Malawi #4 - Anteloping Around

Disclaimer: All photos were taken on disposable film cameras. Therefore they are pretty crap.

Whilst we were away, although we spent the majority of our time in tents at the site, we did all get a day or two of respite from such "tortuous" conditions. The most significant of these trips was our trip to Mvuu, which is a National Park in the south of Malawi, only couple of hours drive away from the site.


Everyone on site got to spend a night there, with a swimming pool, a real bed, and meals cooked for us, as well as one trip out on a land safari, which I'll show you some pictures from here, and one on a boat safari, which I'll cover in my next post.

Pumba and his family were the first wildlife we saw, from the dining room at the lodge, in fact! Interestingly, warthogs kneel down on their front legs when they are grazing, as their necks aren't long enough to allow them to reach the ground! There were a lot of monkeys and things kicking about the lodge as well, as the scavenge leftovers from the tables whenever possible. The lodge is built with low walls, and a roof held up by wooden pillars, so birds and other wild life could come and go. The park wardens tend to chase the monkeys away with a catapult, however, as they are pests, even if they are rather sweet.

Out on our drive we saw a lot of things I didn't manage to get photos of on my disposable camera, which is a shame, but then, there are lots of good pictures of these things online - far better than any I would take. The list of what I didn't photograph includes sable antelope, roan antelope, duikers, bushpigs, elephants, zebras, sparrow weavers, hartebeest, kudus and guinea fowl. Seeing the zebras in the natural habitat was particularly exciting as I've not seen many before, but they're quite a famous animal.

I did manage to get photos of the impala, but we saw loads of those, so it was easy to wait for some right near the truck.

I also got this one picture of a buffalo which came out alright, although it's still pretty far away. Maybe by the time I go again (which I probably will, you know what I'm like) then I'll have a decent camera with zoom lenses and things!

We also saw a few baobab trees in the park. These are pretty cool - rather esoterically African, so they were nice to see again. We actually went to Mvuu the last time I was in Malawi as well, and there were a few things I saw this time which I didn't see before!

After the game drive, we met up with the other jeeps and went down to the riverside. We wanted to watch the sunset but we didn't actually get there on time, so we just had drinks in the dark before we went back to the lodge for dinner.

Love and hugs

Part 1 - The Epic Journey
Part 2 - The Daily Grind
Part 3 - Not Your Average Sunday Morning

Malawi #3 - Not Your Average Sunday Morning

Disclaimer: All photos were taken on disposable film cameras. Therefore they are pretty crap. Unless they are ones which I nicked from people off Facebook, in which case they will be appropriately credited.



Church in Malawi was a brand new experience for many of the young people on the trip. A lot of them do not regularly attend church at home, and may find the whole experience to be dull and unimaginative. Going to the local church in Malawi was a completely different experience from church at home, and even I found it new and exciting, despite having been to the very same church on more than one occasion, four years previously.

The first time we went it was the final English service of the academic year, as all of the students had finished their exams and were heading home for the holidays. We caused quite a stir as we arrived in full uniform and kilts, with bagpipes and all. I saw more than one person snap a photo on their phone as we paraded past - some things never change.


One of the students from the school did the sermon and she was incredible! It was the kind of passionate straightforward sort of preaching I hadn't heard in a while. No talk of the wider church, nothing to suggest that we're doing it wrong. Just an impassioned plea to people that if they love God, they should express their gratitude and put their money where their mouths are. Their church desperately needs some renovation work. If you love church, you need to help us to fix it.

Needless to say they had a record offering that week. Thanks to a bunch of rich white people who reckoned that 500MK (about £2) was a perfectly reasonable sum to put in. The girl who was preaching suggested that 100MK was the kind of thing people should be putting in, if they could possibly afford it. I was just glad we could help them with their roof!

After the service, the young people from the school showed us around the whole mission site. It's a boarding school, so we saw where they lived, where they ate, where they learned. There is a clinic there as well, although we didn't see inside. The tour around the grounds was something we didn't get to do last time so it was really great to see everything.



The following week, a smaller group of us went along to the church again to the Chichewa service, which local people attend, rather than the school children. They were very accomodating at the church, and gave us bibles and hymn books in English so that we could still join in. Unfortunately the English and Chichewa hymnbooks don't match up, so whilst they were singing, we were struggling to fit the words to the tunes, even when we knew them! A lot of the hymn tunes were familiar because the church was founded by missionaries from the Church of Scotland, who would have taken their own hymns and tunes with them, many of which are still used here in Scotland today.

Interestingly, the offering at the Chichewa service was given in cash, but also in kind - people brought in food that they had grown themselves - it is a farmland area - and collected this for distribution. I didn't catch the full explanation of what it was for, as it was in a different language, but that seemed to be the gist of it anyway.

