Monday, July 6, 2009

My birthday and heading home!

Well, this is it. The end of my 3 months here and the past few weeks have just flown by! I finished off all the projects I could and handed on things I couldn’t finish. I did manage to get a new mattress for the ante-natal room at the health center – the women there were sleeping on barely covered mattresses and two beds had no mattresses at all.

Last Thursday I celebrated my 27th birthday in true Malawian style!! Louise, Kirsten and I were invited to lunch at Agnes’s house. Agnes is a local lady who was baking and bringing our bread daily but was recently employed by RIPPLE to be our evening cook/help. We went to her house in the morning to watch her in her bread making process. It is amazing what she did with no oven – the whole thing is done in a straw/brick hut and baked in a brick oven. Very impressive as even with a real oven at home I can never do it right! Around 9am, it was time to catch out chicken for lunch. Her whole family spread out in the bush looking for this chicken, who probably knew what was coming because he had gone missing! It took them about half an hour of hunting through the brush and then chasing the poor thing to capture it. It was promptly beheaded, plucked and cooked with tomatoes. I have never spent a birthday helping to pluck a chicken but it had to be done! We had a lovely lunch of chicken and rice. I have to say though one of the hardest things that I’ve dealt with is the real poverty in the families where we lived but also their sense of welcome and generosity. Getting this chicken and cooking it for us was expensive and a massive deal for Agnes, she was so proud of what she had to offer us and made us eat most of it. It was heart breaking afterwards to watch her children suck on the bones. We tried to leave as much as we could but it is insulting for them for us not to eat it. It really was a special birthday. We had a lovely chocolate cake in the evening and the other volunteers gave a painting of Mwaya Beach by our local wood caver/painter.

My other brilliant birthday present was a hot shower! Our boiler has been broken for the last 4 weeks and so it has either been a cold shower or a bucket wash – take your pick! But we got the boiler back on my birthday, it was amazing!

The last weeks flew by. I got sick again! Another fever bug – but this times just a tummy bug, luckily!! I spent the last few days at Mwaya in bed or in the bathroom. Not great but what can you do?

And now I am back in Lilongwe waiting to fly out tomorrow. It was really sad to leave Mwaya. I have met some amazing people and experience some incredible things that have greatly touched me and changed my life. I am going to continue to try to fundraise (I have another half marathon in the fall) and so if anyone wants to help, it will always be appreciated. I do look forward to returning home and back to some of the luxuries that a wait me but I leave here with a lot of sadness. It is a lot harder to say good bye to people who you’ve met when you know keeping in touch with them will virtually be impossible. But I hope to be back to visit at least!

xxx

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