Muli bwanji? Habari Gani?: Back from Blantyre

I’m back in the double-L and I think I brought the cold weather from Blantyre. The mornings now are very cold and I drank tea all day just to keep my hands warm today. I enjoyed Blantyre and it has a very different feel than Lilongwe. It’s a much more compact city and I enjoy being surrounded by the hills and being so close to great outdoor activities. It also seems to have more social cohesion as the expat residents tend to long-term residents as opposed to the 1-2 year contracts most have here in Lilongwe. The first weekend I drove down three of the UNC undergraduates who are here for the summer (my two mentees and a geography/aspiring public health student) and took them to Mulanje where we found a great pool for swimming!

The middle weekend I joined the Mountain Club of Malawi for their annual 3 peaks walk, a 42 km hike around the proximity of Blantyre to the summit of each of the 3 hills surrounding the city: Michiru, Ndirande, and Soche. Of course I was with a group that got lost so it ended up being 45km in total (but who’s counting at that point anyway??). We started at 5am and reached the summit of Michiru just before 7am.

Summit #1: Michiru

Hot tea and biscuits at the bottom, a 3 km detour through a township area, a solid rock wall to scramble up, and 3 hours later we reached the summit of Ndirande. (Now I’m looking - and feeling - a little more haggard).

Summit #2: Ndirande

The view of Ndirande's rock face from Kamuzu viewpoint, our lunch spot halfway down.

After hiking across all of Limbe (the town adjoining Blantyre) and a practically vertical 1km hike up, we reached the summit of Soche just before the sun went down.

Summit #3: Soche

Early evening light over Blantyre from Soche.

Out of the 39 who started, only 12 of us made it the entire distance. I also made some cool new friends in Blantyre that are avid outdoors-people that I can call whenever I’m in town again!

Now, many think think the life of a graduate student in Malawi is somehow glamourous (and I guess it doesn't help that I disproportionately blog about my weekend adventures), and I always think "if only they could see the tiny windowless data room and the corner of a table piled high with study binders where I do most of my work in the clinic". The following scenes are a much more accurate portrayal of reality. A grad student friend from Lilongwe was in Blantyre for a few days of field work and I let her share my room at the College of Medicine guest house since after all, grad students are on a tight budget. Working on my laptop in bed is a pretty typical, exciting night for me. She is typing up field notes, I am preparing for the next day's lecture.

This is even more typical Malawi! Working under bednets by headlamp when there's no electricity.

I took advantage of being so close to Mulanje (especially since someone else paid for my fuel between Lilongwe and Blantyre!) and spent the weekend checking out the course for the upcoming Porter’s Race on July 11. Pitman, the amazing/crazy guide who led my friends on their 30 mile hut-to-hut run in May, led me through the course and gave me some good race-day hints. He finished 7th last year and is hoping to finish 3rd this year! The prize money isn’t much, but it would be enough to cover his school fees and he wants to sit for the Form 4 examinations this year. Every year the top scorers are able to pursue post-secondary education and only approximately 900 in the entire country are able to go on to post-secondary education. I contrast that with the town I grew up in where it was just taken for granted that after high school came college (and in my family, then graduate school).

Welcome to Mount Mulanje