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Friday the 21^st of September – Baluti, Blantyre, Malawi

It seems fitting that I should finally sit down at my laptop to chronicle the beginning of my experience exactly two weeks after I left home. I write this in the kitchen of our house in the village of Baluti, about 10 minutes’ walk plus 15 minutes by minibus from Blantyre. We have three rooms:  a bedroom, shower room and kitchen. I am sitting in the kitchen to write this as, while we do have fairly reliable electricity, we only have two working sockets and neither of these are in the bedroom. Imagine my delight when the bed I happened to choose in our room had a double socket above it! Alas, it doesn’t work. Our unofficial host Stevie, who works for the Joshua feeding project that runs Nama Simba, has been gradually improving our abode, amazingly quickly by Malawian standards. In less than two weeks, the gate has been ‘fixed’, the shower painted (we didn’t have the heart to tell him that the water just causes it to peel off) and the burglar bars and windows repaired. We have been promised that the door will be fixed, as it currently has a gaping hole, and the roof will be more securely attached. It gets incredibly windy here at night and the corrugated iron really wants to be free.

There are little aspects of living in our house that took a bit of getting used to, for example, our shower room it lacks a sink. Also the handle of the toilet doesn’t work, so we lift the lid of the cistern and pull a valve to get it to flush. While we are extremely lucky to have a western toilet and shower, cold water showers have not gotten any easier over two weeks.

Project Trust provided us with a basket of useful things when we arrived, such as sheets, pans, cutlery and… a shower curtain? With nowhere to attach this to, it has been utilised as a window curtain, washing line and ‘banana hammock’ (literally a hammock Louise has constructed to keep our bananas away from the ants). They also bought us an electric hot plate for cooking, although the electricity usually cuts out around six, resulting in a very late tea or peanut butter sandwiches. For some reason, the plug for the hot plate is for South African sockets, but another volunteer at our project managed to source us an adaptor. We were also given a second hand toaster which we only discover was white after scrubbing it within an inch of its life during one of my cleaning frenzies.

Our cosy little house was once the Nama Simba nursery school, which has now moved into a bigger building on the same lot. We rarely escape children as there are swings, climbing frames, a sand pit and a slide surrounding our house. It means that we always have to have our makeshift chitenje curtains closed, otherwise the children chant ‘azungu’ at us; which can become very creepy as it starts to get dark. While I’m sure the entire village knows us from our walks to the market and to our project, the staring has not lessened any. It is really very unusual to have white people in Blantyre, never mind in a small village like Baluti. We went to visit some other PT volunteers in Nancholi, we were sitting in their house waiting for two other girls to arrive from Limbe. Louise and I went to meet them off the minibus so they wouldn’t get lost in the midday heat like we did. When the bus driver saw us, he simply pointed in the direction that Gemma and Anna had gone, without a word. I found it hilarious that it was so obvious who we were looking for. A German guy visited the Samaritan’s Trust on Thursday while Louise and I were playing with two children and Florence shook my arm and pointed at him as if to say ‘Look! One of you!’

I truly hope that people will begin to accept us here, as the constant badgering does take its toll.

Our project is at the Samaritan’s Trust, an ‘orphanage’ that houses, teaches and feeds children who have had to live on the streets on Blantyre. There are about a hundred children, aged 6 to 22, and about 15 staff and volunteers.  The organisation is, frankly, amazing. The children get fantastic emotional and physical care, as well as uniforms so they can go to school or practical education in things like brick laying and carpentry. They treat all staff and (most) children with great respect and really seem to look out for each other. We are told that they can be aggressive, and were even taught the words for stop (basi!) and let me go! (tayeni!) just in case, but we haven’t seen any evidence of this yet.

We have decided to really try to grasp Chichewa, which is fricking hard by the way, as it will make it so much easier to talk to and influence the children. Some of the kids’ English is absolutely amazing, but the younger they get, obviously, the harder it is to communicate with them. I’ve found that I can make most of my intentions known with njala (hungry), basi (stop), ndikhuta (I’m satisfied) and zili bwino (well done). While nowadays I actually look forward to nsima for lunch every day, for the first couple of days I really didn’t have an appetite and the children get really angry when you don’t finish what’s on your plate. Now, I simply say ‘Ndikhuta, zikomo’ and hand them my plate. It very quickly disappears or is kept for what we interpreted to mean a ‘midnight snack’.

Greetings here start with ‘Muli bwanji?’ (How are you?) to which the response is ‘Ndili bwino, kaya inu?’ (I’m fine, how about you?). Everything is followed by zikomo (thank you, excuse me etc.) and I’ve found it to be the easiest word to say, so I chant it constantly. The locals really appreciate any attempt at their language, however I am struggling with good morning/afternoon as the response is different to the question. This is because they literally translate to mean did you sleep well/have you spent the day well?

I knew I’d regret leaving it this late to write a blog post, as there’s so much more I want to say, and it’s already really long. I want to mention how we killed 9 cockroaches on the first night in our house or how I met a guy from Inverness in the back packers place we stayed in at the beginning or how people say Ls and Rs exactly the same here or how we saw a gecko in our kitchen last night. Well, I hope to get an internet dongle tomorrow which means I can update this when I like, meaning more regular, shorter posts. 

So, TTFN, take a nice hot shower for me.

Quotes 9 – 21 September

Lydia: I am going to Plaslott.

Catriona: I’m sorry, where are you going?

(She was going to ‘Praise God’)

Nice man on minibus: Where are you from?

Catriona: Scotland.

Nice man on minibus: Ah! You know what I like about Scotland?

Catriona: What do you like?

Nice man on minibus: The men wear skirts.

Catriona: I HATE YOU

Louise: I’m not too keen on you.

Catriona: What?

Louise: I was talking to the roof, too. I’m not as forceful as you and I don’t like to say I hate people, even if the people are roofs.

Louise: (As the children point and laugh at us) Well, now I know why clowns cover their faces with white make-up, apparently white faces are hilarious.

Photo of the Safety Instructions on Kenya Airways. I couldn't understand why the girl was in a tutu.






Oven gloves and a switch for the cooker when we had no cooker.







The welders' method of using the sockets.