A Day in the Life - at Nkhoma

(Written on Saturday, January 22nd) - I am battling a bout of stomach-ickiness tonight, started this afternoon. It probably didn’t help that I decided to walk down to the large market here, and wandered around the stalls for a while, picking my way carefully over the lumpy, bumpy ground – all dry red earth and rocks. There was a lot of local produce – but little variety – tomatoes, potatoes, mangoes and bananas – pretty much exclusively. I had an urge for carrots – not a scrap of orange in sight! And a lot of deep-fried baked goods, like plain, round, giant-sized hole-less donuts, but given my queasiness, I opted out. I also avoided the meat which was being cooked over the open fire, although it was tempting…I have yet to eat goat here, although everywhere I turn I see goats! All the relief and development programs seem to include “goat programs” and from what I can see, goats are thriving. It helps that Malawi has had enough rain to produce greenery. I did buy some mangoes and bananas, which are now in the fridge. I also decided that I shouldn’t leave Malawi without trying a cob of corn, so I spent 20 kwatchas to buy a cob. They cook them over an open fire pit, and so I thought it would be a nice snack.

Turns out that Malawi corn is even tougher than the local chicken! I could not even bite into it! I am mystified as to how the locals eat it – although I suppose they exhibit more sheer determination than me. Judging by some of the teeth I have seen, the corn is a tough combatant. I ended up throwing my cob in the communal garbage here, and it made quite a THUD when it hit the bottom. Local corn must be an acquired taste – I see why they grind it to smithereens to make nsima.

I have now been at Nkhoma for five days – over half the time I will spend here. My work days are pretty routine – here’s how a typical day goes:

5:10 AM – Wake up, lay in bed thinking about getting up before everyone else, in order to have exclusive use of the toilet and tub.

5:30 AM – Get up, in order to have exclusive use of the toilet and tub – which are located in separate, side by side rooms.

5:35 AM – Exclusively using the toilet.

5:37 AM – Run the water in the tub, admiring the water’s light brown color. The tub water is pumped from the lake, and filtered down the mountain, through various sizes of ground rock, from large to small – apparently the filter I brought here did not work, so they continue to basically use a natural approach. (The water we drink here, comes from a borehole in the ground, and is not discoloured. I’ve been using my SteriPen to UV-zap it, but I think that’s overkill – pun intended.) However, the water is HOT, which is more than can be said about my Mozambique showering experience!

5:47 AM – As there is no lock on the tub room, rather than a long, soothing soaking, as soon as I am finished, I scoot up and scramble to dress, making a loud racket so no one will accidentally walk in on me. This is more for the sake of the unwary intruder, as I think I left my modesty back in Chatham.

6:00 AM – Breakfast – Muesli and milk, and hot Milo to drink – during the drink, I down my vitamins – multi, B and D, and, every other day or so, an allergy pill.

6:15 AM – Back in room, reading until…

7:45 AM - I pop a candy into my mouth (I bought a bag of fruit flavoured South African sweets along) and walk from the Guest House, through the hospital grounds, down the road, over to the office buildings where I teach. The walk through the hospital grounds takes me past the area where the “guardians” (relatives and friends of the patients) cook over open fires, for the patients. I walk past several laundry lines, where sheets and blankets dry in the air – the guardians do the laundry outside as well. There’s barely enough money to run the hospital, let alone cater to the non-essential needs of the patients. I walk through a passageway that takes me past an area where a myriad of mothers and babies wait to see doctors. As I walk through a bit of town, people stare at me – some with friendliness, especially children, who often wave or smile, and some with – not so friendliness. In fact, in the faces of the older adults, I most often see a mixture of suspicion or anger – or maybe it’s just a general tiredness or unhappiness, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s not personal – and it makes me wonder, as I walk along, what they think of us, the white “azungu” who regularly show up, then disappear, in and out of Nkhoma.

8:00 AM – I am in the office of Mr. Chitete, my first student. He is the Program Director for Relief and Development, an older gentleman who is incredibly tidy, meticulous and diligent. We have been working on converting his monthly summary report into a Word template, which should save him time, as he currently handwrites everything, and a lot of it is repetitious. We recently moved onto Excel, which he tells me, after watching it calculate, is “beautiful.”

9:15 AM – As my time with Mr. Chitete progresses, I begin eyeing the clock – as fairly soon, a woman, Christina, will arrive with our morning coffee!

