Muli Bwanji!

Hello friends!

Or, muli bwanji, in Chichewa, the language spoken throughout much of Malawi.

This probably (hopefully?) won’t be too long of a post as I am typing on my phone! My laptop has been left in Zomba while I travel this weekend.

As you can presume from the fact that I am writing to you all, I have indeed made it safely to Malawi. I arrived in Lilongwe (the capital) on Monday afernoon and spent the first few nights at a lodge while we went through orientation with WUSC Malawi (our sending Canadian organization). Us is the 8 female Canadian volunteer interns who are with the Malawi Student Without Borders program this time around. We arrived together and will see each other on and off I’m sure. Five of the girls are living in a volunteer house together in Lilongwe, two are staying at a lodge in Blantyre and that leaves just me! I am living in the back of a pastry/coffee shop called MaiPai (pronounced “my pie”), in Zomba.

The first few days watching the Lilongwe ladies settle into their home, making plans for shared tuk tuks and the weekend, I was feeling pretty nervous about the fact that I would be all by myself. Additionally, WUSC hasn’t sent volunteers to Zomba in a long time so no one could give me information on things to do, places to get groceries, good taxis to call etc. Considering everything in Malawi is done by word of mouth and who you know, this was a little stressful! In fact, all anyone could tell me was how beautiful Zomba is…not that I am complaining about natural beauty!

We spent our time in Lilongwe going over culture, language and little things like how to buy phone minutes, how to take mini buses (the slightly sketchy public transport), where to find the vegetable market. We also did some more work oriented tasks like reviewing how they want us to go about monitoring and evaluating our work and how to fill out our workplans.

Finally, on Thursday morning it was time to head to Zomba! It was about a four hour drive down to the more southern part of Malawi and we arrived just in time for my introductory meeting with my organization. I will be working for the next 3 months as a Youth Leadership Officer with “ArtGlo” or in longer terms, the Art and Global Health Centre Africa. They use creative leadership programs and approaches to health and development. For example, they have a program called Make Art Stops Aids and a Students With Dreams program (which I will mostly be working on) which gives university students funding and an open slate to develop creative development projects. They are then supported by the centre to impliment them and also grow in their own abilities as leaders. Having worked as a leadership facilitator at camp, I remember getting to watch the kids develop their skills and become more confident and how rewarding that process was so I am super excited to be working in youth programming again and with students at the university. From what I understand I will also be helping to update training manuals and write funding proposals. I’m sure I will get a better idea as I get settled in but that is what I know so far. I met a couple of coworkers who were super welcoming and very cool so I can’t wait to be introduced to everyone else on Tuesday!

Why Tuesday? It just so happens that we arrived right before a long weekend for a national holiday! Not wanting to waste any potential travel time, the other interns and I scrambled to get together taxis and hostels at Lake Malawi. We are going to Cape Maclear tomorrow (Saturday) and staying until Monday. Apparently it is the big tourist and expat hotspot so we will see!

That said, I will be living alone in Zomba so it made more sense for me to tag along to Blantyre and then taxi from there so I am visiting here until we leave tomorrow. More dinners with volunteers and my third city tour in three days! So far, so good.

I don’t have much to say about Zomba itself as I was just there for about 16 hours haha. Still, we walked around the “city” (its a more like a town, if that haha). But it is so green!! And at the foot of a mountain so safe to say, I am already obsessed. The coffee shop I will be staying at seems really cute and all the staff were so welcoming. I’m excited for my daily walks to work and to get to know the city and the people! More on my adventures there to come, I am sure.

I’m going to say goodbye for now! We are meeting with a WUSC volunteer who is a gender advisor so that should be super interesting. Keep posted for lake pictures because, I guess I am going on vacation this weekend! Not what I was expecting but I am excited 🙂

Until next time, Sam