Unmentioned details

I was talking on the phone to my mom last night and I realized there are so many things  that I didn’t mentioned that are part of life here and things that are miss understood. Life here is simpler in many ways, yet much more challenging and complicated. Here are a random facts of life in Malawi :

• People do eat, they are not starving, it is just that they don’t have much and have no diversity. The end of the dry season is always harder for food as the vegetables get scarcer and the prices go up.

Breakfast is generally weak black tea without milk, with dry white bread or boiled potato. There always is nsima at lunch and dinner. It is made out of maize flour and water, cooked on the fire. It becomes really thick and is used to grab the food with. The eating technique is simple, you roll a small ball of nsima using your fingers, and with your thumb, you can shape it to form a spoon to get your food. They usually use it as a fork or spoon, just like some countries use naan bread or chipati. So yes they eat with their hands, previously washed of course. Some people will have rice instead of nsima, but it is more expensive. Almost everyone grows maize so they don’t have to buy maize flour, they make it themselves.

Any other food that is served with nsima (or rice) is called relish. It is always cooked in a base of vegetable oil, onions, tomato and salt.

1. There are vegetables available: cabbage, green pepper, carrot, potato, tomato, onion, eggplant and okra. They also eat leaves, like pumpkin or casava leaves. They sell them fresh or dry. They are good. Sometimes they will add groundnuts powder (a sort of peanut flour) to it to add proteins…yummy!
2. There also is a lot of different fishes from lake Malawi. Osipa is the smallest one (size of a finger). They eat it the whole thing. either dry or fresh. It is bitter and not really good, but it is a good and cheap source of protein. There also is butter fish, chambo, chibenje, and many more, some of them are big and delicious.
3. Meat wise, there is chicken, goat, cow and in some places duck. Every small market has a butcher. The cuts are not good, but the meat is fresh. It needs to be cooked in a broth for a long time to be soft enough, but it makes excellent stew and curry. Good cuts like sirloin can be found but only in supermarkets in the three bigger cities. They don’t really use milk to cook with or drink and definitely don’t make cheese or yogurt. Therefore the cows are raised for their meat, not their milk. The goats here are only raised for meat, they never use the milk. The milk they sell is long life or in powder (most don’t have fridge and even if you do, the power goes out often for many hours).

There are also seasonal fruits like banana, mandarine, orange, lemon, mango, papaya, pineapple and apple. And they grow ginger and garlic and hot pepper to add flavour, although they are rarely used.

• The public transport within the country is horrible.

The following transportation means described below have two speeds: they either drive dangerously fast or they brake suddenly! Perfect for a safe, peaceful and enjoyable ride. And they wait to be full (read overcrowded!) before they leave.

1. Minibuses also called life “shorteners” are almost everywhere and go almost everywhere. They can be fast or painfully long depending on how many stops they’ll do to take or drop people off. They are normally overcrowded. A minibus is an old medium size Japanese van where uncomfortable seats were added (loosely screwed in) in the back to carry passengers.
2. Buses. They are big, go fast and crazy overcrowded. The max capacity of the bus is 65 seating places and 25 standing in the aisle…this is in a perfect world. They normally have over 80 people seating and as many people as possible standing in the aisle. Especially true at the moment with the diesel and petrol crisis. They cut down the number of buses and minibuses. People carry their big bags of maize flour or fish or beans with them and put them on the flour of the aisle. They play awful music, in loop. The bus often stops to drop people with all their bags which may take a while. At filling stations or road blocks (many on the roads), all the passengers need to get off the bus for inspection and then back in. It takes forever and everyone pushes to get a better spot than what they had. Less expensive than the minibuses.
3. Matola (big solid pickup that should be used to carry goods) or back of a pickup truck. Those travel on shorter distances and go where the minibuses are not often going. There are many stops and they breakdown a lot or run out of fuel. Good enough for less than 50km. Be careful to cover yourself or put sun screen when it is daylight and bring water, there is no roof or shade to protect you.
4. There are also other ways to travel, but I normally don’t (hitchhiking) or can’t afford it (having my own car or motorcycle! or renting a cab on long distances). And right now, the fuel crisis affects everyone. Having a car or a motorcycle is awesome when there is fuel and if you know a really good and reliable mechanic (see my previous blogs!! They won’t have the right tools or part or simply won’t bring them when they come to your house after you paid for their transportation; they will drive your car around to run errands and go visit relatives because they don’t own a car and will bring it with no fuel left; might be drunk; will fix the problem momentarily, if at all…. lovely and never a frustrating experience!!). Cars, decent spare parts and fuel are outrageously expensive, so not an option if you are volunteering!
5. On short distances and locally, there are bike taxis… generally not too expensive if the land is flat. They are awesome. I love it! Too bad Canada is too stuck-up on laws to have a system like this to carry people around. It is fun, affordable, environmentally friendly and reliable.

Most roads are unpaved and uneven except for the few Main Roads that go throw the country and some roads in the cities.

• Computers and internet are not used by many people. They don’t learn how to use them in school. Just like 20 years ago in Canada when things were done by hand. It makes it hard and tedious to keep records and work fast. So you might understand that exchanging documents or editing a report is not an easy process. Although some people are technology friendly and eager to learn, like one of my coworker who has a laptop, and a nice phone. I helped him get internet on his phone and tether it throw Blue Tooth to get faster internet on his laptop even when there is no electricity in town. This makes his life much simpler when it comes to sending report to Unicef in Lilongwe. He used to bring the report in person (150km away) because the connections wasn’t good enough to send and receive documents. I think we quickly forgot how computers and especially internet drastically changed our life and productivity. If you are reading this it means you have internet, so enjoy your chance!

• Electricity for most of the country is coming from hydroelectricity. There are a few dams on the Shire River, a river running south of Lake Malawi. The problem is that during the rainy season (half of the year) the river becomes extremely silty due to the mud slides and runoffs. This is hard on the turbines. Also, the level of the water in the Shire River becomes much lower during the dry season. The government is aware of the situation and problems but has been saying over the last 8 years that they don’t have the money to dredge the river floor, so the electricity shortage are happening more often every year and last longer. They (I mean the President!!) clearly have no intention of fixing the problem. They are hoping that the situation will become bad enough to get money from an NGO or that the problem will magically fixed itself.

There is electricity available in the towns and cities. The villages don’t have access to it. To buy electricity, one can either get a prepaid card from a gas station and enter the code. You have power until there is no units left on the card, the user need to always check to make the usage and the units left. This works the same for phone time. You buy units, you enter the ridiculously long code and you use them until you run out, then go buy more. This is really annoying when you come from a place where you get a bill and you pay every month for what you used. This is also possible here, but most people don’t go for it because it ends up being a big amount of money once a month and they have problems managing their budget. Plus most people don’t have bank account and steady jobs making the energy or phone companies not willing to offer them a monthly plan.

• They don’t have access to credit cards. So they can’t do transaction on line or pay bill. Which means that they always use money everywhere to pay for things. Except in really fancy hotels, the credit cards will not be accepted. Sometimes, when a person has a bank account they might use cheques for bigger expenses like a 3 million Kwatcha car or to pay a contractor after installing boreholes. The biggest bill tha Malawi has is 500 Kwatcha (about 3 USD). The bills are huge, they don’t fix in most wallets. They have bank cards to withdraw money from ATMs, that is of course , when one has a bank account.

 

Ok, I’m done for now. Let me know if you have questions or things that you want to know. I’ll be happy to write a blog about it.

 

Cheers, Ge