9:30 AM – The coffee arrives – I am presented with a mug on a saucer and a tiny spoon with which I carefully measure out a small amount of instant coffee and a generous dose of whole milk powder. Then Christina pours some steaming water into the mug. “Zikomo!” I say, thanking her. “Zikomo!” she replies, thanking me – presumably for thanking her.

9:50 AM – I remind Mr. Chitete that he is working too hard and should remember to take a coffee break himself.

Between 10:05 and 10:20 AM – My two hours with Mr. Chitete ends – depending on my coffee drinking speed, I may rapidly guzzle down the last dregs, before heading over to:

10:06 to 10:21 AM – I unplug my laptop and pick up my old blue chair and go next door to work with Nelly.

12:00 Noon – Nelly and I wrap up our time together – we first worked on a PowerPoint presentation about Malnutrition, based on notes she used the last time she did an oral presentation. It has turned out quite well, but the photos, which we painstakingly downloaded from the Internet, are depressing. Kids with various forms of malnutrition – I will bring the presentation home as one of the “deliverables” from my time here.

12:01 to 12:15 – I retrace my steps, back through the hospital, to the Guest House for lunch. Lunch is usually a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of mango juice and an apple. In honour of the Dutch who originally built this whole mission, I brought along some Gouda slices of cheese, from Lilongwe. (Which reminds me – I must put a good word in for the Amsterdam airport – there was a cheese store there which had a generous supply of cheeses to sample – since I spent the better part of the day in the airport on the way down, I became well acquainted with various Dutch cheeses – the older and more flavourful, the better. I kept wondering if someone was going to notice my frequent trips to the sampling table. I also bought a package of those mini wafer things, the ones that look like thin dry waffles with caramel in between. I had them once in Chatham, and didn’t think they were anything to write home about. Either my tastes have changed, or these were fresher, but they were really good – the texture of dry waffle nestled against gooey syrupy caramel – mmm….)

12:30 to 1:15 – Back in room, reading again.

1:15 to 1:30 – Returning to Mr. Chitete’s office, to resume the lesson.

2:40 PM - As my time with Mr. Chitete progresses, I begin eyeing the clock – as fairly soon, Christina will arrive with our afternoon coffee!

2:55 PM – The coffee arrives etc. OR, on two occasions, we are given, instead, Fanta Orange pop.

3:45 PM – Around about this time, I unplug my laptop, grab my chair, and head next door to Nelly, and we resume our lesson. Unlike Mr. Chitete, she doesn’t have a laptop, so I basically sit next to her, coaching her through the lesson, and when she is working on something, and isn’t requiring my assistance, I muse. Some of my musing is philosophical, other musing is more practical – namely, which can will I open for dinner?

5:00 PM – The afternoon lessons end, and I walk back, through the town, through the hospital, up the slight slope, to the guest house.

5:15 PM – I discovered, on Thursday, that there’s an Internet room I can use at the hospital, so it’s possible I will stop in and use it (and post this..)

5:30 PM – Depending upon the results of the afternoon musing, I will pull out a particular can of South African fare. By the end of the day, I am tired (the one-on-one teaching, for some reason, is actually more mentally draining than the larger groups), so I often will just eat in my room, rather than go to the kitchen and eat in the dining room, with others. This means cold canned food, but depending on my level of introversion, I am ok with this. Until today, I would have had cookies for dessert, but I ate my way through those as of yesterday.

6:00 PM – Unlike Mozambique, I brought along toilet paper, which turns out to be unnecessary, as we are well supplied here (although I did donate a communal roll last Tuesday, as we had run short for some reason.) Instead, this trip, I have been preoccupied with a fear of running out of soap. Here’s why:

I originally brought two bars of Dove along on the trip – and went through them in the first month. So I purchased a large bar of some South African brand – a macadamia and aloe bar or something. One of those soap “flavours” which sounds good enough to eat…but – please note – I haven’t.

Prior to leaving Lilongwe, while shopping for groceries and toilet paper, I put some thought into whether or not to purchase another bar of soap. I decided not to, partially because soap is expensive – over 500 kwatchas (e.g. $3.50) and I am stingy – and partially because I was PRETTY sure, I would have enough to last the remaining week and a half. (Note – for some reason, I think nothing of spending 500 kwatchas on a large bar of Cadbury chocolate…or a container of Pringles chips. I suspect my priorities are…suspect.)

