Quite a weekend

We were able to see Easu on Friday before we left Ekwendeni for the northern regional capitol of Mzuzu.  He has so much on his plate right now with the students coming back from their break today, he is still teaching while function as the acting Dean of the College, and the death of his daughter.  We were surprised that he would be back to work so soon, but also not surprised with so much going on for which he is responsible.   On top of all that he said they wanted to have some kind of celebration with all the people we met to thank us.  We will phone him today and see if that will work out today or tomorrow as we think we may be leaving for Lilongwe on Wednesday. 

As usual, plans are tentative and we hope to get more information today to help us decide our next steps.  We still don’t know whether we will work for the University office in Mzuzu as there is a bunch of internal political stuff going on and find work for 2 volunteers is not their top priority right now.  We will call Flemmings Nkhandwe in Lilongwe to see if he has projects for us.  And we are not having much luck in finding a fun side trip during our time.  The one we wanted most to the National Park up in the north looks like it is not possible unless  we want to spend a small fortune – the one in the south that we wanted to the lake and the former capitol is not available until October and I hope to find out about our last option to a national park in the south.  Email is tentative, phone numbers are not always working so it is hard to make plans.

Now to our weekend!  Friday when we moved over to Mzuzu, we were in contact with Atusaye as he was coming down to Mzuzu from Livingstonia and we planned to spend time together.  Unfortunately, the University was late in issuing his paycheck to him, which he wanted to bring to town to cash.  By the time he and friend Christy left it was 3 or 4 pm when they arrived in Mzuzu so we had a late lunch with them and then they started back the 3 hours to Livingstonia.  It was great to see him one more time before we leave, but he was bummed that the time was so short as they planned to be in Mzuzu by lunch time and Christy had some shopping she wanted to do also.

We talked to Nelson on Friday and he wanted us to come to his Mom and Dad’s for dinner on Saturday night.   We arrived at their house and Nelson’s cousin Alfred, who drove us to Matiya and Mariya’s house at the lake last weekend was there with his wife who had just returned from 2 years in the US.  She is finishing up her PhD in Special Ed at the University of Missouri.  It was fun talking to her and hearing about her adventures in the US.  What a sacrafice to leave your husband and child for 2 years! 

Next, Matiya announced that the Presidential Candidate from the Malawi Congress Party(MCP) would be joining us for dinner.  He is an old friend of Matiya’s from the days that Matiya was head of the northern synod of the Presbyterian church – the candidate was head of Assemblies of God in Malawi, and they had worked together on several projects.

John and I had no idea of the protocols involved so there were a lot of awkward silences, but eventually I tried to just make conversation with him.  He seemed a delightful guy, raised by subsistence farmers like most everyone in Malawi and taught by Peace Corp volunteer teachers so his English has a southern accent which was a hoot.  At the end of the night when he was leaving he waved and said “Bye y’all”.  Matiya is very high on him and he talked about the need to end tribal differences and become one Malawi – and about the importance of education.  All of which sounded great.  John said afterwards that he had a lot of questions but didn’t dare ask them for protocol sake since the MCP was the party of the former dictator who was in power when John was here in the Peace Corps, and had been the party of a pretty bad guy left from that time also.  He is seen to be a strong candidate though, so we may be able to say we had dinner with the President of Malawi after the elections next May.

Here we all are: 

Then on to Sunday.  We phoned Nelson to see if he wanted to have lunch with us since he may be leaving to work on his research and we may be leaving soon for the south too.  After a nice lunch to get caught up on his PhD research, he asked if we wanted to attend a soccer game.  Great, we said having no plans for the day at all.  We got tickets in the VVIP section, which meant we were in the shade and got to sit on chairs, some of which had backs.  Then before the game was to begin, the man sitting next to us said that sometimes to show respect, he would bring people onto the field honor the players and would we join him.  We’re not sure what is going on but he says to just follow his lead when the time comes.

The first local game ends and then the Premier League teams take the field and he gives us the signal to get up and follow him, which we do.  We go down on the field, follow him out to where the players are lined to and shake the hand of each of the players.  As we leave the field, a guy with a “media” vest on stops us to write down our names and where we are from.  At one point I looked around, saw that there were around 1000 people at the game and we were the only ones who were white.  Apparently, that made us celebrities.  We still aren’t sure what it was about but it was fun.

It is however a bit of an embarrassment to be a celebrity simply by virtue of your skin color and place of origin.