be successful, maybe I can meet the M.P. For this district and see if he has any influence or wants to use it. I predict that the rest of my service will mainly be concerned with trying to wrap up these two projects and continuing to teach Life Skills. Maybe some other small project will present itself to me, we'll see.

I spent some time visiting a friend in Nkhata Bay district with a group of people for Chirstmas, then we moved to Nkhata Bay boma for the New Year. (In Malawi, each district of the country bears the name of the chief city in the district, which is called the boma. So when I say Nkhata Bay boma, I refer to the town). Then my sitemate and I roped some people into going back up to Chitimba with us to extend the vacation fun several days longer. It was a good break. My last visitor left on Wednesday, and my sitemate is still out of town for her group's mid-service Peace Corps training, so I have Chitimba to myself, a time I'm using to regather myself and prepare for the upcoming year. Last night, I finally finished the revisions on the first half of the book I'm writing, and started on the second half. I need to get into gear on that project, with only six months left in country. My goal is to finish it by the end of that time. Other than that, I'll be spending my energy preparing for the transition back to non-Peace Corps life. It's hard to believe I'm getting close to the end of it. (In my old life, six months away never seemed close, but here, time flies by so much more quickly). So, that's where things stand. Here's to hoping 2011 turns out well!

Electricity!

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 08:26:29 GMT

I finally got hooked up on Friday; it's been a long haul. I had been gone for the weekend when people told me ESCOM had come by with a meter for me, though they couldn't finish connecting it while I was gone because of some tests they had to make. So I had to wait until Wednesday when someone came, did the tests and completed the connection. But it turned out my main switch was broken. So I had to spend all day in Rumphi on Friday rounding up the only electrician who works for the District Health Office to come replace the switch. There's a fuel crisis again in Malawi right now, so we had to wait all day before we could get our ride back to Chitimba. The poor guy had to finish installing it around 7pm with flashlights and then find a ride back to Rumphi. But it's finished now, finally! I felt bad because there are a bunch of people in town who have been waiting for a meter longer than me, including my Peace Corps site-mate, who's been waiting since January. I had been calling the ESCOM boss about once a week, asking him when the meters would come in. I thought when they finally did, he would hook everyone up in town who was waiting for a meter. But I guess he decided to give one to just me because he was so annoyed by my phone calls.

Anyway, I bought an electric fan, which has been life-changing, and now I can watch movies and television on my computer! So far, I've been plowing through How I Met Your Mother again, but next week when I get back, (I'm in Lilongwe now for Thanksgiving) I have the entire series of Twin Peaks to watch that I got from a friend who lives nearby.

Also, good news on the guardian shelter. The foundation is finished, and the bricks are about to be burned. When I come back on Tuesday, I'll bring all the building supplies and construction of the super-structure can begin!

Rocky Horror Lingerie Drive!

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:41:04 GMT

Hello! Plans are underway to host a Rocky Horror party for my birthday in 2 1/2 months. Costumes are mandatory, so we need to have plenty of fishnets, garter belts and corsetish-looking things on hand for paty-goers in need! These can be too expensive or otherwise hard to find here in Malawi. If anyone in America feels inclined to help, send any of these items or anything that looks vaguely lingerie-ish you can find at a local goodwill or thrift store and send to:

Raymond Thomson
PO Box 1
Chitimba
Rumphi District
Malawi

Packages usually take one to two months to arrive so if anyone wants to help, it would have to be within the next few weeks. Anyone who decides to send something, let me know! I guarantee your contributions will be highly appreciated. :)

More updates later . . .

New Song and No New News

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:33:38 GMT

Like the title of this page reads, there is no new news. I'm still waiting on the community to get started on the foundation of this guardian shelter project. But I did write a new song if it interests you, dear reader. It's called Try To Let It Go. I don't think I need to explain anything about it. As always, lyrics are available on my facebook posting of it. Here's the link: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/12260464/RaymondThomson-2010-TryToLetItGo.mp3.html

Trip to Tanzania

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 14:42:37 GMT

Last month, I took my first vacation outside of the country since I first came to Malawi. My Dad and a friend of his came to visit and met me in Lilongwe, then we flew to Dar Es Salaam, flying to the Selous game reserve in the morning. It was the first time I had ever been in a very small airplane, and although I was excited at first, my excitement quickly turned to dread. I felt so vulnerable and nervous in that tiny aircraft without even a co-pilot. I would just stare at the empty co-pilot's seat and the automated steering wheel, moving back and forth like it was possessed. Then, every time there was a gust of wind, the whole plane would lurch abruptly, as would my insides. I soon broke into a cold sweat. It wasn't long before we reached the game park though, but then I was in for another surprise - the landing strip wasn't a landing strip, but an open field! I had had no idea you could land planes that way. I had images of loose pieces of gravel, dirt clods, shrubs and bumps that in my mind were liable to flip the whole plane over at any given moment. I just kept telling myself that they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't work, which of course, they wouldn't. But I wasn't happy until we got off the plane and on to solid ground.

Then we had three days at the most bwana safari I could have dreamed up, which was really nice. I took two jeep safaris, two boat safaris and one walking safari. Also, the encampment was open to the animals, so elephants would wander past your door during the day, as well as giraffes, and hippos and lions would snuffle by at night. I was once again terrified on one of the jeep safaris due to the lions. There were no walls or anything on the jeep, the lions could have just jumped onto it and torn us to shreds, and we stopped the jeep just six feet away from them; one of them got up and looked me in the eyes while it walked under the back of the jeep. Again, I just told myself that they must know that the lions wouldn't attack. But what if this had been just a weird lion? Well, nothing to worry about in the long run. The crocodiles on the boat safari didn't scare me as much even though they were just as close and there were also no walls on the boat. But crocodiles usually don't move very fast, as creepy as they are.

So we saw tons of neat animals, lots of giraffes, wilde beasts buffalo, hippos, zebra, impala, hyena, and all variety of interesting birds. My Dad brought a super-duper camera with him, so I left most of the picture taking to him. I did take a few though, and I figured I would be expected to have something to show for all this, so I posted just a handful at this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/DropBox - It includes a shot of some of the domestic animals that can be found in my own house as well: a swarm of gigantic ants that were crawling all over my kitchen door one night and an adorable picture of two of my kittens sleeping together (I can never resist these cat pictures). The kittens are all gone now which is sad, but that's how it goes I guess.

After the safari, I had a few days in Dar Es Salaam and spent one night in Zanzibar. I didn't get any good pictures there though, because I already felt really self-conscious as a tourist while I was there and I couldn't bear to whip a camera out, I was so tired of people staring at me and accosting me with offers to sell me things, hire out taxis or any other thing they thought they could to get me to spend money on them. I mostly just kept to myself and didn't spend as long looking around as I might have if I had someone else to walk around with - it would have been easier to withstand the energy of all those street vendors and other people if that had been the case. I did take some pictures from the ferry though, and I included one that I took as I was returning to Dar es Salaam from Zanzibar.

That's all, I'm back in Malawi now, and it's been a tough transition to come back. I had gotten so used to Malawi I guess, and to be out in the rest of the world where there's more development and more connection to other places in the world was a shock to me that has been hard to deal with. Malawi seems so isolated from the rest of the world, it feels like an alternate reality to be here again. The guardian shelter project is not moving with the speed I would prefer, and I'm nervous because we need to finish the foundation before the rainy season starts. Last year, it came late: not until January. But it might come as early as a few weeks from now if I'm unlucky, and if it comes before the foundation is finished, we won't be able to do the project at all. So far, the foundation hasn't even been started yet, though I've been promised work will begin on Monday. We'll see!

New Songs!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:15:00 GMT

Not much else to report aside from the two new songs I wrote. One of them is called "Bwana." In Malawi, "Bwana" means "Boss." I think it might originally be a Swahili word. The word is also applied to anyone who has a lot of money or is basically a big shot of some kind. In Peace Corps we also use it as an adverb, as in "I think I'll be bwana today and order some pizza. In the context of this song, it refers to the prototype of a useless corrupt person working as a government or NGO bureaucrat. A friend of mine recently had a run-in with an NGO that snookered a group he was working with into buying $4000 of equipment that was useless to them and they couldn't afford, at %15 interest. As soon as they default, the NGO will just repossess the equipment and "sell" it to some other sucker. The word "Bungwe" is a Tumbuka word for "organization" and here refers to any government or NGO service program that is run by some bwanas who don't do a thing except take bribes. Here's the link: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/11584876/RaymondThomson-2010-Bwana.mp3.html

I won't post my other song here because it contains profanity. It turns out that I'm still sophomoric enough to write an entire song premised entirely around the repeated use of such uncouth language. If that's the kind of thing that doesn't offend you, you can find a link to it on my Facebook profile.

