Week 2...
Last week, work had their annual general meeting with all program and management staff at a “business conference center” at a remote village about 4 hours north of Lilongwe.
Usually I can sleep in just about any moving vehicle…however, The truck, a brand new Toyota Forerunner is generally used for food distribution in the drought affected south. The problem being that an army of roaches have made it its home. So, we rode in the roach-mobile, with swarms of roaches crawling all over my legs and feet. I spent the entire 4 hours flicking off the adventurous suckers that would crawl up my leg under my skirt, So no sleep in that ride haha.
The conference center was literally a few huts, and one big hut with a long table and over head projector. The sleeping huts were naturally, also roach infested (which no longer bothered me at this point) and the conference main hut was infested with these HUGE hornets that were the size of flying mice. So, all day long, as we sat through 8 hour meetings, all my colleagues would laugh as I would continually freak out when ever one landed on me. In all my travels, I have NEVER seen any stinging insect SO FRIGGIN BIG before. Roaches are one thing….. flying mice with 2 inch stingers are another.
As I was the only mazungu (foreigner) there, the lodge had no bottled water. After 2 days of drinking only bottled coke in 40 degree sweaty hot water, I was finally dehydrated enough for the lodge owner, so she finally agreed to boil some drinking water for me. However, I swear that she deep fried some fish in a pot, then used the same pot to boil water, as the water tasted and smelled like oil. I swear it tasted like pure oil. I probably wouldn’t of minded so much if every thing we were eating was NOT deep fried as well.
So after 4 days of roach massages, colossal sized insects, oily water, and numerous meetings, I am back in the city. Who would of ever thought that I would miss the luxuries of Lilongwe!
Jim spent the whole week in the city house hunting, and trying to find us a car. Once we get all that figured out, we’ll let ya know where we live…. I hope everyone’s doing well in TO! We miss ya.
posted by Tess and Jim O @ 6:03 PM
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