After unpacking and investigating the communal bathroom, I come to the conclusion that I will be using my own soap for every toilet trip, not just for showering, and that my bar of soap looks smaller now than when I last recall looking at it. I am glad that I have the bar of “authentically fragrant Lemon Verbena soap – enriched with Shea Butter for added nourishment to your skin” which Karen tucked into my Christmas Care package. But it’s a small one ounce bar.

So I have been rationing soap rather than toilet paper this time around.

Wondering, will I have enough to get through my time in Nkhoma – calculating the odds, eyeing the bar size, trying desperately to remember to leave the soap out to air dry, as it seems to go further when it’s not soggy.

The stress is getting to me. It also means I shouldn’t have more than a bath a day – although I cheated twice and had evening baths.

So far my luck is holding, and I think I will be OK. But I skipped a bath today, since I had one last night.

And I suspect  that “fresh and clean-smelling” are not currently words which you would use to describe me. Or my attire.

Actually, another current major preoccupation has been over when and how to do laundry. In Mozambique, I did it by hand in a basin, and the young man who helped out on the week days, did a load or two as well. Here, I could pay one of the ladies here to do it, but the laundry, too, appears to be communal, so I thought I’d do my own. But then, I had nowhere obvious to do it – so I ended up washing a full load in the sink, rinsing it in the tub, and then hanging it to air dry in my room.

But determining how to fit that into my crowded daily schedule, as documented above, was quite all-encompassing. It took me three days, before I eventually concluded that it should be done on Friday, so that both bras could be washed, with the expectation that one would be dry by Saturday.

That reasoning paid off, more or less – which is to say that one bra was dry, more or less.

6:05 – 9:05 PM – In room, reading, or working on the computer or pondering when to fit laundry in. On Friday, I treated myself to the last movie in Karen’s Christmas Care package – Cary Grant in Penny Serenade, which is a tear jerker – the little girl in it is magnificent. Oh, and I laughed out loud when Cary Grant and his wife get their adopted daughter – as an infant. When the baby cries for the first time, they don’t know what to do – Cary Grant shrieks at his wife, “Do something, can’t you see it’s suffering?”

(Non sequitur: I have been doing battery conservation here, as Nkhoma turned out to have South African plugs, which are different from the rest of Malawi, and my extension cord didn’t work. Tonight, I finally found an extension cord to borrow, so I have more than 2 ½ hours of laptop time to look forward to! Hence this long, rambling blog. If anyone is actally still reading – what stamina you have!)

9:05 PM – Realize that I am tired already, and that if I want to beat the morning bathroom rush (which, in all honesty, I have never actually seen…and probably never happens – I think most people fight over the shower at the other end of the hall – rather than soak in a tub of light brown water) – I should go to sleep. Read my Bible (I downloaded an iPhone app which I am using, as the hardcopy Bible I brought has really small text. I plan to leave it with Linda to give to Grace, the girl I am sponsoring.), pray, think about home.

11:30 PM – Wake up, lie in bed for a while, wondering what time it is. Turn on the iPhone (which I sleep with – that and my mosquito net are my two bedmates, and constant overseas friends) – note the time with a certain level of dismay/indignation – thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding…” and return to sleep.

2:30 AM – 3:30 AM – Wake up again, on and off, possibly awake for a while… all my sleep here, however, is dreamless.

5:15 AM – The day begins anew.

And, periodically throughout the day: Worry about mosquitoes, assess self for new bites, wondering if itches are mosquito bites or some other kind of bite. Every day or so, I encounter an actual mosquito in my room, which results in The Hunt. Armed with my can of Raid, I take aim, and spray, and watch, and wonder – did I make contact? Was it enough for a kill? Perhaps I see the mosquito begin a downwards flight – but is it flying or falling to its doom? As the floor is dark concrete, I can never find any mosquito bodies as evidence of a kill….one night I woke up and could hear the high-pitched hum of a mosquito, outside of my net. But could it get in? And a while later, I swear I heard the sound of breathing, from somewhere on the floor, near the end of the bed. I started wondering if perhaps someone was sleeping under my bed, as they do at the hospital. Then I told myself I was being irrational – there was no way there could be someone under the bed, as I would surely have heard more than one isolated moment of breathing. Still, I froze in my bed, suspended my own breathing, and listened intensely for any “hidden man under the bed” sounds. A while later, I heard another noise, of some kind of animal of some sort – bumping into something, and remembered a day or so earlier, seeing something walk along the wall – but I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t really be sure if it was just a small lizard or – gasp – a spider.

But I haven’t seen any spiders here in my room, so I told myself it was probably just a lizard, and went back to sleep.