A Moment in Malawi

(With all due apologies for not posting in forever and ever...)

After far too long, Desirée and I are together again, this time in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was a long schlep to get here. I took a flight from London to Abu Dhabi to Johannesburg, and what with various buses and mix-ups in between, it took about 30 hours from leaving my doorstep to arriving at my hotel.

The Abu Dhabi airport, where I had a six hour layover, is a wonder to behold. It's surprisingly small (albeit not for long -- they're currently building a multi-billion-dollar addition, because in the UAE something doesn't even officially exist unless you've dropped a few billion on it), and feels like the inside of a magic mushroom crossed with a tokamak.



I thought that it would have been altogether improved by the addition of a large circuitous caterpillar smoking a hookah, but maybe that's just me.

Desirée, meanwhile, spent a week with some dear friends in Malawi, where she took the following amazing photo. There's a story behind this photo, but I'll let her tell it some other time.

to begin again, or not...

Wow, I must apologize profusely for not making a post in the past 6 weeks. I have no idea where I would even begin, so for now I won't. The past two months have been both incredible and terrible at various points, and I am learning so much. In two days (early in the morning on Saturday, the 8th of December) I fly to meet my dear friends Dustin and Cara in Malawi. I will be staying with them in a town in southern Malawi called Balaka, and meeting all the kids of Bola Moyo (the non-profit I worked with all last year) that I have heard about for so long. While I am there I anticipate that I will not have internet access. Anyone who urgently needs to reach me can call me on my friend Cara's phone:

+265 04104731
(for all of you in the states, I believe that means you'd dial 011-00265-04104731. If you have a hard time, try omitting some of the zeroes.)

Ten days after that, on the 18th, I fly to Johannesburg, where I will meet up with Nathan after not seeing him for 2.5 months. A few days after that we fly to Cape Town where we'll be spending Christmas. I anticipate having much better internet access in SA than I've had here in Kenya, and at that point I'll be uploading some photos to this blog! Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here is a (sorry, poor quality) photo I took of the sunset last night here in Takaungu while I was at a friend's house for dinner. After it got dark, the stars were so beautiful I could not stop staring at the sky. I wish I could have captured it and shared it with all of you.



I come back to this beautiful place on the third of January.

Happy holidays everyone. You are greatly missed.

~Desirée

Children

There is so much I need to write about the work and realizations I’m having here, and it will come, but for now I'll make a lighter post with photos from the last week or two (I’ve decreased the quality of them so they’re easier to upload). One of the things I love about the village where I live is how full it is of children. I’m sure all of Africa is like that. I’ve never considered myself a “kid person” if you know what I mean, but it is difficult to not become one while you’re here. Here are some of my favorite photos of the kids:

This is Habibu. He's an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle and their 7 children. He is a total troublemaker and one of my favorite kids in Takaungu.




This is Habibu and me at the beach yesterday. I went swimming for hours with Habibu and literally nine other children. I go swimming in shorts and a tee-shirt here instead of my bathing suit due to modesty expectations in the village.




This is Fatuma, Habibu's "cousin sister." She also just goes by Tuma. She is one of the most hyper and brightest children I have met here. She is delightful. Yesterday after she got out of the ocean, she rolled around in the sand for a very long time. Then she found a strange piece of seaweed and decided to have fun with it. Of course she positioned it perfectly on the top of her head.



On a related note, last Saturday was Eid (the end of Ramadan) and it seemed like all of the village boys spent the late afternoon on the beach. I ventured down with a couple other people and there were literally hundreds of children there. These boys were jumping off the low cliff in front of us (yeah, I know, not a good idea) and kept tickling our feet.





Last night I went to the home of Katana, one of the employees of the East African Center, to learn how to make coconut oil from scratch. His wife (who is one of my adult education students and speaks no English) and their four wonderful children (and a couple extras from around the neighborhood) were there. Here I am helping make the coconut oil (I look kind of crazed in this photo; sorry)




This is Frances, who is 21 and not an employee of the EAC, but he is Katana's best friend and always seems to show up (who has kindly offered to be my Kenyan husband, which I have politely and firmly declined):




And here are two of Katana's kids (the eldest and youngest) (the one in pink is his baby sister and the one in a white teeshirt is his brothers's child; that's Kate, another volunteer's, hand on the side of the photo):

Life in Africa

You'll have to forgive me for this text-heavy entry. I have yet to
find an internet connection here in Kenya that is adequate for
uploading photos. I will get to that eventually, I am sure. Rest
assured I have been taking plenty of photos. I even want on a safari
last weekend so I have plenty of nice shots from that, and a few from
around the village. Today you'll just have to settle for narrative,
and I commend you if you make it through it all.

