I returned to Malawi slightly after the beginning of
January. Araceli stayed behind for
school (she ended up coming over a week later).
The thought of putting up a blog post has been in the back of my mind
even before I got here.
So….what took so long?
I guess I cannot come up with a good answer. I can only explain what has been happening
over the past month which has led to this delay.
The rains are coming down here. This year they have been sporadic. Sometimes a few days at a time and others you
will go a week without seeing any water.
It just so happened the day I touched down in Malawi there
was a rather large rain hitting the roads.
This left me unable to go out to the project as the roads were
impassable. So my first night back in
Malawi I stayed in the city.
I headed out the next day and once I arrived and put my
luggage into my room I started walking. And once I started I do not feel like I
stopped until last week.
The guys working on finishing the roof
The amount of construction and events happening were more
than I expected. It took a little bit of
time to adjust. When I did, I was so
consumed (in a very very good way) by the construction we were doing.
The ward we are working on has now had its roof completely
finished and we are working on finishing the inside now. We are still building more houses and
buildings. We finished building 2
greenhouses.
Everything was going well…..then the rains came again. You can test the quality of your design based
on a few different items. One of these
is nature. And we received the right
kind of rainstorm to test our design.
One of our bridges....it is underneath the water
It stood up well to it.
There were things which we had to tweak but everything worked out well
Not only the aesthetic difference of Malawi but also the
feeling of Malawi from when we left last year to now has changed. The rains have been coming and everything
here is green. There is a different
attitude held by everyone here than 5 months ago.
One of the greenhouses
For a majority agrarian economy, most of life is dependent
on the weather. Malawi has not gone
through an industrial revolution so their work hours are mostly governed by the
sun (this is not 100% for everyone in the country, but close)
I have most likely written about this before but I am
intrigued by the difference of lifestyles of Malawi vs. Western countries.
The observatory
The above description does not do it justice at all though.
We are spending our Sunday now just cleaning and working
away. Yesterday was Valentines day and I
had brought back a real nice bottle of red wine All I remember was that it was from the
Russian River Valley (California). It
was quite tasty and probably one of the better wines which I have tasted.
The wine selection we get here is not that unique. You get the opportunity though to repeatedly
try the same brand to the point where you could describe each ingredient to the
letter.
As of now we still have quite a few mosquitos over here, we
have plenty of bug spray though so they stay away.
The day is winding down here, if it cools off enough we can
have a fire, this seems doubtful though.
I think we will have to wait another couple months.
