Friday, October 22, 2010

Internet connection

for me, is now free. Thanks MMCT.

Today, I received my birthday package from my parents. Thanks Mom and Dad for all the pictures! and the battery charger....and the GRE prep book..I forgot I asked for that and was stressing about where I was going to find one so I can get my study on and they maybe someday in the future get my grad-school on. Yeah!

I'm still waiting to hear back from PCPP about borehole donation, i the mean time, its making me crazy. To dull my craziness, I have officially biked over 100 km in the last 5 days. I went to the boma and back Monday, to the market on Tuesday. To the boma and back again on Wednesday, then to Bris village that evening, back home Thursday and boma (and I will go back this afternoon) today. That's three trips to the boma at 18 km each way. Plus a trip to the market (maybe 10km round trip and a trip to and from Bri's place for a grand total of 150ish km (the distance to andfrom Bri's place is an estimate). That sounds like a lot. According to my phone that's 93+ miles! Lets just say I'm preparing for the STP....2 years ahead of time. :). My bike is like a lambourgini. Anyway...

I finally got hooked up to the internet at the Mulanje Conservation trust, thanks to my other site-mate john so here I am. I'm not promising more posts, but I can at least promise longer ones.

While I'm waiting for borehole stuff to go through (which is frustratingly slow) I'm writting a grant for an oilpress so a women's group in my village can make peanut oil and sell it (rather than selling it as it is important from Mozambique)...besides...they're peanut farmers, it only makes sense. We'll see if that works out.

I called the doctor this week and went off of Mefloquin, the anti-Malarial medication I have been on since coming to contry. Not only did I get crazy dreams (even weirder and MORE lifelike that the ones I always had....I didnt think it was possible either) but I will, hopefully, no longer have these crazy mood swings that I've been having (not normal). Next week my boss comes from Lilongwe to do a site visit and with her she's bringing Doxycycline...a daily anti-Malarial pill instead of the weekly, Mefloquin. We'll see if I can remember to take it....

We had a crazy rain storm yesterday afternoon with HAIL! I never ever thought to see hail in Africa but it was there. Little kids collected the hailstones with peices of cloth (so the water drained) and had themselves some frosty beverages in this humid tropical paradise....awesome. They thought I was crazy because I didn't...I just watched. I did, however figure out that I need to clean my gutters and that my roof leakes more than I remembered. Maybe I'll try to patch it with nsima haha.

I got a visit from a grad student doing research in Mulanje (ex-Peace Corps Volunteer) yesterday. Other than having to tell everyone in my village that no, he's not my husdband or my boyfriend, we had a good time hanging out, playing bananagrams and watching the rainstorm...it was almost like being back in 'merika.

You know what I'm going to miss upon returning to the states? When I'm riding my bike and someone passes me going the other direction (because I don't let people pass me going the same direction...that means race!) and they point at me and say "'MERICAN!!!" I find it enduring, for no particular reason.

Because of the rainstorm, the water tap started working for a bit but not long enough for me to get water so its still a bike ride away.....I need to take a day and make a ton of trips for water. Its silly of the world to make water the hardest to find when people need it the most...when its hot andsticky and bathing and drinking is necessary. I broke down and washed all my neglected dishes today. I had been putting it off because I didn't want to waste the water on them but it was getting pretty bad...and smelly. Its done now. Next water-intensive chore that I've been neglecting? Laundry. Maybe I can wait until the rainy season? Bad idea. So far only drinking water and bathing have been making the cut. Bathing only makes the cut because of that abscess...otherwise I'd really be saving water!

Well, that's enough for now.

What's on the agenda for next week? I'm bringing two members of the peanut butter group in Bri's village to the village next to mine to teach them to make Peanut Butter. I'm also going to teach another group in my village to make it. This is partially to help them with income generation, and largly because homeade peanut butter is tastier than store bought and I cut store-bought peanut butter from my budget to make room for other things....like ketchup! That is that.

3 comments:

  1. So does this mean that with free internet we might get to see some new pictures soon?

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  2. Unfortunately that does not (most likely) mean pictures because of my unwillingness to sit in a hot room for hours and wait on slow Africa-internet. I'll do my best though.

    ReplyDelete