Camp GLOW

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:20:50 GMT

I recently just returned from Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) and was deeply moved by what I saw there. I came there to perform three activities: to perform a song I wrote for the girls called "This Is My Time," to teach a class on Universal Human Rights, and to perform the role of Shakira in drag in a Peace Corps production of her song "Waka, Waka, This Time For Africa" to break down conceptions of gender roles and barriers. In my last year of teaching, I haven't been able to get a girl in my class to say a single word. At camp GLOW, one of my own students was there to speak up right from the beginning in the Human Rights class, and I was flooded by girls raising their hands, offering their opinions and ideas about rights and their own lives. It was so gratifying and inspiring - girls from the village where they are browbeaten into submissiveness were here all of the sudden: eager and energized. Soaking up the message of self-empowerment with enthusiasm and energy that was like nothing I've seen in Malawi so far.
It made me wish I'd been able to achieve something comparable at my own site. I was able to contribute to Camp GLOW in my own way, and I hope it made the experience a little richer for the girls, but I have little talent for the motivation and organization of masses of teenagers and I was awed by the display of ability I saw by the Peace Corps volunteers in charge and by the spirit and fire of girls in attendance themselves. Far and away, Camp GLOW has been the best thing I've seen in Peace Corps so far and I believe the future success of Malawi will be paved by the young girls who are so eager and ready to taste the unknown and carve a new future, if only the institutions that hold the keys to the gates will allow them entry.
In other news, I was very happy to guide the new Peace Corps trainees as they approach their swearing in date in a couple of weeks. I accompanied a few of them up north in their first major hitching experience, but it turned out that i was the one who was in trouble, not them! I unwittingly walked into the open door of a semi parked on the side of the road in Kasungu and gashed open my head, wondering what had happened. After a few minutes of distressing blood gushing from my head, the wound clotted up and we hiked a few kilometres to the highway to pick up the next hitch, dripping bits of peanut butter on some bread to keep us going. I struggled to stay awake, in case I'd gotten a concussion, having been told that sleeping after such an event can induce a coma or permanent brain damage. Everything is fine, there is no brain damage as far as I know, and I returned home to my adorable kittens a few days later. They are now running and jumping and attacking everything: wrestling with each other and crouching in baskets and doing other wonderful things. They are quite a joy and I would be happy keep them all if they only stayed so cute and didn't cost me so much money to feed. I have two people lined up to take them so far and maybe a third. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting on the money to come through for my guardian shelter project and school is still out, so for now, I'm a full-time kitten mom while I wait.

Kittens!

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:43:50 GMT

(The following was written five days ago but the internet failed, so it is being posted late):

I returned from Lilongwe yesterday and my neighbors informed me that Kamwezi gave birth to her kittens while I was gone! There are three in the litter. My temporary names for them are "Gizmo" for the one with orange spots, because she looks like Gizmo a little, "Han" for the one that's mostly white, because he's always on his own like Han Solo, and "Rascal" for the other one, because he seems rascally. But I plan to give them away in a month or so, and I assume whoever takes them will be giving them new names.

Kamwezi decided to give birth in the neighbors' toilet room (it's not being used by them since we don't have running water - they just use a pit latrine out front. My pit latrine on the other hand is locked, because it's too close to the well to be sanitary to use. So I have to use the toilet in my house, draw buckets of water from the well and flush by pouring the bucket in the toilet tank). Their toilet room was stuffed with junk which we had to clear out to grab the animals. I set up the kittens in my own house and brought Kamwezi over to see them. At first she seemed uninterested, but as soon as she showed interest, she grabbed one in her mouth and started running around with it. I had heard stories about mother cats eating their kittens before and I started freaking out. I'm not prepared to handle that kind of trauma right now. The kitten was crying and then stopped. I was sure Kamwezi had broken its little neck and would soon be tearing it to shreds, but luckily, as it turned out, she was just trying to bring it back to the neighbors' toilet room. Somehow, she had gotten it into her head that that was where she needed to nurse them. I had to chase her over there and separate her from the kitten so I could bring it back home.
I put the frightened kitten back with its brothers and then went to go fetch Kamwezi again. This time I closed the windows and door so she couldn't escape. Again, she picked one up and tried to carry it out the window, leaping up on the table with it in her mouth. After banging her head on the closed window a few times she realized she couldn't get out. Meanwhile, she heard the other kittens crying, so she brought the one she had back and grabbed a different one. She couldn't get this one through the closed window either. Then she looked over at the other kittens again. I could almost see the gears turning in her head as she decided maybe she could just nurse them where they already were rather than move them somewhere else. She brought the kitten back and all was well.

In other news, the electrician didn't finish the job the next day as I had written before; he left for another week, saying he had forgotten a certain part. He came back at the last minute before I had to leave for Lilongwe, and it turned out that instead of just installing the missing part he also decided he needed to carve newer, even more giant holes in my walls in order to unclog the pipe that was to contain the grounding wire. Again, he made the same promise about construction workers coming to fill in the wall. As before, they haven't arrived yet. (update: in the last five days, the construction workers Did arrive, but they ran out of cement before they could finish the job. They said they'd be back in a month or so) Oh well, I just hope that now that I'm wired, the electric company won't take it's usual period of delay before hooking me up, so I can get electricity at least before I leave. Here are the pictures of the Kittens and the new holes in the wall: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/Kittens#

Also, next month, my health group is putting on Camp GLOW (GLOW standing for Girls Leading Our World). It's a girl's empowerment camp that the Health sector of Peace Corps Malawi puts on every year. They have them in other Peace Corps programs too: I think the first one was started in Romania. Anyway, the coordinators are still attempting to finish raising all the money they need for the camp, so if you want to contribute, you can visit the website: campglowmalawi.com and there should be links there for you to do so. Even if there ends up being extra money left over from contributions, the run-off will go to next years' camp, so you don't need to worry about your money going to waste. For my part, I will be co-facilitating a human rights session, and I have also written a song for the girls that I plan to perform at the camp. It's a sappy "you can do it" kind of empowerment song called "This Is My Time." here's a link to it if you're interested in hearing it: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/10679132/RaymondThomson-2010-ThisIsMyTime.mp3.html

Until next time!

Chasing the Wall

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:52:04 GMT

Well, it finally happened. The Rumphi District Health Office finally sent some electricians to wire my house for electricity. When I arrived in August, I was told that it was on schedule to happen in September. I had a hard time believing it when I was told two Wednesdays ago that the electricians had arrived and were looking for me. I hung around the house for the next two days waiting for them to drop by. Finally, I found the lead electrician. He said he had spent the previous two days wiring my neighbors house, and would start working on my house "Tuesday, if not Monday." I assumed this meant there was about a five percent chance that they would start on Monday, and planned for Tuesday. "Why not just make it Monday?" I wanted to ask. But I knew it would be a useless question. I was not surprised when they didn't show up on Monday. I was a little bit surprised when they didn't show up on Tuesday either. Someone told me that the electricians were being paid 2000 kwacha for every day it took them to finish and that they were just delaying so they could make more money. They didn't show up Wednesday either. Or Thursday. I was beginning to despair that they would ever come back. I had spent the entire week hanging around my house in case they happened to show up. Finally, unexpectedly, they arrived Friday afternoon and began the work.

So, it's Monday now, and they say they will come by tomorrow morning to finish the work. It's been an exhausting two weeks of sitting around at home waiting for them to either show up, or waiting there as they did the work. At this point, I should explain something for those who, like myself, had no prior knowledge as to how wires existed invisibly behind our walls. In my house, there are networks of plastic tubes that were built into the walls to accommodate wires leading to sockets, lights and light switches. To insert the wires into the tubes, the electrician uses something he calls "fish tape," which is a coil of sturdy, flexible metal with a hook at the end of it. You insert the hook end through one end of the piping, and continue pushing it through until the hook-end emerges at the other end of the pipe. The curves in the piping are constructed to be gradual enough so it can be pushed through. Then, you tie the ends of your wires to the hook at the end of the fish tape and pull the fish tape back through the pipe with the attached wire in tow.
Along the way, they had a little problem getting the wires through a certain section of tubing and decided the tube was blocked with something. The head electrician asked for my permission for him to "Chase the wall." I was puzzled by the expression: is it a British thing or something uniquely Malawian? Also, he pronounced "chasing" as "chezzing" so I wasn't sure I understood the word right. It turned out that he wanted to dig into the cement/plaster portion of the wall in order to deal with the blocked tube in some way he didn't make clear to me. I told him that I only knew of the word "chasing" in the context of someone running after someone (after reflection, I realized, I also knew about using the word "chaser" to describe something you drink after taking a shot of hard liquor. A method of following, I guess). With following in mind, I saw that that was what he had in mind in his "chasing" as well.
He dug into the wall making a vertical line. He found the wiring tube in the center of this vertical line, but he hadn't dug deep into it at first, which is why he had to dig so far along the line higher and lower first. Then he started digging out the tube alongside the path of it. Then he broke open the tube and discovered the wires were present at that location. Then he broke open the tube at the other side of the tube that had been exposed so far, and the wires were also present. So he continued "chasing" the tube, breaking it open every once in a while until he finally found the place where they were stopped. Then he completely destroyed the tube so he could reattach the fish tape to it on that end. But he still couldn't pull it through. It turned out the pipe wasn't blocked at all: it was just that there was a curve in the pipe that was too severe to pull all the wires through at once. In the end, they just pulled the wires through one by one. Here is a picture of the unnecessary damage they did to my wall: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/ChasingTheWall#
You can see the multicolored section of the tubing on the left which is actually a few pieces of plastic trash I had lying around that the electrician used to wrap around the bare wires where the tube was completely destroyed. You can also see the other holes gouged through the tubing at other points. The electrician assured me that a bricklayer would be present tomorrow for renovations of the health center, and that he would take care of the wall. First of all, I suppose that guy might show up, and he might not. But secondly, I'm a little concerned about him filling the wall with cement, even if the wires are covered with scraps of plastic bags. I'm hoping he has something in mind more solid and permanent to separate the wires from the cement. Maybe it doesn't matter.
The other picture is another one of my cat, Kamwezi. It seems little Kamwezi has become pregnant and there is bound to be many littler Kamwezis running around in the world before too long. I wanted to take a picture that would display her swelling belly, but I'm afraid this is the best I could do. It's hard to get a cat to pose for a picture, and the I couldn't find a way to make the prominent belly appear as prominent as it appears to me. If you could see her in person and were used to the way she normally looks, you would agree that her belly is huge. Kamwezi has been more cranky and ornery than usual - I think she is more hungry in her condition than usual, and I'm not always satisfying that hunger as fully as I probably should be. On the upside, she is also lying around a lot more than usual, so if I can keep her well fed, she isn't as much of a handful as usual. But when she's hungry these days, she's a growling, howling terror. Oh well, that's all for now.