Both times we were in church we were asked to sing for them. Fortunately I knew about this, and we were prepared, but if you ever happen to be in a church in Africa with a group of people, beware they may ask if you have a choir. And if you say only one song, they will ask you for two.


Love and hugs

Part 1 - The Epic Journey
Part 2 - The Daily Grind

Malawi #2 - The Daily Grind

Disclaimer: All photos were taken with a disposable film camera, so I apologise for the poor quality. I also apologise for my mediocre skills as a photographer and photo editor.


Many of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with 6am starts, which are never fun. You live for the weekends, right? I know. Unfortunately, weekends were pretty much the same. Those of you who are not familiar with 6am starts, I recommend you do not discover them whilst you are also sleeping on the ground in a different hemisphere with a new diet and weird medications and outside noises. However, there was no real choice in the matter - we had to get up with the sun and get on with things. I was working on base camp for most of the trip, so I had to help the team of young people on duty to make a vat of porridge every morning to feed the hungry masses. Breakfast was at 7, sharp. No excuses. Incredibly, we nearly always managed it too! I love porridge. Unfortunately, I can only make it for 60 people over a fire. I have no idea how much porridge you make for one person, or how to do it in a microwave.


Since we were a group of fully-invested, promise-keeping Scouts, we ran flag break every morning at quarter to 8 - usually in our casual uniforms, but full shirts and kilts on Sunday's and special occasions. It's kind of nice to have that sort of official start to the day. For me it marked the time where I started to feel like a human being again, and not a morning zombie. If we were lucky there'd be bagpipes!


Project work started at 8 o'clock (more on that in a different post) and the base camp team would go back to tidy up after breakfast, and send a small group off into town to go shopping, nearly every day. There was always bread to be bought, as well as meat, vegetables, eggs and so on, depending on the menu for the next few days. The young people planned most of the meals themselves - the leaders were there to be facilitators for the most part. The shopping party would take the van into Zomba to visit Metro and Shoprite, the Wonder Bakery, and the market. I wish I had photos to show you of this, but it can be considered rude and there was never a lot of spare time for tourism anyway.

Lunch was typically rolls, with corned beef, tinned luncheon meat, or egg mayonnaise, tomatoes, fruit and sometimes crisps. I developed an incredible taste for corned beef and tomato sandwiches, and I miss them probably even more than the porridge.

Dinner could be anything from macaroni cheese (a rarity - cheese costs a fortune), to chilli, to goat curry, to chicken and nsima. Some of what we achieved was quite impressive considering the ingredients and cooking facilities we had available, and that is entirely down to the hard work of the cook team each day. When you have a group of people who are living and working outside for a month, it's really important to keep them properly fed, and I was so proud of how well every team did, despite all the challenges we faced.


One of the most exciting things to cook was chicken. This is because the chickens arrived on site in all their feathered, clucking, flapping glory (that's how you know they're fresh - no fridges where there's no electricity!) and had to be corralled and stopped from escaping (you've seen Chicken Run, right?) until we were ready to take care of them. I'll spare you the graphic details. It's not something I did myself, and not something I enjoy talking about. I was OK with the plucking, and OK with taking the wings and legs and things off, but the rest was all just a bit much.


Nsima is a traditional Malawian food made of milled maize (much coarser than your average bag of cornflour) which would be cooked with water until it thickened into a substance which is hard to describe. It was similar in consistency to cookie dough, but looked like mashed potato, and which tasted of not-really-anything-at-all. You're supposed to roll it into a ball with your hands and dip it into a relish - made from vegetables, kidney beans, and/or meat if possible. The cooking process involves a lot of stirring - I did my best but I wasn't really strong enough, given how HUGE the pot was. Do excuse how awful I look in the photo. I had no idea I looked like that or I would have done something about it. I'm dirty and sunburnt and my hair needs a wash. But hey, there were no mirrors, and I have red hair so I can't help the sunburn, even with SPF 50+!


Dinner was usually served not long after it got dark, around half past 6, and after the washing up was all finished there might be a campfire, some ceilidh dancing, a disco or just the chance to sit around and chat or write diaries or play games. The disco equipment was rented from the nearest wee town with a night club - two enormous speakers and a box with twiddly knobs (that's the technical description) which was wired together just with lengths of insulated wire. I'm not sure it would pass a health and safety inspection but it got the job done, and they were loud as anything, it was quite incredible.

Despite all the routine, every day was different, and every day I learned something new about camp cooking, mass cooking, Malawian cooking, the people I was working with, or how to try and deal with some spectacular cooking disasters!

Love and hugs

Part 1 - The Epic Journey
Part 3 - Not Your Average Sunday Morning

Malawi #1 - The Epic Journey

Good afternoon dear reader! Today begins a series of posts about the incredible trip I took this summer to Malawi with a group of Scouts. I'm moving house soon (I told you that already!) and I figured it would be good to ensure some regular posting whilst I'm all tied up with that. So for the next 3 weeks or so, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you will be supplied with my over-long and somewhat tiresome dazzlingly funny stories about what I got up to in the warm heart of Africa.
*Note: I didn't actually manage to schedule the posts properly so they were not posted in order, but they will all be linked at the end of each post in the series, so you can still read them in sequence.

