Welcome to Malawi!

Well, what’s traveling without a little adventure, huh? Neil, Libby, and I arrived in Malawi to find that our luggage had not. The airport personnel claimed that it was because the aircraft we took from South Africa was too heavy. My personal theory is that we had a somewhat tight connection that our luggage simply didn’t make. Regardless, we asked at the baggage claim if our luggage would be there, and we were told definitely. When we were some of the only people still waiting at the carousel, one of the baggage people went in back and then came back with our bad news. He assured us, though, that our baggage would arrive the next day.

We exchanged some US dollars for Malawian kwacha at 155 kwacha per dollar. We had no idea if this was a good or bad exchange rate, so we only changed a little bit. Then, we were met at the airport by Linda.

You’re wondering who Linda is. We were, too. Sort of. Only, she was white and had a sign with our names on it, so we figured she was trustworthy. We had arranged to stay with missionaries from our church in East Lansing, Phil and Krista, who were working in Lilongwe. We thought one of them would be picking us up, but as it turns out, Linda, their coworker, had to drop off her husband at the airport anyway, so she was our ride.

She was very kind to have waited for us, even though we arrived about a half an hour late and then our luggage dilemma took even more time. She gave us a brief intro to the country on the way, and then dropped us off with Phil and Krista. They are extremely nice people, and wonderful hosts. They have a cute almost-one-year-old daughter, Cara. We dropped off our bags and they asked us what we wanted to do. We asked what they normally did on Monday afternoons, and their reply was music to our ears: ultimate frisbee.

Now who would’ve thought that that’s what we would be doing as soon as we got off the plane in Malawi? Had I taken the opportunity to guess, I may have said nap, take a walk, go to a market, hang out with Phil and Krista... any of a number of things, but ultimate was not even on the radar.

Since we only had our carry-ons, we didn’t really have any clothes suitable for the game, but fortunately, in a house of Frisbee players, there’s usually some extras. So, we walked about 10 minutes or so to a nearby park, where a pick-up game was already in progress. We played for probably about an hour and a half before we dropped with exhaustion.

We went back and made dinner with our hosts: curry! It was delicious. We debated for awhile whether to take the 7am or 11am bus the next day to Blantyre. We decided why get up early, when we wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time to work anyhow? So, we chose the 11am bus.

However, the next morning when Libby and Phil went to get us tickets, they informed us that the 11am bus wasn’t running that day. No explanation. Just the facts. So, we decided on a minibus, which run whenever they get full throughout the day.

We called Terrie Taylor, the physician coordinating our rotation, with our plans, and she begged us not to take such a “death trap” and to wait for the 4:30pm bus. We rejoiced at the opportunity to spend a day exploring Lilongwe, so we gladly accepted her proposal to wait.

Phil was wonderful and took us around by car to show us some of the city. The layout is very strange. The people who planned the city had lots of foresight... a little too much, perhaps. They planned for lots of growth, and thus set up their financial center and their government center and their residential centers all apart from one another. The problem is that they’re pretty darn far apart from each other, to the point that you can’t walk from one zone to another. Oops.

We saw their half-finished Parliament building. Taiwan was funding it to thank Malawi for being one of the few countries to recognize Taiwan’s independence. But then Malawi decided it could get along just as well if it allied with China. For some odd reason Taiwan didn’t like that decision and abruptly stopped its financial support. And for some equally odd reason, China didn’t want to pay Taiwan’s contractors to finish the construction project. So, now, Lilongwe has a perpetually half-finished Parliament Building.

However, there were definitely some very nice areas, too. There was a super fancy USAid building. The building that currently houses the government is really nice. The tallest building (13 stories) in the country is in Lilongwe. Some buildings, taken out of context, would seem perfectly at home in any major US city.

We got dropped off in one of the downtowns and set off by foot. We walked around a lot and had fun visiting some of the open-air markets. There were wood carvers on one corner who made absolutely beautiful stuff by hand, but their... persistence was a bit distressing, so we didn’t spend a lot of time around them. We went to a post office, so if you happen to be a cousin of mine reading this, in need of a get well card, it’ll be fun to see when it arrives.

We went to “Indian Town,” and had Indian food for lunch. DELICIOUS! It turns out that the Indians who settled in Malawi were such good business people that the Malawians couldn’t compete. The government got mad and decided they all had to relocate to this small area within Lilongwe. They did (resulting in many delicious restaurants and a pretty strong presence of Indian culture in a small area), but the Malawians didn’t really take advantage and take over any of the Indian businesses.

We went to a small American-style mall to wait until it was time to go. The azulu (white people) to Malawian ratio was extremely high there. Everything was about 30 times more expensive than in the open-air markets. The one perk, though, was that we found a place that offered five minutes of free wifi - just enough to email people to let them know we’d arrived safely.

That pretty much spent our time in Lilongwe, and then we headed to the bus station. It started pouring while we were waiting, so we were pleased to be inside. The ride itself was beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous landscape - all sorts of mountains/hills all over.

We arrived in Blantyre well after dark, met up with Terrie Taylor, and she gave us a ride to her home - our home for the next month. And there I will stop, since this has been a long entry.