August 3, 2009 - First project visit in Malawi

I had forgotten how nice breakfast is in this hotel. It’s served in a lovely courtyard and you get a big bowl of fresh fruit salad with your eggs and toast. I think we have had eggs everyday on this trip. I was getting a bit egged out at first but now am used to it. Most days I remember to ask for just one egg cause the fare usually includes two.

John picked us up at 8 this morning and took us to the CPAR office here in Lilongwe. After introductions and renewed acquaintance with folks we’d met on our last visit, they presented a great overview of the projects they are working on.

After lunch, we headed out with Joseph, Patricia, Dennis, and Vincent to visit an educational one about child survival near Lilongwe…a CPAR/Unicef partnership.  On the way we picked up Lucy and Frank, who work for the government youth services. This year, there have been many deaths from Cholera in Malawi, so in emergency response, prevention information has been added to the project. Thirty Volunteers (men and women) from the community were given training, and then went door to door to share the knowledge. Today, we met some of the volunteers. While Dwight was talking to them about their work, I was having some fun with a bunch of kids who had come to see what was going on. They LOVED getting their pictures taken, especially getting to see themselves on the preview screen. Is there such a thing as a portable battery…or even better, solar powered photo printer? If yes, I wish I had one of those with me. It would be so fun to print out pictures and give them to the kids on the spot.

(Above) Some fun pics from the project visit

We got back to the hotel around 5pm and decided to go over to Shoprite to look around. It’s fun seeing all the different brands of products. There’s a restaurant close to it that serves Portuguese style chicken so we picked up a couple of wraps to take back to the hotel and ate them in the courtyard where we eat breakfast. It gets dark early here and there aren’t many lights on the street so we didn’t want to be out too long…there are lots of potholes/uneven surfaces on the sidewalks so walking can be tricky. It actually was already pretty dark as we were coming home.

I’m not sure what traditional Malawian food is like but it doesn’t seem easy to find here in Lilongwe. That’s too bad…some of the best dinners we have had on the trip are the traditional ones.

The hotel has wireless connection but I haven’t been able to log into it for more than a minute or two at a time. I wasted a lot of time trying tonight. Hopefully I will be able to use the service at the office tomorrow.