Malawi: Part 2

And here's part two! Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, staying in the village for three days.

The wife of the couple we were staying with (Lina is her name) planned a ladies' seminar out in one of the villages.  It was arranged that the ladies would come in on trucks and stay for about three days while the seminar went on.  A grass fence enclosed a large area where the ladies listened to lessons, ate and slept.  

There were about 750 women, so I couldn't even get a picture of them all! This is Sunday morning as we were all gathered after Church.  Those brown things hanging are fish from the lake.  They'd hang them up to dry.

Thankfully, Lina, my mom and I were able to sleep in this brick house that belonged to one of the church members.

This is the room we stayed in - this is the view with my back to the door.

This is looking towards the door.  People here usually don't have wooden doors, lots of times there will just be material or an old lace curtain.

No indoor toilets, so this was our toilet for the time we were there.  Alot nicer than most, actually!

Often times the little buildings that the toilets are in don't have doors, so they design them so that you can't see right in.  This is how it would look from above...

You have to ask to "enter" before you walk in, or else you could have an unpleasant surprise, heh.  Almost happened to Mom, but thankfully not me!   

Funny story: There are cockroaches in the choo (toilet), and, of course, they would come out at night.  One of the nights we went out there and I went in first.  I started stomping around, trying to scare the roaches away from the hole.

Mom: "Linz!! What are you doing?!"

Me: "There are tons of roaches in here and I'm trying to get them away from me!"

Later that night Mom had to use the restroom, so she got up and walked out to the choo.  What she didn't know was that the door automatically locked from the inside, so when she tried to get back in she was locked out!  Thankfully there was a window in our room she could knock on and and tell me to let her back in.

The ladies were nice and heated some water for us over the fire in the mornings so we could bathe - this was our shower.  Again, this had the same building design as the toilet, so there was no door.  

We were right at Lake Malawi, and it was beautiful.  You'd think it was the ocean!

This is the kitchen that the ladies cooked in

There would usually be ugali (similar a thick clump of cream of wheat), beans, cooked cabbage and goat.

One of our translators was due any day with her baby, and surprise! she went into labor on one of the days we were there.  Lina took her to the hospital in Lilongwe, and the baby was delivered that night.  So for quite a while Mom and I were in the village, with no car, and not able to speak the language.  The weekend went fairly well, except for not really knowing what we were supposed to do since we couldn't talk to anybody!

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What's a weird experience you've had?

I don't think this one really counted as weird, just interesting!

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Go check out Stefanie's blog where she's introducing me!