And Then, There Was Blog

Mon, 31 May 2010 14:13:38 GMT

So, no big new to report, really. Life goes on; I'm still doing well, and projects are moving along as they do. My intake group of Health '09 just finished our Mid Service Training Conference. It was a little bit early because there will be a double intake in July, so Peace Corps will not be able to accommodate the double training schedule at the same time. It still feels like a halfway mark though, even if we still have 14 months to go. So far, all twenty of us are still here - tonight, we're having a one-year-in-country dinner here in Lilongwe since a bunch of us are still in town (I have to see the dentist tomorrow). We arrived in Malawi a year ago today. So hooray for us!

In other news, I've written two news songs this last month. I think both of them were inspired by frustrating experiences in my work that I don't want to go into the details of. The first one is "Feel Free": http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/10080800/RaymondThomson-2010-FeelFree.mp3.html
In Malawi, "Feel Free" is a common expression people say after welcoming you. I always find it a little confusing though: Because I shouldn't feel free to just to any crazy or lame thing that comes into my head. This song is about telling someone they should feel free to carry on with behaviors that have alienated and hurt the other person, so I guess it's kind of a downer, but I like it.

The second song is "Ricochet":
http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/10080704/RaymondThomson-2010-Ricochet.mp3.html
I think it basically speaks for itself pretty much. Anyway, anyone reading this who is my facebook friend can also find links to these songs on my facebook page: I have a link section in the bottom lefthand corner. I've posted the lyrics to each one in case anyone is interested and can't make out what I'm singing. Well, that's all for now!

New Song

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:18:07 GMT

Nothing new to add, other than I've recorded a new song. I finished writing this one about a month ago, but didn't record it until last week. Here's the link to it: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/9644588/RaymondThomson-2010-EmptyVessels.mp3.html

It follows a theme about how I've been frustrated in the way Malawians tend to view me as a white person. There are a number of assumptions about white people: they have oodles of money, they can't do manual labor, they can't handle heat and sun, they can't handle discomfort in general, etc etc. In general, one gets to feeling like people view you as a mythical beast who should always be catered to or asked for money. One gets the feeling that people try to show you respect or have you around, or treat you in any way they treat you at all, due to the chance that those things might result in you giving them money.

Some people don't go in for all of that, and I see them walking by me in my village giving me hateful looks. Those hateful looks inspired the first verse. The second verse is about relationships of course, and the whole thing is just about the way we assume things about people based on what we want to believe about the world and how our vision of who this other person is helps give hope to or justify that belief. It's also about how people end up adopting the very traits that have been ascribed to them. I've found myself from time to time slipping into the very character pattern of the rich, arrogant, oblivious white person, since that's how people expect me to be and how they treat me no matter what I do - so sometimes it's just easier to act that way so your interactions with people become less confusing. So people create an identify for me and impose it on me, and sometimes, I stop fighting and just let it become true. I think this is something that happens to everyone in life; I've just never been able to notice it happening to me so clearly before.

Things and other things

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:56:51 GMT

I took a long trip recently, because I wanted to see the south of Malawi, which I had not yet visited. I was already in Lilongwe for business, and planning to go back up north soon. I have a site-mate who lives across the street from me in Chitimba, and we decided to have a block party to celebrate (and eat) the giant block of cheese that had been sent to her in the mail. But it turned out that half the people in Peace Corps had decided to climb Mount Mulanje during the time we had scheduled for the party, so we conferred and decided to delay the party. And I decided that I would stick around and climb the mountain. But i wasn't prepared.

I took a trip south to Thyolo (pronounced Cholo) to visit a friend of mine who is an instructer there of nursing students, then I headed back to Lilongwe to meet up with Mulanje people. In Lilongwe I decided to buy some market shoes since I had heard that it was a bad idea to try it in sandals, which was all I had. I ended up buying a pair of basketball sneakers for about 7 bucks. I got a Peace Corps volunteer who was leaving the country to give me a pair of socks. Then I went with a friend north to meet another friend, and then back south the next day. We got stuck in Lilongwe again, so we didn't get to Blantyre until the next day. Blantyre is an actual city with sidewalks and a movie theater! We resolved to see a movie after the mountain, and left the next day for Mulanje.

There were 12 of us, and two people were in charge of getting food. They got us plenty of rice, but only 6 packets of soya pieces. Soya pieces are little dried chucks of flavored tofuish soy food that come in a sealed plastic bag. I usually eat all of one bag along with some rice for a complete meal. These people purchased six (6!) packets for 12 people for a three day hike. But they did get plenty of rice. Most of us didn't realize this until it was too late, and we hadn't brought personal food. Oh well, next time, "make sure you have enough food to feed yourself, and don't rely on someone else to make that happen!"

I hired a porter. Most people didn't. I have a weak back, but more than that, I didn't want to be miserable on the mountain and also didn't have anything to prove. Also, it was only $20 for three days and climbing big mountains is not something I do regularly (have ever done before, or plan to do again any time soon if ever). So it seemed liked a reasonable investment. The porterless people soon were in severe pain and The Doom was setting in on them. My porter ended up carrying someone else's stuff in addition to my own. Mulanje is the third highest mountain in Africa at 3001 m. (I had this all converted in my head to feet once, but I don't remember the figures. I think a meter is about 3.25 feet or so). We started at 720 meters and climbed to 2200 m in about seven hours the first day, where we stopped in a cabin on the mountainside. We got off to a late start so the last hour was in the dark, clambering down across stones. I had a headlamp. Many people didn't. Miraculously, nobody was injured. Finally, just before reaching the cabin-lodge thing, we had to cross a broad stream. "Really?" I said to myself. but there was nothing for it, so across we went, ankle deep in the water, market shoes soaked. We got to the cabin and cooked the rice and soya.

Our guide wanted to leave the cabin early in the morning (around 630) so we could get to the peak before noon, and back down before the rains set in. 5 people stayed at the cabin, and seven of us continued up. My shoes and socks were still soaked, so I switched to my aforementioned sandals. "Oh well," I thought, "at least my Tevas have great tread." So I thought. But it turns out I hadn't looked at the bottom of my sandals since I bought them last May. They once had great tread, but now the traction has completely worn down below the balls of my feet to a smooth finish. This I did not realize until I was slipping profusely on the tough climb that second day and I looked at those worn down soles. "Uh-oh," I thought.

You see, nobody had told me that the peak consisted of large slabs of slippery rock with little in the way of footholds, and too steep in many many places to walk up, but requires using your hands and grasping at bare rock for dear life. I was terrified. What's more, the porter did not come along for this leg of the journey, and though I left most of my stuff in the cabin, I brought a small bag with me with a few things in it. This bag was flapping in front of me over and over, obstructing my arms and threatening to knock my balance off and throw me off the edge. But I made it. But I was less worried about getting up than I was about getting down again. And getting down proved to be even more treacherous. One member of our group almost died as she lost her footing and started running right off the edge of a cliff. I turned to the left and saw her - I was dumbstruck with horror, thinking "there she goes, she's going to die now." But the guide who took us up caught her arm as she was running past and steadied her and nobody died or even got hurt. It started sprinkling a little rain on us as we came down so we had to be very careful. We went up and down 800 meters that day - it took about 7-8 hours.

We all made it down the next day. We were sore and hurting, but that was to be expected. On the way, we passed another group of Peace Corps people who were heading up. It was 10am or so, and they were resolved to go all the way to the top and back to the cabin that day. I told them not to do it and wait to start in the morning the next day, but they didn't listen to me. They ended up getting caught in serious rain and doing the last hour and a half in the dark. I was very worried about them, but they made it ok, though their experience was far more harrowing than mine. They had to come down almost all the way sitting on their butts which ruined their trousers, and one person had a sprained wrist, but I was very happy two days later in Blantyre when we met up again and I learned that nothing more serious had happened.

We caught a big buddy truck to take us from the mountain to the next stop after finishing the hike (on the way, we stopped at a beautiful waterfall and took a soothing swim.) It started raining on us and if we weren't filthy already (we were) we became so; the bottom of the trucks cargo area where we were sitting was covered with mud. But as we left, there was a full rainbow which perfectly framed the mountain (in the picture I took, note that the visible part of the mountain only goes up to about 2000 meters. You can't see the peak, called "Sapitwa" where we went). On closer examination, we saw that there was not only a full rainbow, but double full rainbows. It seemed to be a sign of some sort of blessing somehow.

Back to Blantyre. We visited the Carlsberg brewery and they gave us free beer afterwards. From there we journeyed to the movie theater and saw "Sherlock Holmes." It was a great treat to see a movie in a theater, but I have to admit that despite my affinity for Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, I found the movie to be basically lame. Why does every character in every adventure movie have to have amazing ninja fighting skills nowadays? My vision of Sherlock Holmes would have had him and Watson using clever mental deductions far more and acrobatic fighting skills far less than they did. Or remember the old Indiana Jones films? He would get into some really ugly low-skill level fist fights and was good with a whip but that was it. Anyway, it was still fun.

So: I traveled with some more people to visit another Peace Corps site in Chiradzulu, then floated up to Zomba, Malawi's former capital the next day. We ended up staying there for a few days where we ate a lot of great food, saw a baby monkey at a gas station and hiked up to a place called the "Zomba Plateau" where the most lavish hotel has been built at the top. It's called Ku Chawe, which means "at heaven" or something like that in Chichewa. Only if beers are triple the regular price in heaven. But they have a giant chess set there.

Finally, it was time to return to Lilongwe, and then back to Chitimba. But we still had a party to host in Chitimba. It was great fun; 10 people came, and we prepared a song on guitar and ukelele for it. In "How I Met your Mother," they have a Thnaksgiving where a certain character gets slapped called "Slapsgiving." We decided someone would get slapped for the party and then we would play the song they sing after the slapping in How I Met Your Mother called "You Just Got Slapped." I wanted to have a debate contest where the winner would slap the loser, but the crowd wasn't feeling it, so we just slapped a party-goer who seemed like the most slappable person and then played the song.

