It’s been quite the social week here in Lilongwe. The intake
of volunteers who arrived in country at the beginning of February have been in
town for a week long training course known as ICT2 (in country training 2.)
It’s been a great opportunity to make some more friends and build up that
contact list for cheap weekends away :-)
Tuesday night was a bar called “The living room” which is
very pleasant even by UK standards, they serve descent food and often have
different events on such as movie night, quiz night and acoustic night. This
week they had a guitarist playing on the veranda which was great background as
we hunkered down under our blankets on the couch drinking ice cold Malawian
gin.
A note on Malawian gin; it’s incredibly smooth and tastes
slightly fruity, mixed with sobo (orange squash) or tonic you barely notice the
alcohol content which can prove painful the next morning when you realize you
drank half a bottle!
On Wednesday night two volunteers who work at the local
refugee camp invited us all round for a cheese and wine evening. Cheese is
virtually unobtainable in Malawi and when you can get hold of it the quality is
pretty awful. Tom and Helen had recently been back to the UK and had smuggled
back as much as they could carry so the party went down a storm. There were at
least 40 odd people there from various NGO’s and countries of origin all eating
as much of the stuff has humanly possible!
On Friday the ICT2 lot had a field trip planned to a
cultural centre about 100km outside of Lilongwe. Although officially I wasn’t
on the training course I managed to snag a seat on one of the pickups so went
along for the day.
The centre was actually a village set up by a catholic
mission, we had some lunch and then a very knowledgeable tour guide showed us
round three rooms that displayed various aspects of pre-Christian Malawian
culture.
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| Our Tour Guide |
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| The ICT2 Volunteer Group |
Unfortunately cameras weren’t permitted on most of the tour but
pictures from the journey and around the centre can be seen here;
On the way back we had some engine trouble which gave us a
chance to stretch our legs. The pressure build up in the radiator caused a
geezer of water to erupt which made for a pretty cool shot. Sadly though this
did mean we all had to surrender our drinking water so we could fill it back up
and get home;
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| Wait for it... |
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| Boom! |
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