***

I have settled into what can only be succinctly described as an
alternate reality in the past 13 days. The first few days here were
incredibly hard, adjusting to life without Nathan, without very
reliable communication technology, and learning upon my first day
here that the two projects I specifically came here to work on with
this organization (and why I chose it over other places) were either
defunct or had never existed in the first place. Apparently mass
miscommunication with interns is extremely common for this
organization, and truly it is prevalent with NGOs like this
throughout the "developing world," so my unpleasant realization was
nothing special. Thus, I've spent the past fortnight reconciling my
existence here, being away from the things, people, and creatures of
my former life and trying to figure out my meaning in the present
when the particular projects I'd had my heart set on do not exist in
the world.

I am still very much a sponge of experience at the moment. Yesterday
I went all over the area, taking three matatus (what they call the
public taxis here, which are smallish vans packed like sardines with
at least 15 people) and spending at least 4 hours in transport. I
was with fellow volunteers for the organization. I had a lot of time
to think and observe during that transit time, although I of course
was a bit preoccupied (literally) hanging on for dear life in the
vehicle driven by some of the fastest, most reckless matatu drivers I
have ever come across. At one point the vehicle slowed down as we
passed a fresh accident--a large passenger bus that had tipped over
into the nearby ditch, and we could see its wheels still turning.
The passengers who were better off were standing on the side of the
road, obviously stunned and injured. Everyone in the the matatu grew
quiet, and for a moment the driver seemed tempted to come to a full
stop as we observed the accident and the horrible aftermath. I felt
terrified and full of dread for the people still inside that bus.
But half a moment later we were speeding on faster than ever before.
I felt a twinge in my chest and pulled my seat belt a bit tighter.

As I looked out the window at the surrounding cicil plantations, to
distract myself from the ever-present fear of an accident, I thought
to myself, this is Africa. This is the place I have longed to return
to for six years, a place I have hoped to devote myself to in some
unknowable capacity for the entirety of my adult life now. This is a
place of overwhelming emotions, a place where I see everything in
greater exposure, in brighter and darker color--where I feel in
almost every moment how fragile and fleeting life really is, where
people and creatures live so close to the edge of life and death that
the two often merge together, and where we cannot all help but be
confronted with the reality of our own mortality, in nearly every
corner we look.

I am grateful for this. This bizarre sensation--is it a thrill? Not
exactly. It gives me reason to be to say thank you for each breath I
take in, for every meal I partake in, every step I take along the hot
paths (literal and figurative) of sand and grit I take to work and
home every day. This is what I love more than I could hope to describe.

***

I live with a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim part of the
village. I arrived here about halfway through Ramadan, and so I have
been eating by myself for breakfast and lunch (though the family
provides the food for me, as part of my program fee) until today.
Today is Eid, the last day of Ramadan, and the first day after a
month of fasting. I myself observe that Ramadan is the strangest
mixture of asceticism and gluttony, where they fast all day and gorge
themselves all night. So it is not a strict "fast" as many frame
it. The family I participate in is mostly comprised of women. They
are somewhere in the process of cooking and cleaning the vast
majority of the time. The two younger women (my host sister and host
sister-in-law) both work as schoolteachers at two primary schools in
the village. Compared to many of the other host families utilized
the organization, mine is pretty conservative. Only yesterday did I
see my host-sister in law's hair for the first time (and I live with
her!). The family is split into two houses: one house, where my host
sister Ummi stays with her mother Ameena and father Mohammed.
Another, where I stay, with my host brother Salim, his wife Sharifa,
and the uncle Mzee Salim (Mzee is an honorific meaning "old man"). I
rarely see the father Mohammed as he eats separately from all of us,
usually in the living room in front of the television as he chain
smokes. Mohammed doesn't go to mosque and doesn't do any of the
things most Muslim men usually do, which I understand to be
incredibly unusual in this community. I have barely exchanged more
than 50 words with the man. His wife and his children, however, are
fairly devout in the practice of their religion, the women in
particular.

