Whoa, friendies, it’s certainly been a while since I last wrote! You can thank the various members of my (extended) family for inspiring this post, as they’ve bothered me to no end about the fact that I haven’t written in… well, long enough.
So helllooooo, world, it is I, Jessica, still alive and kickin’ in Malawi. We had lovely holidays here at the farm, Christmas Eve the occasion of a huge feast – we killed a medium-sized pink pig and roasted her over charcoal, along with one of our egg-laying hens (we still have 16, don’t worry), cooked a variety of side dishes and, most importantly, made a jug of mulled wine which lasted until the next morning. Gifts were simple – I baked Mikael brownies and cookies, he bought me a pink sparkly skirt, and we gave our staff the uniforms they had asked for. I ate so much I was unable to move for 24 hours – just long enough, as we were invited to Christmas dinner in Livingstonia by our friends Lynn and Jonny. A lovely Irish couple who moved here with their two young girls a month ago, Lynn is a doctor who has come to work at the hospital up in town. The hospital is very well known in the area, despite it not having a fully-qualified doctor on staff for the past 5 years, and Lynn has brought her family along to fix that problem in a semi-permanent fashion – they plan to be here “long term”, long-enough term to invest in buying our breeding pair of pigs and their remaining babies. The pigs just left today (!!!), which means we get to tear down the pig pen and hope that all the rank smelling mud inside washes away in the next big rainstorm, which should happen any minute now. Then it was New Year’s Eve, and we went to bed around 9pm – the lack of lights, loud music, and expectation of fireworks leading to an early night by both Mikael and I and our customers. Apparently, Malawians stay up all night on both Christmas and New Year’s, drinking and dancing in the village, and our staff came to work tired (or not at all) the following days. That brings us to now – I’m currently sitting in our kitchen, one of the few rain proof areas of the farm, waiting for some lunch to be made (I’ll never knock having a cook again, especially when we only have fire to cook over, even though our cook is often grouchy when I ask her what happened to various vegetables that I swear were in the kitchen earlier that morning) and keeping the dogs out. Day to day life – not so exciting, eh?
Oh, I kid – there has been plenty enough excitement since I last wrote. I’m not sure if I mentioned the juvenile black mamba in one of the chalets that we encouraged to leave by throwing cups of hot water at it, and that we’ve recently spotted behind the showers; or the unidentified green tree snake who I came upon quite unexpectedly in the kitchen, looking at me with a mouthfull of gecko before scooting off up a tree; or the beautiful deck that we finished (well, mostly our carpenter) behind one of the other chalets, watched for a day by the most adorable family of bush babies; or the fact that Mikael got the big Malaria this past weekend while I simultaneously got the flu; or that we’ve been here over 5 months already and only have 4 more to go!! All of these things are exciting enough without mentioning that local mushrooms have been sprouting everywhere (most not good to eat, but some delicious); we’ve finally started framing the floor of the entirely new chalet we’ll be building in the upcoming weeks; we managed to get petrol less than 2 weeks ago and still have enough to make it to Mzuzu for shopping next week; we have NOT run out of beer, even though Malawi has been out for a little over a month; and our dog King, who got bitten by a baboon about a month ago, is nearly completely healed and can be found bounding off happily in chase of even more of these notoriously bad-ass primates.
Reading that over, none of it is particularly exciting or comes across as more than commonplace to me. I guess the theme of this blog is that we’re finally settled in here, and that the things that come along that may seem exotic to you, my readers out there, don’t really phase us anymore (everything except for the tiny biting flies that have recently sprung up everywhere, covering my shoulders in a collection of itchy little bumps – they phase us). It the random beautiful moments that keep us going and continually remind us of why we chose to spend 9 months on a hillside in rural Malawi – like last night, as dusk was falling, all of the termites in the entire world (or at least near our kitchen) decided it was “that time” to complete the growth of their wings and take off from their homes for far-away lands. Literally hundreds of winged beasties streamed from small holes in the ground, to the joy and delight of us and our two customers, as we watched translucent wings flutter through the moon-speckled trees and disappear. Our old dog and young kitten also got a kick out of the take-off, positioning themselves near one of the multitude of holes and catching an after-dinner treat. Or a few nights ago, one of the first clear nights in a while and coincidentally the night of the full moon, where we were treated to a moon-rise over Lake Malawi that would be a fantasy-come-true for many a landscape photographer. The same night, the mountains across the lake in Tanzania stood out in sharp relief against the pink and dusk-blue sky, giving our guests to a view of deeply crevassed hillsides over 100km away that seemed so close we could touch them. Or our normally dry creek bed that, during one particularly hard rain, turned into a huge rushing rapid-filled river with a stunning waterfall disappearing over the cliff face that we call our home. It’s this stuff that makes us laugh and smile like it was our first day here, and that makes us feel like the Mushroom Farm is the most special place in all the world.
I miss you guys, and look forward to my homecoming sometime later this year. Until then, this is Jess, signing off – let me know if you have particular topics that you’d like to know more about from the perspective of a backpacker-turned-campsite-manager in rural Malawi, and I’ll dedicate my next blog to your questions!
Love, hugs, kisses, and rainbows.
