Halloween etc

Evil Hunter and Nelly the Roadkill Elephant


the hashers pre-run



using my blunderbus(sp) gun for it's original purpose, as a Vuvuzela horn



a Swedish mime artist



descending a steep bit on the hash at Michiru



Hunter and his quarry



Nelly and Evil Hunter



Newly christened Nelly



Mime artist, Andy the volunteer, mime artist too?



Corpse Bride, and Don King



Nelly, Disco Ball, Mario, Luigi, Evil Hunter



Nelly and Chibuku (a type of horrible maize 'beer')



kitchen dancing with a bloke in a dress...pretty scary in Malawi!



The kingfisher this morning

I’m currently trying to get the last bits of mango fibres out of my teeth…mmm…yum! Best mango I’ve had here. Previously we’ve been munching on the big ones (size of my hand) but we’ve just experimented with a small fruit which was about the size of an apricot. It turned out to be very small but incredibly delicious mango! Yum!

Of course, Rach couldn’t enjoy them as she’s currently got a bout of Bangwe Belly and is staying off anything fibrous/from the market. I had to enjoy the mango enough for both of us – I think I did a good job! And at 5 kwacha (about 2p) for 2, what’s not to enjoy!

Weather update:

Surprisingly amenable temperatures. I mean, it’s hot, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not unbearable. Probably gets up to high 20s or 30 most days at Bangwe, probably a couple of degrees warmer down in Blantyre City centre. The ‘dry season’ is about as reliable as everything else in Malawi – it has rained on us a few times recently, but not spectacularly so I don’t think we’re into the ‘rains’ yet.

Work update:

I’m working away to overhaul completely the AYISE website, and to produce their 2009 and 2008 annual reports. I’ve also been managing (sort of) a Canadian volunteer who is a very experienced communications professional. She has come over for 2 weeks as part of a Canadian programme called Leave For Change, run through the World University Services Canada (although she’s not connected to any uni…odd). Anyway, it has been great to have an experienced professional in, doing what they do best. So many of AYISE’s volunteers are full of enthusiasm but with limited skills or experience to offer (and I’d include myself in that category), so to a certain extent they don’t offer much to AYISE, except for free labour and a limited degree of respect from other Malawian organisations. I have been working with the volunteer to help her find the right people to talk to (sometimes me) about various aspects of AYISE’s communications. She’s only looking into our external communications, as she only really has 10 days here, but it’d have been great (but ineffectual I suspect) to get her to work on AYISE’s internal communications!

Rach has been organising the recruitment of her replacement. She has been involved at every stage of the process, so that’s been great experience for her, although there are some significant differences between a Malawian job application and those in the UK. She has just let the lucky applicant know that he is starting tomorrow at 10am! Things can happen surprisingly fast in Malawi. The candidate is an internal one, and so it’s a bit of a case of ‘better the devil you know’, as we know this guy is not perfect, but he was the best of the applicants so what can you do? I think it’s great that Rach has finally got what she has been wanting for the last 6 months, which is a dedicated volunteer coordinator. Previously it has been tagged onto another role, and basically ignored/bodged. But this is Malawi, where customer satisfaction is not an issue, so it took Rachel coming along and showing them how unacceptable their current provision and commitment to volunteers was, to actually get some change. The level of the change she has requested should not be underestimated – AYISE at the moment is very strapped for cash, so taking on a new commitment for payroll is a sign of great respect for Rachel’s request.

And so to the non-work stuff! Just a short mention here for the fact that it is only just over 4 weeks until we leave! Really excited about that! I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that there will be things I’ll miss ‘though. For example, this morning there was a malachite kingfisher just outside our window, perched on a branch of our orange tree – how often do you get to say that?! The guava tree is bearing fruits, as is the papaya tree still, and the peach tree is just coming into season. This evening I took a walk up to the market, and was gifted a smile in response to every greeting I made in Chichewa. The man who sells us rice and beans at the market asked after ‘your wife’ as always, and expressed real concern about her health and added that he was actually depressed that we were leaving. I wandered the market with my cap on, in shorts and sandals, with a rucksack on my back, basically looking as white as possible, with no fear of robbery or anything untoward happening to me. On the way back there was a swarm of bees (apparently, I think people were just hysterical) and so a young man, younger than me, escorted me around on the back alleys, and again I felt no worries (although I was ‘Asungu!’d a lot), and the bloke didn’t even consider asking me for cash after he’d safely escorted me around and back to the road – now how often would that happen in a poor estate (or anywhere else for that matter) in the UK? So good feelings at the moment.

The weekend, as you may have noticed from the photos, was Halloween. For us, this consisted of a Halloween hash run in the Michiru Nature Sanctuary (the observant among you will remember that Michiru is one of the 3 peaks of Blantyre, and also where I have set up a connection for environmental volunteers at AYISE), and then a party at one of our friend’s house in Blantyre. We thought long and hard about our costumes, and decided that Rachel’s best ever costume (the elephant – there’s a special photo somewhere which induces laughter at every viewing) should be re-enacted but with the cautionary addition of bloody red marks where her tusks have been removed by an Evil Hunter (me). I have to say, unsurprisingly, Rachel’s costume was far better than mine – however I have gone for silly facial hair as part of the Movember movement (see www.movember.com) (another of the party’s theme’s, other than just Halloween) to raise awareness about prostate cancer. Basically, if someone asks me why I wear such ridiculous looking facial hair I will talk to them about prostate cancer (I really need to learn something about prostate cancer I think). If you want to ‘sponsor’ me for my silly facial hair please give to Cancer Research.

At the hash, Rach was definitely the most dedicated dresser-upper, and as a consequence, and due to long and committed service, she was ‘christened’ Nelly. I’m not sure how much she wanted to be Christened, but I’m proud of her for her efforts at drinking beer through a trunk made of old toilet roll tubes! The run was really good, through the mopane forest of Michiru nature reserve. Starting at 3 we were worried it’d be ridiculously hot, but due to a delay we didn’t start until 3.30 by which time it was cloudy and the temperature was ok.

By this point Rach was already feeling unwell, and so I don’t think that was the cause of Bangwe Belly. Unfortunately we don’t really know what caused it but from about mid-afternoon on Saturday she’s been “not right” with regular toilet trips. She had to leave the Halloween party very early and then spent the whole of Sunday in bed, where I joined her and read interesting passages from “The Scottish Enlightenment” to her…I think the academia helped a little…