Disclaimer: All photos were taken on disposable film cameras. Therefore they are pretty crap. Unless they are ones which I nicked from people off Facebook, in which case they will be appropriately credited.

Our epic journey to Malawi began on Thursday 30th June, 2011. And you probably read epic and assumed I was exaggerating, but that wouldn't really be fair. For a start, there were 10 leaders and 34 young people (aged 15-18), 45 kit bags, 1 large plastic box, 1 guitar, and 14 enormous canvas tents. Well, we were going for 4 weeks, so we couldn't really help but have a whole heap of crap with us!


But yes, the epic journey began on Thursday, when we left Edinburgh on a coach at 7am (roughly!) to begin our first leg, on the motorway to Heathrow. So far, so blah. It was like getting the megabus, except you knew everyone, and you were allowed to wear your pajamas...

We arrived more than 9 hours later, at half past 4, queued for a very long time to check in, spent a very long time getting through security, and then spent a very long time waiting for our flight, which was around 9pm.

Our first flight was the red-eye to Addis Ababa, which took about 8 hours and arrived at 7am (5am UK time). So we were knackered, achey, travel sick, but excited. We weren't there yet but we were in AFRICA! Yuss!!

A few hours later we hopped on a shorter flight to Lilongwe, which is the capital city of Malawi. I sat between to lovely America missionaries and we started off having a conversation, but they'd been travelling as long as we had, and so all three of us fell asleep in about 20 minutes and barely woke up until we started our descent. THAT knackered people. So sleepy and disorientated that I, in fact, left my best ever jumper that my mum knitted me under the seat on the plane, and did not even realise until like 2 weeks later when I wanted to wash the other jumper I had with me that I had actually brought two jumpers with me out of Edinburgh. Well, what can I say, it's hot in Africa. You don't need jumpers that much! But yeah, I shed a few tears, I won't like. She is making me a new one though, because she's an official babe.



But yes, we arrived (less one jumper) in Lilongwe, and met up with some of our old Scout friends from my 2007 trip (more on that another time, perhaps) and some new ones, and hopped into another coach and to the Korea Garden Lodge. It was great. Nice clean rooms, and GREAT food, and a swimming pool which was FRICKIN' COLD! But good after all that hot sweaty travelling. One of the kids, who's pretty tall, decided to dive in across the ways (parallel with the short side) and zoomed across and hit his head off the wall. Idiot. He had this massive cut on his nose, and our resident nurse was out at the Scout HQ looking for a geocache *eyeroll* but we patched him up and he was fine really.


The next day (this is Saturday now - I was confused too) we were up early again and onto our trusty coach (they had to open the hatch to the engine to get the thing started!) We had to stop for diesel, police checks, toilet trips and all kinds, so we got the opportunity to oggle the locals through the window, and see the gorgeous scenery as well. These adorable kids were at one of the stops, and at another one, this teenage boy was trying to propose marriage to some of the girls through the window. I was amused.


Our final stop was in a place called Liwonde, which is right down to the south of Lake Malawi, where the Shire River and the main road cross over. We stopped for a juice, and we were hoping for something to eat, but the cafe didn't really have the capacity to feed all of us. But some helpful person told us there was a "supermarket" which was "just round the corner". Half an hour's walk later, we arrive at this miniature Cash and Carry - different from what you would get in the UK or the US I imagine - and just about managed to buy enough bread, bananas, peanut butter and pilchards to feed the crowd, as well as a whole stack of paper plates and some knives. After a lot of confusion due to a lack of phone contact, the bus eventually arrived to pick us up and so the grand sandwich adventure began. I don't know if you've ever tried to make sandwiches for a bus full of hungry teenagers, on a paper plate in your lap, on the bumpiest road known to man, where one of the kids is somewhat allergic to the peanut butter you're trying to feed to everyone else. I would recommend it. Although we were laughing at the time, probably to stop us crying...

An hour or so after that, about 4.30 or 5pm, I reckon, we eventually arrived at the Makwawa Scout Campsite. Huzzah! Fourteen hurriedly pitched tents, one massive pot of spaghetti bolognaise, and a check under the toilet seat for scorpions later and it was pretty much time for bed.

Love and hugs

Part 2 - The Daily Grind
Part 3 - Not Your Average Sunday Morning

A Few "Holiday" Snaps

Today was another quiet day up here on the coast. Slept late. Read a lot. That's about it. We had sweet potatoes for tea.

So your substitute entertainment this evening is going to come in the form of some photos. I'm tired though, so this is going to be a wordless post. I'll tell you the stories another day, I promise.