***

I think I live with the typical Muslim man from the coast of Kenya--
my host brother, Salim. He just married his wife Sharifa in mid-
August, so they are still definitely newlyweds. Salim usually lives
and works in Nairobi, but he has returned to the village for the
whole of Ramadan. This means he leaves tomorrow to return to
Nairobi, taking a one hour matatu ride into Mombasa, and a grueling 9
hour bus ride to Nairobi after that. Salim is a hard one for me to
figure out (which is part of why he is typical), because he is
obviously devout in his faith, strictly observing fasting during the
day (while working long hard hours at the family's shamba, or farm)
and talking to me often of Islam and Islamic beliefs and practices
and how he is happy to be married now. His wife stays here in the
village while he works in the big bad city of Nairobi. He tells me
that he often goes dancing and drinking in clubs in Nairobi, but that
he doesn't want his wife to know-- he tells me this when she is in
the very same room, somehow thinking that she won't hear or
understand, when her hearing and English comprehension is perfectly
adequate to catch what he is telling me. He also tells me that I
should come visit Nairobi sometime, and he'll take me out drinking
and dancing with his friends. I just kind of nod and smile because I
know he is trying to be nice in his bizarre way. I would like to go
to Nairobi sometime, but not in that capacity. Salim told me just
the other night that he used to be a delinquent, drinking and
frequently smoking "the marijuana," though he doesn't do that so much
anymore since now he is married. Just this morning he told me about
the many prostitutes there are in Nairobi. Salim talks to me a lot,
and though he is weird and says things that make me uncomfortable
quite often, I can't help but think I will miss him. The women here
don't talk to me very much at all--only to communicate about the most
necessary of things. Hopefully that will change after Salim goes
back to the city.

***

I am lucky to live with a family who has electricity and decent
running water, and a sturdy house (even though they keep cardboard on
their windows instead of glass or bars in some parts of their house)
that will not fall over in the rain. I visited an adjacent village a
few days ago, called Vuma, which is filled mostly with Giriama people
(the tribal people, who are worse off in terms of poverty than the
Muslim Swahili people, of which my host family is a part) and I saw
tiny mud huts with no windows which many, many people inhabit. I saw
young boys doing backbreaking work in a coral quarry--this place was
at one time, millions of years ago, covered by ocean water as the
coral is only about 15 feet below the soil, though when I mentioned
this to the local man acting as my guide, he laughed and told me he
did not understand (I could tell that he thought I was crazy).
People here also think that the wazungu (the white people, literally
Europeans) are crazy because we believe in mythical giant lizard
creatures called dinosaurs who were somehow mysteriously killed off,
and now their corpses are responsible for the petroleum beneath the
earth's surface. It really is one of the weirdest things you've ever
heard, if you stop and think about it, and I'm not sure how much I
would believe it if I hadn't seen fully reconstructed dinosaur
skeletons in museums with my own two eyes. But there is no museum
out here of any kind, and you can find men above the age of 20
attending the 8th grade. Attending secondary school is an absolute
luxury, and university level education is not found in the village.
The very few who have attended university no longer live in the
village, that is for sure.

***
I wanted to leave the moment I got here. While I tell myself it
would be much easier if only Nathan were with me, I'm not sure that's
entirely correct. Though I am enjoying myself, the thought of being
here for six months sounds excruciating to me at this point. But
this place is full of surprises and reversals, so I know that in
another two weeks it is entirely possible that I may never want to
leave, or I may be as homesick as ever (for a home that no longer
exists, try that on for size), or BOTH. Viva la contradiction. That
is what I love (and hate) about it here. That is why I can't help
but come back. That is why I want to stay even when I want to leave.

Salisbury/Stonehenge/Avebury tour

We woke early Sunday morning and headed to the other side of Oxford to meet up with a tour group called "Cotswald Roaming." We drove through lots of sleepy yet beautiful English towns on the way to our first stop, the town of Salisbury, which has the second tallest cathedral spire in Europe (THE tallest being somewhere in Germany) and the oldest working clock in Europe. It also held one of the four original copies of the Magna Carta.









After lunch and seeing the cathedral, we traveled onward to Stonehenge! Alas, there were way too many tourists milling about to get any fabulous photos. Still pretty awesome.








We then traveled to Avebury, which is actually a LOT larger than Stonehenge but gets quite a bit less press. It's different in that the stones in Stonehenge were all shaped by humans, but the stones in Avebury were chosen for their specific shape and not fashioned at all by humans. It is magnificent, and also different because it is not roped off and surrounded by lots of tourists, but rather surrounded by sheep grazing in the grasses.






There's also a road built right into the middle of the Avebury site. Apparently up until recent decades, there was a ramshackle village (with no electricity or running water!) built around the old stones and farmers were actively trying to destroy them. The government of Britain convinced the village's old inhabitants to move down the road into much nicer government-built accommodation and they found and restored much of the original stones of Avebury. It's an absolutely breathtaking site and we enjoyed frolicking in the fields with the sheep (even if we had to watch where we stepped). We returned to Oxford that evening totally worn out, so decided upon an easy dinner at the Eagle & Child, which has apparently become our regular pub.

