A long day of travel from Lilongwe by bus. We caught a cab with our driver from Senga Bay, who ran out of gas almost immediately picking us up. We were dropped at the AXA bus pickup, loaded onto a squeaky-clean, air-conditioned anachronism, from either a hopeful future, or a promising past that has yet to deliver. Rolling out of Lilongwe I realized that there have been a lot of things, starling at first, but so quickly ubiquitous, that I have failed to report them: bicycles with bunches live chickens dangling from the handle bars, lettuce and sweet potatoes the size of children, men selling puppies from the side of the road, strings of cooked field mice for snacks, miserable, muzzled, and panting german shepards on perpetual patrol, everyone selling sim cards and air time for the big phone company Zain, which I theorize has it's name printed on more things in Malawi than "Malawi". There is a whole atmosphere here, mostly dust and smog. It seemed alien for only the briefest of moments, but is so self-assured that now I can only see it for what it is; the daily operations of the people of Malawi.
We exited our air conditioning in Blantyre and then caught a mini-bus to Limbe, which is actually just a different area of Blantyre, a short hop there, and onto a mini-bus bound for Mulanje. For those of you with no knowledge of mini-buses, they are the ubiquitous, unserviced vans, failing the emissions requirements of all developed nations, carrying upwards of 20 people with max-capacities of 14. They break down or run out of gas constantly, their drivers are completely incompetent, and they are the most dangerous things on the road besides the goats. We had to exit our bus halfway to Mulanje and pile into a different one which sat idling for about 15 minutes, and then drove a forth of a mile up the road and stopped for petrol, then turned around to go back to where we had just been to stuff two more people in. We are now, finally, at the feet of Mt. Mulanje, at Providence Girl's School, a hybrid (government and Catholic) secondary boarding school for nearly 600 girls. The Catholic sisters who run the school hosted us for dinner: chambo, nsima, chicken, greens, pasta, and bananas. They asked everyone's denomination. I told sister January that I was unaffiliated. She say that will change when I take a woman. I told her those were two very unlikely scenarios.
PICASA PHOTOS
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