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You asked what my typical day is like. Life is a lot more centered around the schedule of the sun than what we’re used to. Especially since, for instance, I am one of the few volunteers with both running water and electricity in their houses. And right now I am writing this by the light of my headlamp because my electricity has gone out again. I would be writing by candlelight except that the mosquitoes were annoying me and so I got inside my bed net. There’s something you need to know about mosquitoes. There’s malaria here and mosquitos that have been infected by the parasite that causes malaria are only different from regular mosquitos in two ways: 1) they only come out between dusk and dawn; and 2) they don’t buzz. This is relevant because, while I prefer to be bitten by noisy mosquitoes in general, when I am in my room, safely behind my bed net, I prefer malarial mosquitoes to be in my room. Non malarial mosquitoes can buzz near enough to my ear to keep me awake, but when malarial mosquitoes are outside my net they can’t do anything to me except plot their revenge as I stick my thumbs in my ears, waggle my fingers, and say, “nanny nanny boo boo” to them.

The upshot of this is that, without tv, computers, lights, etc., we tend to go to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it gets light again. Because of that I usually wake up around 5:30am without an alarm. Sometimes I do yoga, sometimes I do chores until transport from the college I work at comes around 7:30 (pronounced, “half seven). Most volunteers live closer to their work than I do and for most the only transport is by foot or bike. I work at a nursing college, mostly lecturing, although I’m getting into visiting the students on the wards in the hospital, too. ‘Town” is a 20 minute walk from school, so I often take that walk on my 1.5 hr lunch (normal here is classes start at 8, tea from 9:30-10, lunch from 12-1:30, tea from 3:30-4, classes end at 5.) to do my produce shopping at the market. I have to shop for produce 2-3times/week because of my lack of refrigerator (well, my roommate, Derek—another health volunteer who was supposed to go home last July but extended through March and then his landlord wouldn’t prep his house for rainy season so now he and his dog Fifo are staying with me—brought an African refrigerator which consists of a large metal pot. You put produce in the pot, put the pot in a bucket half filled with cool water and it slows down the spoilage rate of the produce. At his old house Derek had a proper, ceramic African refrigerator, but it sweat so much he never used it. Anyway, our makeshift fridge doesn’t preserve so well that I don’t have to shop multiple times a week.)

Then I catch transport home. When I get home, I make nsima for the dogs: Fifo, Derek’s ~3 year old black and white dog, and Ujeni (it means whatchamacallit or thingamajig), my ~7 month old Malawian mutt. Gandalf, the dog next door, usually is so excited by the prospect of me possibly sharing some of my dogs’ food with him that his tail starts wagging his butt.

Nsima is the staple food here in Malawi. Something like it is the staple food all the way from South Africa to Kenya, actually. Here in southern Malawi it’s made of maize flour (in northern Malawi it is often but not always made of cassava; I’m not sure about other countries.) There are two types of maize flour here: ufa and ngaiwa. Ufa is made by milling the maize, soaking it, drying it in the sun, then re-milling it. This has the effect of removing almost all the nutritional value from the ufa. I prefer ngaiwa, which is milled once or twice but is not soaked and dried. (If you are familiar with English history, the cachet of using ufa is similar to the cachet of white bread. Even though the nutritional value of white bread is much poorer than than the nutritional value of whole grain, it was originally valued as better because only nobility to remove all the sticks, vegetable matter, and detritus from flour. And only royalty could afford to have all the bran and chaff removed too. So whiter bread was a sign of greater status. It’s kind of the same with ufa.) Nsima is made by bringing water nearly to a boil and adding a couple of handfuls of ufa until it’s porridge consistency. If you’re using ufa, it doesn’t need to cook very long; ngaiwa nsima needs to cook for a few minutes. This is the point where I add usipa or matemba (small, dried fish) when I’m cooking for the dogs, but I wouldn’t if I were cooking for people. When the nsima begins to smell cooked, you add more handfuls of of ufa while briskly stirring. It should be difficult but not impossible to stir. Continue stirring until all the lumps are gone and the nsima is very thick. It is spooned out into patties with a special oval spoon. I can only eat 1/2 -1 patty at a meal, but most Malawians eat 2 or more. To eat, you break off small pieces, roll them between your thumb and your first 2 fingers and then use the nsima to pick up the side dishes, or ndiwo, which include everything that isn’t nsima: greens, chicken, whatever. The dogs, lacking both thumbs and any level of caring about the proper way to present food, just get their nsima spooned into a bowl.

Because the power goes out semi regularly, I try to always have food on hand for a cold dinner. Sometimes that just means a peanut butter sandwich, but usually it means something like what I had the other night: a salad with chopped peanuts and a sweet chili pepper dressing. Because it’s so much harder to get protein here, we rely a lot more on plant proteins like peanuts. Although I did manage to buy some mince (that’s hamburger in American (real English J )) at the BP (yes, as in the gas station—it’s the best place to buy mince in town.) today. Best. Hamburger. EVAR. Ok, so that’s enough (or more than enough) about nutrition, right?