It was Norman's last day in town. He left on the bus back to Heathrow the next morning around half past 9. We bid him a bit of a sad goodbye and spent the rest of the day recovering from the whirlwind visit.

I am a visitor here - I am not permanent...

Those of you who are familiar with the Postal Service (the band) will recognize the lyrics in my title. The song is actually about Washington DC, but it seems appropriate for my life right now. I've been a visitor everywhere I've been in the past 6 weeks, and that feeling is not going to dissipate (for me) at all in the next 6 months as I travel onward. Hopefully Nathan will begin to really build a home here while I am gone, but soon, very soon, we will be on different journeys experiencing totally different things. It is a very surreal concept to ponder, as I prepare myself to live a life utterly unknown to me until this point - as I prepare to sink myself into the reality of a population who has lived on the other side of the world from me all of my life.

But this surreality is a gift, and I can only hope that I rise to the challenge of adjusting to it accordingly. This entire year is a gift that I have been looking forward to for so long now, and most of the time it is difficult to believe that this time has actually arrived.

I am relishing my ability to post so often to this blog while I still can. Since my internet access in Kenya is going to be so sparse, I will probably not be able to post here very much when I am there. When I'm able, I will email blog entries to Nathan and he will post them for me.

Anyway, I digress... I should tell you all about this weekend and the end of Norman's (Nathan's dad's) visit. After we returned from Bath on Friday night, we were thinking we would take another day trip out of town on Saturday. That did not happen. We were all feeling tuckered and tried to leave town, but wound up staying in Oxford instead. Not a bad "fall back" plan, however. We visited Christchurch College, which was heavily featured in a lot of the Harry Potter movies. (Although I have not read Harry Potter and have only seen two of the movies, I was still kind of impressed by this fact.) One can see why: it is a grand, grand place - just as nice as many palaces could be.


(the inner courtyard area)


(the ceiling)


(the chapel)


(the dining room... aka Hogwarts Dining Room in the Harry Potter Movies)


All Soul's College is another beautiful college, and is situated on Radcliffe Square next to the famous Radcliffe Camera (which is probably THE most famous building in Oxford - I have posted a few photos of it before):




After hitting a few pubs that afternoon, we caught an awesome sunset in the park next to our flat on the way home.





It was a happy day...

(Norman took this photo)





The following day (Sunday) Nathan, Norman & I got up bright and early (for us) and caught a little tour to Salisbury, Stonehenge & Avebury. I will save that for another post and another day, as we both have to get up early in the morning - Nathan is going to a Personal Rapid Transit Conference in a little English town called Daventry, and I've decided to take the day in London to go exploring by myself.

A crazy photo update!

I've been slacking on the blog posts, but mostly due to being insanely busy. I've got tons of photos to share but don't have the time or the energy to upload them all, so here are a few with some brief explanations.

Last Friday we spent most of the day in London, getting lost. We found Russell Square, with this awesome Victorian building Nathan became completely obsessed with (we'd love to live in the area one day, but were recently told that rents run around £2000/mo for a one bedroom flat. yikes!):








Nathan's father has been in town since Saturday the 15th, so we've been entertaining him (and ourselves) since his arrival. The first several days we spent gallavanting around Oxford (because there's just so much to explore):

(Some of Oxford's famous spires, paired with the Radcliffe Camera)


(The Bridge of Sighs)


Lest you think everything in Oxford is quaint, let me assure it is not. Most of the time it is quite crowded, and I think September is still very much a part of the high tourist season. Last weekend was alumni weekend here, and the town was bustling, to say the least. Here's a portion of the crowd we encountered on Cornmarket Street, one of the main roads in the downtown area here:



Here Nathan and I are at the Eagle & Child Pub, the famous Oxford pub where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to meet and socialize/argue, likely in the very booth they utilized (we were both very tired this particular day as you can probably tell):


Oh oh! One thing I should mention is that we've refreshed Nathan's wardrobe since we arrived here, out of necessity. He needs some decent things to wear for business school. Here he is looking spiffy:



We spent the past two days in Bath. We got a fantastic deal on a wonderful boutique B&B with a lot of character. It was definitely among the fanciest places we've ever stayed, and probably the best value. I was very happy with it.... one of those budget traveler's delights.

Bath is incredibly beautiful but very touristy. To escape a lot of the tourism, the first day we spent about an hour walking along the canal, which had numerous hand-cranked lochs for the many boats that travel through.



The houses along the canal are beautiful but not ostentatious like much of the rest of Bath...