All in all, I had a great time. Again, I find myself writing about traveling and parties rather than my Peace Corps work, because it's really much more interesting. But my projects are coming along. On Monday, I'll be traveling to Mzuzu to pick up the wiring implements for the Youth Center-Library I'm getting hooked up with electricity, and the guardian chelter project is still in the works. I traveled to Muhuju on Tuesday because I was told one of the Chinese engineers working there would provided me with plans for the guardian shelter they already have there. When I got there, he refused to help me, saying he was "too Busy." I traveled to Rumphi with my free ride (tagging along with the ambulance driver) hoping to come back to Muhuju at 3pm when the engineer would be "less busy." But we were stranded in Rumphi due to lack of fuel. For some strange reason, the Ambulances could only be provided fuel obtained from a certain place in Mzuzu instead of just filling up at the filling station in Rumphi. It only takes about 1 1/2 hours to get to Mzuzu from Rumphi, but we ended up waiting over eight hours until we were ready to leave at 6pm. I spent 8am-8pm that day traveling and languishing in Rumphi and for absolutely nothing. But this is the way things work.

That's it for now! Wish me luck on this guardian shelter thing. I feel like I will need it.

Here are pictures from Mulanje, and other things referenced during recent weeks: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/MulanjeAndMore#

Enough! or too much

Welding and Squash

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:31:42 GMT

So I mentioned last post how I discovered a local child was sneaking through my window and stealing various small household items. My solution was to weld extra pieces of metal to the windows to make the gaps smaller, but this was a headier task than I had anticipated. The first step was getting the pieces of metal. It took a trip 15 km to Uliwa and some haggling, but wasn't too difficult. My neighbor told me that some people would be coming in a few days to do some repairs on the health center and that they would have a welding machine with them. So, I wiated for them to come, but surprise surprise, they never came. A few weeks had passed by this time, and I started getting nervous because I needed to get this welding done before I left town again for a while. I ran across this electrician who claimed he would do the welding for me. He agreed to come by Saturday, but couldn't say what time on Saturday it would be. He also told my neighbor I could expect him on Saturday as well. So I waited around the house all day on Saturday, and surprise surprise! He never came. Apparently there was a football match on t.v. that day, so all other concerns were abandoned; I thought that was the reason he didn't come, but he never came Sunday or Monday either. Finally on Tuesday, I asked someone if they knew who this guy was. I was instructed to seek out a local restaurant owner and ask to be put in touch with him since he apparently lives near to there.

On my way to the restaurant, I stopped in to talk to someone else I know, and mentioned my plight. He told me that this electrician did not do welding and wasn't sure why he told me that he did. According to him, there was only one man in the village who had a welding machine, and that he lives "over by the school." (2 km away. Although this guy owns the machine, he doesn't know how to weld himself, but hires another guy to do it, who is apparently the only guy in town skilled at welding. I went out in search of this man with the machine; I went to a bar next to the school and asked if they knew where he was. They gave me vague directions to go further up the road. I stopped at a house further up the road, and the guy who lived there escorted me behind his house, through a maze of other homesteads, asking people along the way. After a while, we arrived at a house that was where this man lives. We waited while he was summoned for 10 minutes or so, and then he arrived. I explained my need for a welder. He told me to follow him. We went back across the school grounds and arrived at a shed next to the bar I started at. He talked to someone else, and was informed that the man who has the key to the shed was "far away." Eventually I gathered that the welding machine was in this shed.
So I suggested that we do the welding on another day, not having expected to arrange it immediately anyway. He asked when. "How about tomorrow?" I threw that out, instinctively trying the soonest possible time. He said yes, but that it should be in the morning. I taught a class in the morning, but I thought it would be unwise to contradict him. Maybe there was some special reason the morning would work. In Malawian culture, people don't like to disagree with you, so if I suggested the afternoon, and the afternoon was impossible for some reason, it would be most likely that he would just agree with me and then it would never happen. He said that he and the welder would be by at 7 or 730 am. I said ok, and went back home.

I put the odds of someone actually showing up at around 15%, and had given up entirely on it by about 9:20. I was about to start preparing for my 10:40 class when two men show up with a bundle of metal coils and wires. Neither of them were the man I spoke to the day before; one of them was the welder, and the other was someone who had a bicycle and had helped him transport the machine there. He asked how we were going to plug it in, and I said my neighbor (who has electricity) said we could plug it in there. he asked if I had an extension cord. I didn't. Well, what were we going to do? I started panicking - how would we find one? I aksed my neighbor, who told me to ask the health center groundskeeper. The groundkeeper told me to ask the carpenter next door. The carpenter had one, and would normally never lend it out, but decided to make an exception in my case. I had a cord! I rushed back with the cord. I showed the welder the metal pieces I had and what I wanted done. He said that was fine, but he didn't have a hacksaw, which he needed to cut them to size. He would have to go to the road block where he could borrow one. I said ok and he took off.

I rushed to the school and told them I would have to cancel my class. No problem. ok, good. I rushed back home and waited. He finally came back at 11:00 with the hacksaw and got to work. At this point, I need to describe the welding machine. I had almost zero knowledge of welding before this, and didn't know what to expect. The machine, was a lump of metal coils weighing about 30 or 40 pounds interlaced with pieces of wood. It had three cords coming out of it. One was the plug, which instead of having a plug, just had two bare wires that had to be jammed into the end of the extension cord. Another wire led to a malformed lump of metal. The other wire led to a metal clamp which had lost its clamping capability. I had to surrender a rag to the welder so he could tear it into strips and wrap the strips around the metal handle so he could hold it. He also wrapped a strip around the welding rod because the clamp wouldn't hold it and he couldn't touch it with his fingers of course. He would take the clamp in his left hand and hold the welding rod in his right hand so it was touching the clamp at one end. The other end would be moved over to the aforementioned lump of metal connected to a wire. When they touched, there would be many sparks, until the tip of the welding rod was red. Then it would be ready to weld.

Remember, his hands are both full, so how were we going to hold the metal bars in place that I wanted welded to the existing metal frame? He suggested that I wrap a strip of cloth around the piece and hold it with my hands. I suggested that we tie a string around the metal bar, which I would hold taut on the far side of the room, pulling the bar towards the window frame to hold it in place, which is what we did. Now, the welder had no protective equipment whatsoever, in fact, he was wearing a tank top, shorts and flip flops. His method for protecting his face while the sparks were flying from the welding was to close his eyes as the welding rod came into contact with the metal. So I was standing inside the house at the far end of the room holding a string attached to a piece of metal while we was welding with his eyes shut. Over the course of the job, he explained that he had been studying mechanical engineering at Phwezi technical college (60 km south) but ran out of money to pay for it, so now he was stuck in Chitimba and losing hope, looking for odd jobs to get money. This high risk welding job itself was going to net him less than five dollars. At various times during the welding, the rag he had wrapped around the welding rod would catch fire and he would have to throw it on the ground and find a new piece of rag. Meanwhile, the welding terrified my cat, the creature who made this whole absurd procedure necessary in the first place. It was several days before she was comfortable enough to stay in the house again. She sensed that somehow the evil sparks were made possible by the extension cord and I filmed a very funny sequence of her tapping the cord with her paw and jumping away each time as if it was shocking her. But I was unable to upload it to my web album. Oh well

After it was all over, the welder explained that he had to track down another bicycle in order to transport the welding machine out of my house. He would be back at 2 or 3 o'clock. That was five days ago. As of now, the welding machine is still in my house, and I'm wondering what to do about it since I'm leaving town for a while on Wednesday.

Vegetable news: After planting 9 kinds of seeds at four various intervals; constructing specially designed seed beds, using chicken manure in the soil, constructing grass coverings to shield seedlings from the sunlight, watering every day for some periods of time, trying fertilizer instead of manure, building a fence to keep chickens out, rebuilding the fence when the first one collapsed, desperately planting eggplants, onions, green peppers, garlic and tomatoes from food I had bought in the market after my store bought seeds continued to fail, and wondering what kind of thumb is the opposite of "green," my garden has yielded: squash! The only thing that agreed to grow. I've included pictures of the prolific squash plants, and the biggest squash fruit on the vine currently. I harvested one that had turned the appropriate color - I dug through a pile of things and discovered I still had the seed package although all the seeds are gone - and discovered they are butternut squash, and they are supposed to look brownish orange when they are done. My brownish orange squash was a little smaller than I thought it should be, but it tasted right: I steamed it, after much frustration involving my steaming equipment that involved swearing and screaming and smashing things. My neighbor came by to make sure i was ok. But it eventually worked. There are a few more fruits on the vine, so I should have a few more nights of squash eating before the squash plants reach the end of the line. Well, it may be a limited success, but I can now say truthfully that I have grown a vegetable.

Here are the latest pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/SquashWelding# To explain: Malawians seem to be uniformly deathly afraid of snakes and people are always bugging me to keep long grasses short and sweep up any debris that snakes could be hiding under. While cutting some lemon grass in my yard, I didn't find a snake, but did find this lizard, which I then photographed. There is a picture of the welding machine, next to a paperback for scale. Also, pictures of the window that was welded from far away and close up. The same paperback is also there for scale so you can see how small the gap was that the thief-child was crawling through. And there are two pictures of squash to display my lone gardening success.

Enough! or too much

Traveling, Birthdays, peanut butter, etc.

