Update: Housing
Posted By Sika on October 2, 2007
I realized that I haven’t written anything about what’s been happening here with me. When I arrived in Zomba, my house wasn’t ready, even though we had been told the day before that it was. The remodel wasn’t completely done, but more importantly, Escom had not put in the electric meter. Now that sounds like a simple fix, right? Well, the Nkhoma School of Nursing has had 8 houses standing ready in every way except electric meters for over 6 months. Luckily for me, Zomba is a bigger town, and so I only had to wait for almost 3 weeks. And by then, my landlord had all his construction finished.
A note on my landlord: He is awesome. He worked quickly on the house without needing prompting. When I got here, I asked if he could change an outlet in the kitchen to South African prongs so I could plug in my hotplate and electric kettle. He promised to come over that night, but he forgot. Instead of making excuses, he brought over a hotplate with a Malawian plug to tide me over until he could get to the house while I was there. I had realized that the fuses were actually labeled and that I could take apart another outlet to make sure I was wiring it correctly, so I had already changed the outlet myself. The power also conveniently went out just as I was starting the change, and didn’t come back on until I was done. Everything else he has done on time with no hassle. This is rare and I would live in just about any neighbourhood to have a landlord like him. Tomorrow his wife is coming over to teach me how to know which and how many mkhwani (pumpkin leaves) I can harvest for the best masamba (greens) without killing the plant.
So where was I those almost 3 weeks? Why wasn’t I online bitching and moaning about my dire fate? I am so glad you asked. I was staying with my friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer, Derek. He’s a health volunteer like me, (more importantly, he’s a Seattle Boy) although he already did his 2 years and then extended for another 7 months. I may have to lock him in my house to keep him around when his service ends. Derek and I settled into a routine pretty easily: we come home; chat with Moses (who is Derek’s friend who keeps up his house for him) and Banda, Derek’s night watchman; I try to subvert his dogs, Chimwemwe (means happiness in Chichewa) and FIFO (means First In First Out in Accountingese); I cook, he cleans (he dislikes cooking and I dislike cleaning), we watch movies of varying quality on one of our computers which for security’s sake we pretend not to own and then goof around for a little while before crashing. At the beginning of my second week there, I wrote a letter to one of Derek’s friends just for the hell of it. I let him decide to whom it would go after I wrote it. I think I had the easiest transition to site ever in the history of Peace Corps thanks to his companionship. Of course now that I am in my own house I am in withdrawal, but he and Moses came to the hospital to see me when Moses’ 6-month-old daughter, Athena, was there with malaria, so the withdrawal hasn’t been complete.
Derek’s house is in a neighbourhood called Sadzi, about a 40 minute walk south from downtown. My house is in Matawale, about a 45 minute walk north of downtown. There’s transport we can hire to get into town, but 40 Kwacha here and there adds up really quickly, and so we walk into town most. I don’t know if I will continue that now that I am here in Matawale; going into downtown has a fair amount of uphillyness. Plus, Matawale has a lot of the things I might need and lunch is long enough that I can walk into town from school a couple of times a week.
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