Lake Malawi - Meponda

Fruit of a Baobab tree. It is used to make Cream of Tartar and is essentially pure Vitamin C. It's actually pretty good.

Sunset

Some people from the local church came on Saturday to be baptized. It was a beautiful service.

One afternoon some people from the church came and we sang songs together.

The Radaz family put on a worship concert for us.

The first snake I've seen in Mozambique. No one knew what kind it was, but it wasn't venomous.

I just got back to Lichinga after spending a week at Lake Malawi. It was a great, relaxing week and I really enjoyed it a lot. It was a lot of fun to be with all the SIM missionaries from Mozambique and get to know them. And a family from my church came and did worship for us all week. It was really great to sing and be together. I've only been here for a few months, but already I missed having worship and fellowship like that so much. I can only imagine how it must feel to only have worship in English and fellowship with friends once a year.

We had great food all week and more than enough time to just hang out, sleep, relax, swim, read, etc. We saw a snake one day, but no one knew what kind it was. We saw a giant centipede which is not venomous, but has a painful bite. We also saw lots of fish eagles, monkeys, and.....fleas. That was the worst part of the week, all the flea bites I ended up with. But I survived. And I stepped on a rock the first day which made my foot sore all week long. But oh well. It was all totally worth it. Such a great week.

On Saturday some people came from the local church and we had a Baptismal service. It was so beautiful and just cool to experience. It's so great to be able to have a service like that despite any cultural differences or language barriers that are present. And I find it especially neat to have the knowledge that someday I will see those people again, even if it's not in this lifetime.

Malawi

So I spent a few days in Malawi which turned out to be really enjoyable. On Thursday on the way to Lilongwe, we had to stop and wait on the side of the road for about twenty minutes so that the president of Malawi could go by. That was a rather neat experience, although apparently it's really not all that uncommon.

I spent a couple days in Lilongwe.  We went shopping and ate at a couple really great restaurants. It was fun to see a new place. On Sunday, we went to a Baptist church in Lilongwe and it was really great to have worship and a sermon in English.

After church we picked up a family at the airport and then headed to Liwonde where there is a game park. Early Monday morning (about 5:30am) we got up and headed out to the game park after a quick breakfast. 

As we drove through the game park we were able to sit on top of the car on the luggage rack. That was really a lot of fun and allowed us to see so much. We saw warthog, impala, water buck, baboons, etc. as we drove. The scenery was also spectacular.  After about an hour or so of driving we saw a herd of elephants. They were moving through the trees and some of the younger ones looked at the car. Then suddenly we saw a huge elephant in the middle of the road ahead of us. He was a big elephant. We drove a little closer and just watched him as he stood there and then slowly meandered off the road and into the bush. So cool!!!

Shortly after 9am we stopped at a resort/hotel that is inside the park to stretch our legs and use a toilet. We ended up decided to do the boat tour there and it was totally worth every minute. We saw tons of hippos and crocodiles, as well as two herds of elephants, and lots of birds including two fishing owls which are really rare to see. At one point on the boat tour we got near a large crocodile and it jumped toward the boat into the river! I was in the front of the boat and jumped back. It was funny. In the first herd of elephants we saw a really small baby which was stumbling through the mud, it was adorable.

The president of Malawi is in one of those cars.

Some of the landscape in the park.

Crocodile. Not sure if that's the one that freaked me out or not.

Baby elephant

Elephant in the middle of the road. He was huge.

Hippos, birds, warthogs....Africa :)

I took 200 pictures in the park, but unfortunately it takes too long to upload many onto here. But I picked a few of the better ones :)

Itepela

View of the mountain from the Mushamba in the morning

The road to Itepela

Testing for Malaria

HIV test strip. It's negative.

The kids at the school. They to there three times a week to learn to read Portuguese.

I had a great time in Itepela. So much so that I ended up staying the whole week and coming back today instead of coming back on Monday like I was originally supposed to.  It's a beautiful village and I felt so welcome with the family I was staying with.

It got to do lots of things, mainly just living there.  It was great to see what life is like in the middle of no where.  They do not have internet or phone service. There is a land line, but it's not used very often. And the electricity is solar powered and only used when it's needed.

One thing I did was go to the lab with Ariel (the woman in the picture holding the slide) and learn how to test for Malaria. It's actually a rather simple process and most people with a Western education would be able to do it. First you poke the end of a finger to get a few drops of blood onto a slide. Then you put the slide in the sun to dry. Once it's dye you put it in a dye for 10 minutes, then you let the slide dry again. Once the slide is dry the second time, you put it under the microscope and look for Malaria.  The trick is to know what you're looking for and know how to identify it.  Malaria has a round head with a body. The head is very round. Under the microscope you're looking for something that looks like a period with a body on top of it. I saw a few examples and given a day or two I probably could have diagnosed Malaria rather easily.

I also ate a number of things I've never eaten before. Kasave, which is like potato only more fibrous. Sugar cane. Sardines, bones and scales and all.

I learned a lot about life in a village. You eat lots of rice and beans, rice and peas, rice and mutapa. Sometimes you have bread and in season you have veggies.  For someone from America where we eat a variety of foods it is difficult to get used to a simpler diet. But it's really not that bad. One thing to remember is that food here is not something you do for pleasure, you just do it because you have to.

I also went to church on Sunday, which was good. Africa is so funny. Church is supposed to start at 9, and every great once in a while it does. Generally it's more like 10:30 or 11, even later when church finally starts. And all of life is that way, you just go with the flow and if something goes wrong do something else. Getting stressed because plans change or something breaks is just unheard of.

What else did I do in Itepela? Oh we played "Uno" and "Spoons" a lot with the kids. One night we played "Spoons" for an hour and a half. It was a lot of fun.

Ariel, the other American, and I played a lot of games as well.  It's something to do. When you do not have all the crazy things we have in America you find stuff to do. Actually I'm beginning to like games and enjoy them more. I'm learning lots of things about myself and about life in being here.