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:05:11 GMT

I had a couple weeks away from my site recently, precipitated by Hope Kit Training, which took place in Mponela. It seems that Americans have trouble pronouncing this correctly, but I don't know how we are failing. Inevitably, if you tell a Malawian you went to or are going to Mponela, they will be confused and not know what you are talking about. After you repeat Mponela a few times, they will say, “Oh, you mean Mponela!” pronouncing it in a way that sounds identical to the way you have said it. This has happened to me a few times and also to other Peace Corps volunteers, including one who lives very close to Mponela and still can't figure out what the problem is. Anyway, Hope Kit training is a series of activities designed to impress key HIV and AIDS awareness issues upon local community members. My 30th birthday took place during the training, so I had a captive audience of Peace Corps Volunteers to celebrate with. Some of them even wrangled up a cake somehow! Occassions kept popping up to sing happy birthday; I've never had it sung to me so many times before. There was one at breakfast, then someone else showed up who hadn't been there and started singing, so everyone joined in again. There was another round during training, and then another at dinner when the cake came out. The Malawian contingent followed up “Happy Birthday,” singing the same tune, but with the words “how old are you now?” Maybe it's a British thing? Then someone started “Feliz Cumpleanos a ti,” just for good measure, bringing the total to six. Songs were also sung for people who had recently had birthdays or had birthdays coming up, so there was a lot of birthday singing going around

After Hope Kit, I went to visit another volunteer who was preparing a Valentine's Day meal with some friends. We made falafel, tzatziki sauce, baba ganoush, and pita bread, (sorry for any spelling errors) by picking up key ingredients in Lilongwe beforehand. They had planned this for a while apparently, and had already gathered the hard to find items and prepared a computer printout with the instructions on how to go about it. The food was wonderful, and it was nice to be around good people and not be alone on Valentine's Day. Then it was back to Lilongwe, where I finished watching all the episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” available to me. This is a sitcom I had never heard of until about three weeks ago, that is currently finishing its fifth and (I'm told) final season. I became hooked after watching only a few episodes, mainly on the strength of Barney, the character created by Neal Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser). It's funny that I had to come to Malawi to learn about this American TV show. I haven't payed attention to any shows on TV for years. It's better that way though. If I had been watching this show all that time, I wouldn't have experienced the joy of cramming 3 ½ seasons into a few weeks. Season 4 was unavailable to me, and we only had season 5 through 9 episodes. What will happen? How will Ted finally meet his children's mother? I guess the world will learn the answers in the next few months, but I'll have to wait until somebody sends those episodes to a peace corps volunteer in Malawi, so we can all get the missing episodes on our hard drives.
While killing time at the Peace Corps computer lab in Lilongwe, the song “Paper Planes” by MIA was played by someone. This is one of those ubiquitous songs that almost everyone in Peace Corps seems to have on their ipods. I know at least one other volunteer who has all the lyrics memorized and it occurred to me that I would enjoy the song even more if I did the same thing. So I wrote down the lyrics after looking them up online and resolved to learn them while waiting for hitches later that day. My hitching partners and I were stranded and had to stay in Lilongwe that night, but I was well on the way. The next day, I had a new hitching partner, and recruited her to my lyrical mission. We started chanting the lyrics while trying to hitch to Mzuzu the next morning “No one on the corner has swagger like us.” It took us seven hitches to reach Mzuzu. One to the airport, one to Mponela (with an interesting guy, whose family were old school British colonists in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He told us about the history of Rhodesia, how it was a rogue state from 1965-1980, because they refused to accept majority (read: black African) rule, and broke away from the British Empire. It was apparently very hard to travel anywhere with a Rhodesian passport, because most of the international community refused entry. Zimbabwe got their independence in 1980 when Rhodesia finally crumbled. The man who was driving us said he stuck around for two years and left for Malawi when he decided in his words, “it wasn't going to work.”) He's been growing tobacco in Malawi ever since. He also told us a little bit about the tobacco business here: they grow all different types here, including Virginia and Turkish, the varieties I've heard of before. Then the harvest is bought by one of four huge companies, three of them American and one Japanese. Those companies ship the tobacco to processing plants they control all over the world. Anyway, he picked us up again and took us a little further down the road, and in the meantime had bought us each a hardboiled egg and bottle of coke for breakfast!
We waited at the next stop for a while and got picked up by a pickup truck that broke down immediately. We helped them push the truck back and forth for a half hour or so, trying to jump start the engine, but to no avail. We abandoned them for a decked-out SUV with every possible gadget, including something I'd never seen before: a sunshade on the passenger side that was also a DVD player. The driver was a Malawian working for an NGO called Lifeline. We took a detour on the way to Kasungu so he could show us the health center his NGO had started. He gave us a whirlwind tour and then dropped us at the Kasungu turn-off, where we waited for a long time. We finished memorizing the Paper Planes lyrics there and then it started raining heavily. We were just getting properly soaked when this guy driving a little TNM truck picked us up (TNM is the second largest cell phone company in Malawi). He could only take us a short distance, but it got us out of the rain. At the next stop, I guarded the luggage under a shelter while my partner took the umbrella and flagged down cars in the rain. She ended up finding us a huge van with motorized curtains on the windows. He had to make a stop in Mzimba, which took us an hour out of our way, but he didn't charge us anything; in fact no one did the whole day, so we made it to Mzuzu for free!
Once in Mzuzu, two more people were having brithdays, so about 15 of us took bike taxis out to the boondocks where there was this dive bar/rest house to spend the night. It was a bizarre experience, but interesting. Now, I'm back in Chitimba, recovering from the whirlwind. We just finished the first term of the school year, and my students did better this time; over ten of them passed. But in all honesty, this was largely due to the availability of multiple choice questions this time. They are still struggling with questions that require them to come up with their own answers and write it down. Well, we'll see how it goes!
On my other front at site, my project with the local youth center is moving along. Having acquired several loads of books, we have gotten the library up and running, and proposals are underway to provide the center with electricity and needed furniture and shelves. It's a slow process, but it seems to be moving along. I also have put out feelers to see what kind of interest there is for two projects that have been proposed to me and seem worthwhile: Building some pit latrines at the local road block and constructing a guardian shelter at the health center (a guardian shelter is a building patrons can use to sleep and cook in when they need to spend more than one day at the health center and have no where to stay in the community). I just want to let people know that I do more than visit other places, travel around and photograph animals at my house here in Malawi. Speaking of my house, I discovered that a local child has been breaking in while I'm gone and stealing peanut butter and a few other small items. Today I went to Uliwa to purchase additional bars for the front window. I need to leave the window open for the cat to get in and out, but the current space between the bars is enough for a small child to crawl through. Ok, that's enough for awhile. More later!

America: what the *&^%$$?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:45:02 GMT

So I feel the need to discuss American political events at this time,
which I've largely avoided doing on this blog, but I feel that I
can't remain silent right now, and as this blog has already been
attached with a disclaimer in its title, it should be clear that the
following opinions are no one's but my own. I was perplexed and
discouraged to learn about the results of the recent Massachusetts
senate election, as well as with the knowledge that Obama's approval
ratings have fallen, and it has left me wondering what is going on in
the minds of Americans lately. From here, it looks like Obama has
done everything anyone could have expected of him: his chief task was
guiding the country away from the brink of a second Great Depression.
It seems that Americans have forgotten that this was a real
possibility, and all indications are that not only has this been
averted, but that the economy is actually recovering and growing
again. The banks are no longer in danger of collapsing, the stock
market is back into healthy levels again, and the only thing remaining
is jobs, which are always the last sector of the economy to recover in
such situations. 10% unemployment is difficult, but with the
fundamentals of the economy sound again, it will improve, and if
decisive action had not been taken and a new depression had actually
occurred, we would be looking at 30% unemployment, not 10.

Massive deficits are the legacy of the same Republicans who are now complaining about them. The spending Obama had to push through to dig us out of a potential Depression (also caused by Republican policies) is still only a fraction of what was thrust upon him by the previous administration. Eventually they will have to be paid for - by tax increases: and when that happens, I am sure people will be foaming at the mouth again, unwilling to admit that those tax increases are the results of those same Republican deficits, now swollen by the added interest rates imposed by this unpaid for borrowing.

The withdrawal from Iraq is proceeding on schedule, and while it is
disappointing that the war in Afghanistan continues, Obama is doing
nothing different there than exactly what he said he would do, and
what is frankly needed: to buy some time for events to (hopefully)
stabilize in Pakistan, due to the close links between the rogue
elements in those two countries. But unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a
NATO operation, and the entire world has a vested interest in doing
what it can to prevent the Pakistani government from toppling.

On the domestic front, Obama has had some success in passing his
agenda, but in areas where his agenda has been stalled, (notably
health care), the cause is almost entirely attributable to a minority
party which is bound and determined not to cooperate in any way, and
seems to prefer that the entire country be brought to a screeching
standstill in order to try and make the majority party look bad.

So the Massachusetts voters decided to reward this behavior by making
it that much more possible for the minority to ensure that nothing
gets done at all and derail Obama's entire agenda. From here in
Malawi, it is clear that Obama is admired and loved all around the
world, (especially here in Africa of course), and it is confusing to
see Americans as seemingly the only people on the planet who don't appreciate his
value. I woke up at 4am on Thursday to listen to his State of the
Union speech, and there is nothing else I can say about events that he
didn't state more eloquently and gracefully in that excellent speech.
What I will say is that I have been thinking about the current success of the anti-Obama movement and the Supreme Court's recent decision (which subjects U.S.
elections even more greatly to the corrupting influence of the money used to
buy and sell politicians). It has got me thinking about this faction of
Americans who seem to have primary faith in the all-healing power of
money, and an almost religious devotion to the sanctity of "the
market." That inspired me to finish writing a song I had conceived of
called "Set My Markets Free," a gospel song lampooning this
single-minded fixation on privitization and "free markets." You can
listen to it here: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/8441045/RaymondThomson-2010-SetMyMarketsFree.mp3 . I hope it appeals to someone reading this (I'm thinking of you sheck d),; I've been having problems getting it to play on my computer, so someone will have to tell me whether this Ziddu thing is still working or not. That's all for now, I've said my piece.
More on life in Malawi next time.

