We're Back!

At the airport in Ethiopia

We all just arrived here in Malawi! It was a long trip - the whole journey took close to 40 hours. From SLO to LAX, Washington DC, Ethiopia, Lilongwe, and then our destination of Blantire this afternoon (that's 4 flights, but who's counting?), we're finally done with travel for now!

Daniel picked us up at the airport and we crammed into his car with all of our luggage. We dropped it off and went to the grocery store to pick up some basics. The highlights: bread and eggs. They have pretty fresh bread in the store that they slice right there, so we picked up a loaf. Eggs are AMAZING here. They're really high quality at a pretty good price. Our apartment's kitchen was completely empty, so we also picked up a basic skillet.

Our tiny stove

We made a basic dinner on our stove, which happens to be fairly underpowered and slow. Almost everything has to be cooked on the max setting of 6.

We ended up crashing pretty soon after that because our flight was so long and some of us got almost no sleep.

The next day - Sunday - was a fairly relaxed one. Not too much happens here on Sundays, so it was a day for us mostly to recover and get ready for the coming weeks of work. We started the day by attempting to make some eggs. The stove seemed to be working even slower than normal. After trying to run it for quite a while, we discovered that the power was completely out throughout the house! In need of something to do as well as fresh water, we took a trip to the nearest store to buy bottled water. We checked the power when we returned - of course it was still out.

Without much to do or anything to cook with, we ended up collectively eating an entire block of cheese. (a small block, but still!) The cheese just disappeared. Finally around 6PM the power came back on. We watched a movie (or tried - basically all of us ended up falling asleep by the end!)

Tomorrow the real work begins: we are scheduled to meet with the Kumponda community leaders tomorrow morning at 10! It'll be our first excursion beyond the city and into our community, so it should be a really interesting day.