"taking a day off"

rainbow and clounds over the Providence Girls' Secondary School.

I'm not going to anywhere today, just staying here at the school and catching up on things (like sleep, laundry, this blog, etc.). However there are a few things I've been meaning to say but could never find a place to put them, so here are a few random observations:

Micro vs Macro Hygiene

You might get to malawi and look around and think that the people here, judging them by the paint jobs on their buildings, the rust on their cars, or the trash near their markets, would be pretty dirty. You'd be very wrong.

People was their hands multiple times a day, at the very least before every meal. Bathing is done at least a few times a week and their clothes are always clean. Homes are swept constantly and, even though they may keep goats in the house during the night for fear of thieves, I'd be willing to eat off the floor of any home in any of the villages I've seen so far (fortunately I'll never need to prove this to anyone). The issue is not so much keeping the single house or person or place clean, it's keeping a city's water supply clean, having sewage systems that aren't just really deep gutters, collecting trash and moving it to landfills instead of burning it on the street or in your back yard, etc. If you don't have these things than even if 99% of the people are clean and one isn't that can become a major problem for everyone.

Witchcraft

Some people in some parts of Malawi believe in witchcraft, but they don't really mean the things I mean with the term witchcraft. There are really two kinds of witchcraft, the less harmful kind is composed of incredibly crazy stories being told to scare children. Apparently some people actually believe that if you wake up with a sore neck it's because during the night a witch came, took your head off your body, played rugby with it, and then in the morning put it back on wrong. Most people believe these stories as much as I believe that there are monsters under my bed or in my closet.

Then there's what they'll call witchcraft but is really just people showing how cruel they can be (not even Malawi is free of evil people). What will happen is that someone will throw pests in someone else's crop, or they'll put poisonous herbs in their well, or they'll do whatever messed up thing human beings seem to always do to each other. When things like this happen you'll often hear this referred to as witchcraft, even though everyone knows there's nothing supernatural about it, and the reasons for it are as simple and sad and human as any other crime, jealousy, greed, wrath, whatever.

Dairy Goats?

There are a lot of goats roaming around rural Malawi, so I asked Idah once if she liked goat milk. She asked me, just to make sure, if I'd asked her whether she actually drank the milk from a goat. I repeated the question, do you like to drink the milk that comes from a goat? She looked at me disgusted, as if I'd asked you if you'd like to eat live cockroach with a side of ear wax. So no goat cheese in Malawi, but it was a funny moment.

Weather

The sun here is as hot as I've ever felt it. It'll get hot by 8 or 9 in the morning and it won't cool down until sunset. At around noon or 1 o'clock it'll be very high in the sky (higher than I can remember ever seeing it) and it'll feel like you're in an oven. How Malawians manage to sweat so little is still a mystery to me.

So I'm almost happy when, like today, it rains a little. I don't think I'd be so happy if I was here during the wet season and it was hot and humid, but I'm not, so I'll sit here with my feet under the rain, feel the cool breeze, eat some of these delicious tangerines, and just be happy to be where I am.

this picture was published on tuesday, april 21 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 24.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/125; iso: 400. this image has the following tags: malawi.