Lilongwe and more songs

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:05:18 GMT

First of all, I'm sad to report that the frog was brutally killed by Kamwezi after I left home to use the internet last week. I came home to the sickening display of hundreds of large ants swarming all over the corpse of that unlucky amphibian on my porch. I swept that corpse, or what was left of it, and the countless ants off the porch where I imagine the ants regrouped and finished their feast.
I recently had a request for me to take some pictures of Lilongwe (where I am once again visiting) so I did my best. There isn't much to see, really. It's hard to describe Lilongwe as a city, really. It's really just miles and miles of sprawl without a center. I guess if there's a center, the area I stay at might qualify. It's near the central bus depot, police station and post office: an ambiguous area sometimes referred to as "Old Town." Anyway, here are the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/Lilongwe# I'll provide some needed commentary... The first picture is of this absurd footbridge which spans Kamuzu Processional Highway, which I guess you could say is Lilongwe's main drag. As you can see though, the street is only two lanes, and relatively easy to cross, unless you have some kind of disability I guess. But in that case, mounting this 25 foot bridge may present difficulties as well. In any case, hardly anyone ever uses it. I finally climbed up the other day out of curiosity. I was disappointed to find that there isn't much of a view. That's the central mosque in the background there. As you would expect, they broadcast the call to prayer five times a day over loudspeaker, which I enjoy, because I stay far enough away from it for it to be too loud, so it provides a pleasant backdrop. Malawi is a heavily Chirstian country; it's interesting to me how mosques can get permission to broadcast the call to prayer even when they are in a distinct minority in their city, but I like it. The next picture is the same but it features a woman skillfully carrying bananas on her head, so I thought I'd include it for anyone interested in getting a better look at how that's done.

Next is a shot of some buildings; to the right is the Bohemian Cafe, the only place I've found in Malawi yet that has bagels, though I've heard you can find them down in Zomba and Blantyre somewhere. On the left is the local ESCOM building, the hated public electricity monopoly that presides over constant blackouts, and keeps people waiting for months to get their buildings electrified. The next picture is further up the street if you walk past the Bohemian Cafe, and is MacDaud's, which bears a striking resemblance to a certain restaurant fabled to be started by a Scottish clown named Ronald... anyway, you can get pizza there. They have these huge gaudy pictures of Hanna Barbara cartoons on the inside walls, the place is a real trip. Speaking of pizza, the next picture is of Sana food center, on a different part of Kamuzu Processional; they also serve pizza. Next, I took a picture of the John Deere building, because it always makes me think I'm back in Idaho again. The Peace Corps office is just down the street to the right.

Turning left from John Deere takes you to the next picture, which displays Shoprite on the right, an American-style supermarket that's way too expensive for me to go to. On the left, you can see a pothole in the sidewalk. Malawian cities abound with these unexpected holes and ditches that weave their way in and out of the edges of streets and what pass for sidewalks. For no apparent reason that I'm aware of, sidewalks tend to be hollowed out for a couple feet underneath, so if the concrete is broken, it leaves these potholes to trap the unsuspecting pedestrian. Many Peace Corps volunteers have taken to calling them "Mzungu Traps"... mzungu is a word that apparently once meant well-off person, but has gradually shifted to mean white-person in Malawi. If you are white in a Malawian village, you can expect children (iwes) to run after you screaming Mzungu! Mzungu! They might also yell "hello!" over and over again until you pass by no matter how many times you respond, or if you don't at all. Other favorites are "Give me my money!" "I'm fine and you!" "Give me pen!" and the perennial, "What is my name?!"

The next picture is a pretty stretch of road to show the softer side of Lilongwe, and the final one is that same stretch of road that passes Shoprite as it intersects with Kamuzu Processional. On the left are street vendors who will sell you pirated Chinese DVDs with 10-20 movies on each disk for about 10 bucks. Other people there will sell you units for your cell phone. In Malawi, you buy units ahead of time which give you a certain amount of seconds of air time: you just punch in the code on the strips of cardboard they sell you to load up, or "top up," as they say here, in what must be some sort of British expression. On the right hand side are the lines of minibuses ready to take you to other areas of the city. The conductors will be standing next to their bus on the side of the road yelling at you to get in as you pass by.

Nothing much to tell about my week in Lilongwe, I've been pretty sedentary here. But I have loaded up the first two songs I've written that I mentioned last time. The first one, "Consider Me," was written in October-November, and you can listen to it here: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/8197387/RaymondThomson-2009-ConsiderMe.mp3.html
The idea for this song came to me as a line of dialogue from the Princess Bride jumped unbidden, into my head, as happens all too often. It's when Princess Buttercup tells Humperdink she will kill herself rather than marry him; she can only marry Westley. Humperdink agrees to send a message to Westley to come for her. But then he says that if Westley doesn't respond: "Please consider me as an alternative to suicide." I thought that would make a fun premise for a song, so I got to work.

As it happens, the second song, "Gently," was also inspired by the Princess Bride. Here it is: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/8197338/RaymondThomson-2009-Gently.mp3.html Again, the unbidden Princess Bride ruminations hit me as I remembered the scene where Buttercup is about to commence the aforementioned suicide, when she is interrupted: Westley is lounging on her bed and advises her not to destroy her "perfect breasts," as there is a world shortage of them. She rushes to the bed and starts aggressively kissing him. "Gently!" he says. "Is that all you can say," says Buttercup, "Gently?" He repeats, "Gently!" more urgently this time. You see, Westley was mostly dead all afternoon, and was still in the process of recovering. Anyway, I liked the idea of a song in which the singer asks his lover to do everything gently; this one came out in a rush - I wrote the whole thing in just one day. Well, that's all for a while. Enjoy!

Songs, Cat and Frog

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:35:48 GMT

So to start with, I've replanted my garden; I tried two sets of plantings before. Initially, the only things that grew were squash and tomatoes. The tomatoes only grew for a short time before dying, and the squash grew well until I had to leave town and was unable to secure a neighbor to do the watering for me while I was gone. I had been hoping the rainy season would start while i was gone, but it didn't, and the squash died. The rainy season has started in earnest now, and I'm leaving town again for a week tomorrow. Of everything I planted five days ago, once again, only the squash has germinated, and I'm hoping the rain will be enough to keep it alive. I'm also hoping that the other plants just need more time to bloom and aren't doomed before they begin. I hardened my heart and ruthlessly uprooted everything in the garden before planting again. I tried to plant in straight lines, marked by little sticks on the ends, and my plan is to pull any plants that aren't in those lines since I have no idea whether a plant is a weed or l=not just by looking at its leaves. We'll see...
Here's a couple of pictures I took today: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/CatAndFrog# I saw this magnificent white frog on my patio and took this picture; within five seconds of me taking the picture, Kamwezi noticed my interest in the frog and decided to attack it, as illustrated in the following picture. While she was able to capture it easily, and carried it around in her mouth, she didn't kill it, and it was left to attempt to escape her over and over again while she batted it around and grabbed it in her mouth again and again. I felt bad for the frog; it would have been better maybe if she had just killed it. As it was, the frog probably had a broken leg or two: I could see that it was breathing heavily - it must have been going through a torturous experience. Cats can be so cruel. Kamwezi plays rough, but she hasn't developed a killer instinct - maybe because I feed her too much usipa (little fish), and she is complacent. I want her to grow to be large and strong so she can fight off other cats that try to hone in on her territory, and I have wanted to win her over with tasty food, which has been successful it would seem. Well, we'll see what happens...

So as some of you know, I bought a guitar when I moved to my site here in the Peace Corps, and my progress has been better than I had hoped for. While I haven't attempted to pluck individual strings yet, I've become relatively adept at playing the basic chords. A couple months ago, I started to write songs, and last week I finished my third song, entitled "Iwe." I posted it at this website: http://www.ziddu.com/viewfile/8124936/RaymondThomson-2010-Iwe.mp3.html It requires a little bit of explanation. In the languages of the region, "iwe" means "you, (informally)." It is generally applied to children and animals, especially when that child or animal is doing something bad. To scold the child or animal, you might say "Iwe!" and then tell it off. Also, the children shout iwe at each other all the time when they are playing. As a result, in Peace Corps Malawi, volunteers have taken to referring to Malawian children as iwes, since that is how they are so often addressed. So this song is in reference to those iwes, who are ordered around (as expressed in the first half of the song) and who are also prone to misbehave, and difficult to control (they represent almost half the Malawian population) as expressed in the second half of the song. Another cultural note: in the line "Iwe, bring me my sima," "sima" refers to the staple meal of Malawians. Sima, (or "nsima" in the south) is nothing more that maize flour mixed with boiling water, but it is mixed more thickly than regular porridge, so that it makes patties, rather than a soupy gruel. Sima is so ubiquitous that the word is sometimes interchangeable with "food." A meal generally consists of sima and "dende," which means "side dish," or as Malawians refer to it, as "relish." Dende can be anything from vegetables to beans to eggs to usipa, etc. etc. Malawians typically shun cutlery even if it were available, and like to break off pieces of sima in their hands, and then grab a piece of dende with it for each bite. Anyway, I hope you're able to access the audio; I originally planned on posting it on facebook, but they only allow for postings of video, not audio, and haven't found a way to post audio on this blog page either. If it works out, I will post my first two songs this way as well.

Malawian News and A Malawian Sunday

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:09:00 GMT

So, first of all, an update on local Malawian events: It's possible although not likely that someone reading this blog heard of the earthquakes in Karonga District a few weeks ago (Chitimba is 2 km south of the Karonga district border). I myself slept right through it. I only learned about it the next morning while listening to the BBC World News. Later, people asked me if I had felt it the night before. I heard that four people died in the quake; needless to say, I'm fine. The ongoing Malawian news is the fuel crisis. Apparently, the government has been artificially pegging the kwacha at 140 to the dollar, when it should really be about 160 (the black market price). This has led to a dearth of US currency in Malawi, which is needed to buy fuel. Criticism has been leveled at the President for recently buying a jet plane: clearly an unneeded luxury in a country as small as Malawi. When I was in Lilongwe the lines at the gas stations would have made Americans ashamed for ever complaining about fuel shortages in the '70's. But things are settling down now, and the recent big news is that two men have held the first ever gay engagement ceremony in Malawi. The story made the front pages, and both men were promptly arrested the next day. In Malawi, being gay carries a maximum punishment of 15 years prison.

