Mikä Malawi

Catching a bus is always an interesting experience in Malawi… You arrive to the bus station and in few seconds you are surrounded with “bus boys” who are all trying to get you to their buses. They will tell you everything to get you to go with their bus..” Take this one! This is the fastest! This is the best! This is the fastest of the fastest!” When you ask for the time they are leaving you get all kind of answers.. “It´s leaving just now now. It´s leaving 7.30. It´s leaving 9.00. It´s leaving when it´s full.” The last answer is always the correct answer, the bus will leave when it´s full, that´s for sure. So basically you just need to look for the bus which has the most people in it already. It might also be that they put some random guys to sit in the bus to look like it´s full though there is not nearly enough people for it to departure yet. They will also step on the gas to make it sound like they are leaving though they are not. It´s a tricky thing. It´s better to leave hurry to ...

Greetings from Mzuzu, the capital of Northern Malawi! I am writing this with a candle light in our dining room. The power cuts are everyday and normally come around 6pm lasting about 1 to 4 hours. First few times are surprising but by now we are already use to them and basically the only way to be prepared is to have a good set of candles available for those times. Though when it happens you are always in the other side of the house from the matches and flashlights.. Our house So after having to spend some extra time in Lilongwe we finally made it to our new home. When thinking about it now it was actually a very good thing because we had time to settle and get to know the town before we started to work. We arrived last Thursday and mainly spend the weekend cleaning and setting up the house. We were really lucky to get a wide range of kitchen equipment from some previous volunteers so we didn´t have to spend a lot of money on those. We are still missing quite a lot of furniture since t...

Greetings from the sunny side of the earth! Where should I start from.. Well, my flight finally arrived to Lilongwe and this is where I have been ever since. We started with the real intense and busy In-Country training week. We had sessions about quite a range of subjects, including for example security and culture in Malawi, not forgetting the corruption, HIV/AIDS and health issues and general understanding about the sustainable development in Malawi. Most of all I enjoyed our chitumbuka lessons which is the local language we are going to use in the North of Malawi. It was so much fun and we pretty much covered the basics during the first week, greetings and how to get lower prices at the market, very essential. The training week ended on Saturday with a meeting with our employer, Edward the manager himself seemed such a nice person, I am sure we are going to get along well. So about the situation now. Since we are in Africa, delays and miscommunication is normal and not really surpr...

Yesterday I started flying towards Malawi. In -25 degrees I left Helsinki. Knowing that there will be no need for winter jackets, hats, gloves, layers and layers of clothes for the next 2 years it made the leaving quite easy. But must say Helsinki looked really beautiful when looking from above, really white like winter should be. The next departure from Frankfurt didn´t go quite as expected.. We were just talking with few fellow travelers today that the announcements were not so nice, it went somehow like this: - Dear passengers, we have a problem in the engine one, we will try to sort it out but we will get back to the airplane parking space to get the engineers working on it. - Dear passengers, we will now try the engine one if it works correctly ( after this you could see a smoke coming out from the engine) - Dear passengers, we are still working on the engine problem, we will let you know in about 15 minutes - Dear passengers, we we will now try the engine one and then make the fi...

All my bags are packed I´m ready to go... Well, about being ready I am not so sure about, can you ever really be ready to leave and live in another country for 2 years? I don´t think so. But at least my bags are ready so that leaves me some time to relax for tonight. I think I have left so many times already from one place to another that the whole thing about leaving and saying goodbye is easy for me. I always wanted to go back to Africa and haven´t really realized yet that I will actually be there on Sunday but I am sure it will be such a lovely feeling to land my feet back to the true African ground. And I love these moments where you can start a whole new page in the book of your life! I have really enjoyed the last pages and will probably stay on the same chapter still, just adding more adventures to this page. You might know that I have never really settled anywhere. Becoming older sometimes gives me the feeling that I should consider settling more but now at the moment of one mo...