In the evening I play with the dogs, watch movies or read or write letters or in my journal. Sometimes I do yoga—stress relief is very important and we all have our own coping mechanisms. I usually go to bed around 9.

On the weekends I do laundry and I clean the house. I like the 2 bucket method for washing clothes, but I sometimes expand to 3 buckets. Clothes are washed with bar soap and by rubbing them together between your knuckles. I have a picture of my amayi (host mom) washing clothes on my flickr page, if that helps. And then you hang the clothes on the line and since it’s rainy season you hope it doesn’t rain before the clothes dry. On weekends I also hike the Zomba plateau, visit friends, go to the Lake (Malawi), which is so big you can just barely see Mozambique from the shore, or whatever else strikes my fancy.

You asked about dangerous adventures. In a sense, every time I get on a minibus it’s dangerous: the tires are often bald; the gas gauges are broken; the hatch is often tied into place; the sliding door usually can only be opened from the outside; and where there are seats for 13 they fit 18-22 (the side benefit of being crammed in so tightly is that the ride feels much smoother when there’s no room for you to jostle around. Minibus rides are also interesting because you can end up carrying anything from someone else’s bag to their child, to their chicken, or possibly even a goat (although I’ve only heard of it happening, I haven’t seen it). But no, even when I did a game count in Liwonde park I was sufficiently far from the elephants to not feel as though I was in any danger. Now I’m trying to think if there’s anything I want to do that would qualify as dangerous enough to make a good story. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.

When my group arrived here in June it was cold season. We had been warned about it getting cold, but none of us really believed it—I mean c’mon, it’s Africa we’re talking about here. After a couple of weeks cold season was really settling in, which happened to coincide with our homestays, where we stayed in the villages in mud huts with thatched roofs and no electricity and no running water. Every night I slept in my lightweight long johns, a t-shirt, scrub pants, a sweatshirt, and usually 2 pairs of socks.

A chitenje is a 2 meter length of fabric that can be used for a headdress, a skirt, or to carry a baby. Our trainers told us that there are 101 uses for zitenje (the plural form of chitenje; probably one of the hardest things for me to get used to with Chichewa is the idea that when pluralizing nouns you modify the beginning of the word, not the end. I end up saying things like zitenjes.). I discovered that one of those uses was that if you fold one in thirds and place it over your feet, folded another in half and put it on top of a blanket and then placed a third over everything (sometimes using a skirt or two as extra padding), it might possibly make you warm enough. That is still my favorite chitenje use. Cold season runs June-August or September.

Next is hot season. Hot seasons runs August or so-November or sso. Hot season is hot (obviously) but up here near the plateau it’s not unbearably so. There has been so little rain for so long that everything is dry and dusty. Most of the landscape is in colors of gold and brown. There is so much dust that at the end of the day our feet are tattooed with dirt just from walking through clouds and clouds of it. It takes dedicated scrubbing to get even a portion of the dirt off. Near the end of the hot season the heat begins to get oppressive here (in many other parts of the country that aren’t a high altitude the heat spends a lot more time being awful.) The feeling of being smothered in the heat gets worse and worse as the humidity goes up and up until finally the air can’t hold any more moisture and it begins to rain. It feels like a break, as if the sky had cracked open, sucked out all the swelteringness and the tacky feeling of clothes stuck to your back (and front and sides) which makes the rain a relief, even though over the course of rainy season we lose paths to flooding, everything becomes covered in mud, and the entire daily routine is altered. I found it interesting when the rainy season began because in Seattle I can tell it’s going to rain by the electric earth smell and by how it cools down. But here it’s the opposite: you know rain is coming because suddenly it is exponentially hotter.

The nice thing about rainy season is that most everything grows. I’ve planted a garden with beans, lettuce, tomatoes, sweet peppers, herbs, strawberries, carrots, air potatoes, watermelon, litchi, etc (only I really wish I had charted where I planted everything because I don’t remember). Bonongwe (poor man’s spinach), which is probably my favorite green except for mkhwani (pumpkin leaves), volunteered itself in my garden, so now we’re letting it go to seed so we can plant it on purpose. A passion fruit vine has volunteered itself near my porch. Another PCV once had a tomato plant volunteer itself in the cracks in the cement of her backyard. Everything grows right now (well, except for some of the things I plant on purpose). In the matter of a couple months the entire appearance of this area of the country has changed drastically. Buildings I was using as landmarks are now completely obscured by maize. That’s one thing that surprised me: when I pictured something like the corn fields from Field of Dreams. There are some places where there is maize as far as the eye can see, but more common, especially here in town, is 10 to 20 maize plants stuck in the square of earth between the brick fence and the road., or growing along the side of the road or tucked to pretty much any patch of earth 5 feet by 5 feet or bigger.