So, enough Malawian news, what about my news? I had a relaxing time in Nkhata Bay, and watched a lot of satellite TV at the place I was staying. Before I came to Malawi, I had thought that music videos were a dead art form. In America, MTV and VH1 have entirely replaced music videos with trashy reality TV and the shallowest reflections on pop culture and celebrity gossip (at least on cable). Not having had access to much satellite TV in the states, I discovered that at least in Malawi, VH1 and MTV broadcast actual music videos on their satellite stations. Not only that, but they acutally broadcast nothing but! Which delighted me to no end. I've had a weakness for music videos for as long as I started watching them in earnest in 1989. I was completely hypnotized by the video for “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. I got to see it three or four times, and every time felt like I was in some delightfully bizarre Twin Peaks shadow world that I didn't want to end. So that was the highlight of my new year. Yesterday, I had resolved to leave Nkhata Bay by Ilala, which is a ship that sails up and down lake Malawi. However, they ran out of fuel (fuel crisis) and told me they would leave at 10:30 instead of 7:00am. This meant I would be stranded at Chilumba overnight. I decided to travel by minibus so I could reach home by the end of the day. I took a minibus to Mzuzu, but something was wrong with it. The floor of the minibus became so hot that it melted part of my sandals. I had had it by Mzuzu, and after being thwarted in my attempt to find and buy butter knives (for some reason you can find forks and spoons here but not knives) I got fed up and decided to try and hitch to Chitimba.
So I started walking north, but couldn't find anyone going farther than Ekwendeni (not very far to the north), I decided to forgo hitching for a while and just walk to Mzuzu University where Peace Corps has worked out a deal for free internet. It took me about an hour and I arrived at 11:30. At that time I realized it was Sunday, the day that nothing is open, and discovered that the building I needed didn't open until 1:00pm. So I went back out to the road to hitch. I still couldn't find anything, and my nose was sunburned. Finally I broke down and took a minibus headed to Bwengu, a road stop less than half as far as I was going, but I needed to move. At Bwengu, I paused for a coke and went back to the road. I found a matola headed to Chitimba, but they were charging an arm and a leg. I relented though, because I argued them down 100 kwacha, and they offered to let me ride in the cab, which was good because soon it started raining heavily. I got to Chitimba and headed to the lodge to use the internet. The power was out. I forgot it was Sunday. The power always goes out on Sunday. I don't know why: is it because everyone's at church, or they just decided to schedule blackouts for a lazy day?
I drank a beer and headed home again. My cat was waiting for me- it's nice to have her around. I need someone to be friendly for me these days. It was a frustrating Sunday. Here are some photos of dear Kamwezi, the ill-fated Ilala, and other things. http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/ANewYear#

Things I've done Lately

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:53:24 GMT

Haven't updated much recently: I spent a couple nice weeks relaxing in the hammock I picked up from the transit house auctin down in Lilongwe. I'm waiting on my fence to get rebuilt and getting some fertilizer before I try gardening again. Last time, everything I planted failed except the squash, but I had to leave town for a period of time and couldn't find anyone to water those squash while I was gone, so they died too. However, Some random plant ended up growing very well, I don't know how it got there, but Malawians have told me that the leaves of this plant are good to eat, so I guess I will keep them, and then plant new rows. The rainy season is here now, so watering shouldn't be a problem anymore. My new plan is to plant the seeds in perfectly straight columns so I will be able to pull the weeds when they start to grow. My problem now is that I can't tell what is a weed and what is not so I let everything grow, and the weeds prevent the other plants from succeeding. This way, I can be sure that anything growing outside of those straight lines can safely be pulled.

I have been traveling for the holidays; spent a few days down in Ngalaa few hundred km down the lakeshore from Chitimba for Christmas and had a good relaxing time. Now I am stopping over in Mzuzu and leaving today for Nkhata Bay for New Years', also on the lakeshore. Several dozen Peace Corps Volunteers are expected to be there so it will be a crazy scene I guess, or as volunteers around here are particularly fond of describing things, as "a s**t show." (the asterisks are there for those who are senstive to the use of forbidden noises, or more accurately, sensitive to figures representing certain noises that will echo in the forbidden area of the brain where the secret rituals of noise politics will blast the sounds throughout the internal sound machine inside their minds. But actually, those sounds are bound to be reproduced even with the asterisks, in fact, the asterisks draw more attention to the word, so those forbidden noises will probably be reverberating ever loudly, and increasing all the more as I draw out this parenthetical aside. I guess I'm just embarassed at feeling compelled to use asterisks at all because it seems so utterly absurd to me, and I want everyone to know that I am aware of how absurd it is, lest they come away with an impression of me as having the kind of mind that would regard the use of asterisks as a logical, sensible thing to do.)

What else? Not much really that I feel like writing about now, just thought I'd throw something out there since I had been a while.

Lounging in Lilongwe

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:38:49 GMT

So today is my last day of an extended stay in Lilongwe; I spent all this week on medical hold so I could get some physical therapy for this tight/sore/inflamed muscles in my rib cage that has refused to heal for almost 4 months. I don't know if it will have proved helpful or not, but it was worth a try and I was happy to have a week to relax and take it easy - the Peace Corps gave me some extra kwacha for my living allowance here in Lilongwe and I have been using it to eat food I have been deprived of: pizza dinners, and bagels with buter and jam for breakfast, with coffee and orange juice - So delightful! I have been ordering any kind of food with cheese whenever I can, and taken time to enjoy milkshakes and ice cream. I also stumbled across a weekly softball activity that some American ex-pats in Lilongwe have extended an open invitation to Peace Corps for; we didn't have enough people to play softball, but we played a game of whiffleball, and took batting practice with real softballs and bats afterwards. It was a fun treat to hit some softballs, and it's a good thing we didn't actually play softball (for me anyway) because a few times when a ball went over my head and I tried to run after it, my pants started silding down and would almost fall off. I've lost about 20 pounds here in Malawi, and now none of my pants fit any more - it's no problem as long as I walk slowly and don't keep too much in my pockets - but I need new pants that fit me - I may try going to the Lilongwe amrket to find some today - I hate the market though; I can't stand bargaining or having people crowd me and shout at me, but - I can't afford the clothes that are sold in actual stores.

Matolas and Dehydration

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:36:51 GMT

I've been doing a lot of traveling, which is why I haven't posted in so long. After my last post, I went to Chitipa for Halloween. Chitipa is the section of Malawi that is in the northwesternmost tip; to get there, you need to take a four hour-long matola ride (matolas are any kind of truck in which passengers cram into the cargo area) from Karonga along a very bumpy dirt road. I don't remember the names of the languages that are spoken in Chitipa, but they aren't spoken anywhere else in Malawi. Chitipa is quite isolated, and in some ways it feels like being in the wild west. Halloween there was fun, but immediately afterwards I had to travel back to Dedza for a two-week training session with Peace Corps. After getting back to Karonga, we boarded a bus to Lilongwe that took 12 hours. While on that bus, I became very sick and threw up out the window numerous times; I couldn't keep anything down, not even fluids. We spent the night in Lilongwe, and I visited the Peace Corps doctor, who determined that I was dehydrated enough to require two litres of water administered into my body by I.V. I must have eaten some contaminated food in Chitipa. It took me about a week to recover fully.