Here are some of my two favorite dorks enjoying themselves on this particular walk:



We broke down and took one of those tacky open-top tourist buses. We had less than two full days there and so wanted to make sure we saw the highlights of the town. The bus tour helped even though it rained on the open top a bit. Here's one of the famous views of Bath, of Pulteny Bridge:




This morning we visited the beautiful Bath Abbey built in the 16th century (I loved its ceiling!):








And of course we couldn't leave the city without visiting the famous Roman baths. Too bad they're not open to the public for bathing - due to the lead pipes and something about a strange bacteria growing in the water (?!):






Now we're back home in Oxford for the evening. We've got a tour set up on Sunday to visit Stonehenge, and tomorrow we may head into London, depending on our energy level.

I hope to write up a more substantive update on the past couple of weeks sometime next week after Norman leaves. Things are not going to get less hectic, though, as the starting date for Nathan's program draws more near and preparations for my Kenya departure kick into high gear (I leave a week from this Sunday).

Photography from the Christchurch meadow

Nathan here now, with apologies for the infrequency of my posts. I'm trying to sink into Oxford in a kind of subconscious, subliminal sort of way. Periodically it hits me that I actually live here now, but mostly I'm just putting one foot in front of the other: opening a bank account, finding the best places to buy trousers or fennel seed or any number of other things. But everyday life takes place against a backdrop of occasionally quite staggering beauty.

I think I'll like my year here. A lot.

Our graveyard intrigue

The last blog entry I posted (just a few moments ago, though I back-dated it) was written by me on Thursday and Friday while I did not have internet access. We got internet access at our flat on Monday, just yesterday. But the university seems extremely paranoid that wireless presents a major security risk, so we are plugged in with old-fashioned ethernet cables. It is also nigh-impossible to find wireless anywhere around town. I suppose we will make do. ;)

Our first several days here, I was slacking on the photo-taking. I'd been an incessant photo-snapping tourist for three weeks and I needed break. Plus, I figured, this is our new home and I will be here for quite a while (relatively speaking), and thus I felt less compelled to snap photos. However, yesterday was an exceptionally beautiful, warm day and we spent most of it gallavanting around town on foot with camera in tow. I haven't found the perfect bicycle yet, and I may just have to wait until I come back from Kenya, but Nathan did break down and purchase one for himself. (Understandably, as fairly soon he will be riding it everywhere.) Everyone here commutes by bike, and it is impossible to really survive here for long without one. In the meanwhile, we've been walking wherever we need to go, and it usually amounts to 6-7 miles or more per day. We're avoiding the buses, because they're totally confusing and the service is rather poor. Plus, it's beautiful out lately and the best way to really get to know a city is on foot.

We haven't taken many photos of the "Dreaming Spires" that make Oxford so famous, because frankly they are a dime a dozen here. We've been saving our photo-snapping for more unusual sites, and those brief moments when the light comes out to play.











Yesterday we made a great find: an old graveyard in the St. Cross-Holywell Church by Linacre College. It was an old graveyard, and many of the headstones were so old that they were completely illegible. The stones became legible once they reached death dates in the 1700s.



What was particular intriguing about this graveyard is that several parts of it were obviously completely covered up with several feet of ivy (for perhaps many decades) that had only been cleared recently, and several parts of it had yet to be cleared. Many of the headstones were covered and tangled up with at least three feet of ivy above their tops. We're not sure why, but some of the headstones had been incredibly well-preserved (perhaps by the ivy?), and some headstones with death dates from the 1860s looked not to be more than 10 years old but apparently were.








Nathan insisted on doing a photo shoot in the graveyard, but the light was a bit unpredictable:



We spent at least an hour wandering around in this magical graveyard. We definitely intend to go back. Fortunately we both have the same morbid interest in the beauty that is old cemeteries, and Oxford is chock full of them. I was hoping that someone in Oxford would be offering tours of all the old Oxford graveyards, but a google search hasn't pulled up anything of that sort.

On our way home, we stopped for Happy Hour at a place called Kazbar, which is a pretty famous little spot in Oxford. They serve tapas and interesting foofy drinks from around the world. I took my revenge by turning the camera on Nathan (unfortunately the light wasn't great and they turned out grainy, but the expression on Nathan's face is still worth seeing):






Today Nathan is finishing up some administrative financial aid paperwork for his program, and we're going to apply for a British bank account (which is a difficult feat, as I understand it). Tomorrow we're off on a daytrip to London. Saturday Nathan's father, Norman, arrives for a 10-day visit. So far we've got trips tentatively planned to Bath and Stonehenge. In the meanwhile I'm enjoying the slower pace we've established and our little ventures around town.