We headed to Dedza for the training, but while there, the water pipes burst and could not be prepared. As a result, there was limited water available for washing clothes and ourselves, so I was ready to head back to Lilongwe for a few days to recover before heading back north. Five people from my training group came with me back to Chitimba; I suggested that we hike up to Livingstonia. It's 15 kilometres away, but up the side of a mountain, on a road called Goloti, that consists of treacherous switchbacks all the way up. We were getting tired about halfway there and two hours along when it started to rain heavily and we became drenched with the downpour. We had no rain gear and were caught on the side of the mountain, cold, wet and miserable. Luckily, we came across this place called the Mushroom Farm, where we took refuge. It's this backpackers lodge on the side of the mountain, with excellent vegetarian food, beer and coffee at very steep prices (for Malawi). Nevertheless, we all needed to recover, so we enjoyed the nourishment, and dried off. Luckily, the rain stopped at this time, but it was too late in the day to continue up and we weren't in any mood for it. We hiked back down Goloti, defeated.
Myself and one other person caught colds in the rain, but we decided to make it to Livingstonia the next day; this time by matola. The matola was late, and we had to wait around for three or four hours, but it finally came, and dropped us at Machewe Falls, which is a beautiful waterfall close to the top of the mountain, where the town of Livingstonia sits on a plateau. After visiting the falls, we hiked the rest of the way up. Unfortunately, I became exhausted during that last bit of hiking, and came down with nausea and a fever. I had carted around a jacket and umbrella in case of rain which didn't come, but the jacket at least came in handy when I came down with chills. Livingstonia was very pretty, a mission was built there in 1894, and there are many large conifers, and large pretty buildings due to the money that was responsible for the mission and university that it spawned. Furthermore, the view is spectacular. However, by the time we finished lunch (although I was unable to eat any), there were only a few hours of daylight left and even if there was enough time to hike back down the Goloti, I was in no shape to walk anywhere. Luckily, we found a matola going down; they let me ride in the cab, where I laid down and successfully kept myself from throwing up down the windy, bumpy ride down the mountain. That was two days ago; I spent yesterday recovering, and feel better now, but not completely. I've posted some pictures from the two days of trying to reach Livingstonia, as well as a picture of a huge lizard that got into my bedroom somehow http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/MancheweFalls# . Out of respect for privacy, I haven't been posting pictures that include other people in them at my picasa site, since they are open for anyone to view (except for the Gule Wamkulu, whose identities are safely hidden behind masks and the spectators at the crowd, which was after all, a public event. However, at some point, I plan to start posting pictures that include other people on my Facebook page, which is only viewable by people I have “friended.” So there will eventually be a bunch of more pictures there, including some from Halloween (my costume was Hunter S. Thompson) and from this Livingstonia trip as well.
On Tuesday, I have to go back to Lilongwe again for a week; I was elected to VAC (Volunteer Action Committee), which is a group of Peace Corps Volunteers in Malawi who meet once every two months to serve as representatives of volunteers and communicate with the main office about how their administration and policies are affecting volunteers on the ground. VAC also fulfills some other functions like planning Fourth of July and Thanksgiving celebrations, and distributing some funds for small grants for volunteer projects. It also used to help manage the transit houses and used the money from people staying there to help fund the small grants it distributed. There is some question of where funding for those small grants will come from without the transit houses, but we shall see how that goes. Each group (of roughly 20) elects two members to serve. In Malawi, we have a health, environment and education group arrive every year to stay for two years, so at any given time there are about 12 VAC members. After the VAC meeting, I am staying for the afforementioned Thanksgiving celebration and something called Camp Kky, which is an education Camp where I will be teaching World Geography. That's all for now!
. Out of respect for privacy, I haven't been posting pictures that include other people in them at my picasa site, since they are open for anyone to view (except for the Gule Wamkulu, whose identities are safely hidden behind masks and the spectators at the crowd, which was after all, a public event. However, at some point, I plan to start posting pictures that include other people on my Facebook page, which is only viewable by people I have “friended.” So there will eventually be a bunch of more pictures there, including some from Halloween (my costume was Hunter S. Thompson) and from this Livingstonia trip as well.
On Tuesday, I have to go back to Lilongwe again for a week; I was elected to VAC (Volunteer Action Committee), which is a group of Peace Corps Volunteers in Malawi who meet once every two months to serve as representatives of volunteers and communicate with the main office about how their administration and policies are affecting volunteers on the ground. VAC also fulfills some other functions like planning Fourth of July and Thanksgiving celebrations, and distributing some funds for small grants for volunteer projects. It also used to help manage the transit houses and used the money from people staying there to help fund the small grants it distributed. There is some question of where funding for those small grants will come from without the transit houses, but we shall see how that goes. Each group (of roughly 20) elects two members to serve. In Malawi, we have a health, environment and education group arrive every year to stay for two years, so at any given time there are about 12 VAC members. After the VAC meeting, I am staying for the afforementioned Thanksgiving celebration and something called Camp Sky, which is an education Camp where I will be teaching World Geography. That's all for now!

Cats and Vegetables

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:08:15 GMT

My vegetable project continues on its way, but most of it is lying in the ruins of doubt. Kamwezi is well; she had an eye infection that seems to have cleared up, aside from a lot of crust left over on the edges of her eyelid. She is still full of crazy energy, but when she sleeps, she has a tendency to flop down and lie still like a dead thing, often in unusual positions. One time I thought she had actually died while she was sleeping; I kept prodding her so see if she was alive and she didn't move at all until I had done it five or six times. I put up some pictures of some of the strange positions she gets into when sleeping: believe it or not, she is actually asleep in these photos. They are up with some pictures of the aforementioned vegetable project here http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/SeedBed# . There are three successive photos there: one which I already posted, and two more. My neighbor helped me construct these grass coverings he had suggested to me as a method of retaining moisture for the seedlings. The one closest to the camera represents how they are supposed to look; the other two represent what happened to them after neighborhood cats were finished playing with them. After Kamwezi scared them off, I didn't have that problem anymore, and she was small enough to just run underneath the structure that was still intact at that time when she would play in the yard. Last week, I took the grass coverings down, and the remaining picture is the result. I had spotted green things growing under the grass, but now that I have taken the grass down, it appears that almost all of these plants are probably just weeds.

I have also discovered that I may not have the heart for gardening (as appears to be the case in an ever growing list of practical activities). Having identified the weeds, it occurred to me that I should pull them up, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I looked at the fresh, healthy and growing little plants, and reflected that the only reason they had come into being was my dutiful watering every evening. How could I pull these plants up, the children of my creation? I couldn't. Besides, I wasn't entirely sure if any of these little hopeful green plants might actually be the vegetables I had planted and intended to grow, and not a weed after all. Maybe if I could be sure of that I could take counsel with my conscience and find it within me to pull the weeds – I don't know. I'm leaving for some training this week, so posts to this blog may be sporadic for awhile. I considered just letting the whole garden go rather than get a neighbor to water the weeds for me, but I am pretty sure the squash I planted is actually growing, so I'll have someone water for me while I'm gone, hoping that there is still a chance for some of the other actual vegetables to grow as well, and that the weeds that are there haven't already prevented those ones from growing.

An amusing anecdote: I was attending a meeting with some community members and they were speaking to each other in Chitumbuka. As usual, I can only make out a few individual words and can't follow what they're saying at all. I was listening for words that I could write down and ask about, but it is so hard to really identify the actual syllables someone is saying and at which places the breaks between words are supposed to go. Finally, I thought I heard something I recognized, but couldn't remember the meaning of; I wrote it down: "moriquendi." After a break in the conversation, I asked what it meant. The person I asked scratched his head and said it wasn't any word he was familiar with. I then remembered that Chitumbuka doesn't use the letter "q," the sound of the English "qu" is represented by "kw" at all times, but I definately remembered that the word I was after was spelled this way. "It must be a French word," I thought, (I had been studying French before learning I would go to Malawi. I wracked my brain, but couldn't remember what moriquendi means in French. Then I remembered that in French, "qu" is always pronounced "k." Were there any exceptions? I wasn't entirely sure, but I didn't think so. I knew that the pronunciation of moriquendi used the "kw" sound; that was how I remembered it anyway. "It must be a Spanish word," I thought, since Spanish is the only other language I have studied. I tried to remember what moriquendi meant in Spanish, and soon remembered that like French, the "qu" in Spanish is "k." Now I was frustrated; not only was I continuing to fail to learn Chitumbuka, I was hearing words incorrectly when it was spoken, and they turned out to be words that didn't exist in any language at all, but I have a distinct memory of. "My mind is deliberately refusing to learn this language," I thought. "It's the only explanation."
But a few days later, after I forgot all about it, the answer came to me out of nowhere: I knew what moriquendi was. Moriquendi is a word in the language of "Quenya," as anyone with an extensive knowledge of J.R.R. Tolein's Silmarillion will recall. When the elves first came into being in the bygone days of the First Age, they were the only speaking peoples (there were no human beings yet). They invented a language called Quenya, (which essentially means "speech") and dubbed themselves the "Quendi," which signifies "the people who speak." As time went by, the Quendi (the elves) broke into different groups. You see, the Valar, (who were equivalent basically to Greek Gods in Tolkien's world) had forsaken Middle Earth, where the Elves awakened, and lived in a land over the Western Ocean. They summoned the elves, and said if they would travel to this land that they could live in bliss with the Valar forever. Some of the elves forsook the summons, preferring to stay in Middle Earth, but other groups of Elves, took up the journey. Some of these elves didn't complete the journey for various reasons though. All the elves who never made it to the land of the Valar were collectively called the "moriquendi," meaning, "the elves of darkness." You see, at the time, the Valar had these two sacred trees in their land that gave off this kind of holy light. Middle Earth in those days had no light but starlight. It was only when Morgoth, the Black Enemy, destroyed the two trees that the Valar used all their powers to bring forth a single fruit from each tree before they died completely. One of those fruits became the sun, and the other the moon. So this is why the elves who never lived among the Valar were called moriquendi, or "elves of darkness," they had never beheld the light of the trees, or which the sun and moon are only flawed remnants of.
For those who are only familiar with Lord of the Rings movies, all the elf-characters from that are moriquendi except Galadriel. You see, Galadriel was a member of a group of elves who went into exile in Middle Earth to pursue Morgoth and attempt to regain the silmarils which he stole from Feanor. Feanor was an elf who had captured the light of the two trees in three jewels called silmarils. He was Galdriel's half-uncle (her father's half brother). These elves were almost completely destroyed in their hopeless war against Morgoth. Only Beren and Luthien were able to capture one silmaril during all this time. Their grandaughter Elwing took the silmaril along with her husband Earendil back over the seas to the Valar who finally agreed to conquer Morgoth. They set Earendil to sail the skies at night with this silmaril, which we see as the planet Venus. The other silmarils were lost. So in Lord of the Rings, even the mighty Elrond and Arwen are moriquendi. Elrond was born in Middle Earth (Earendil and Elwing were his parents). In the book Lord of The Rings, there are a few of the exiles like Galadriel that show up, but she is the only one who is a major enough of a character to have made it into the movies. Her husband is an elf she met in Middle Earth who had never sailed West, as Legolas also never did. At the end, when they sail away at the Grey Havens, they are going to the Valar, and Galdriel returns there at last. But the invitation is still open to elves like Legolas, and in due time they end up sailing themselves, when they have finally wearied of Middle Earth. Arwen of course, can never sail, because she makes the choice of Luthien, to be a mortal woman and die, never to see her father Elrond again (or her mother, (Galadriel's daughter) who already left after being wounded by orcs and losing the zest for Middle Earth as a result.
I could write about Tolkienesqe mythology all day, but I think what I've already provided is more than sufficient. I used to enjoy seeing Venus in the sky in America, you can see it after dusk and before dawn in the West (as I understand) but here in the Southern Hemisphere, I don't know how to find it, or whether it can be seen at all.