Friday – and Lin and I decided to have a lie-in, and walk in to the site later in the morning. Mari gave us instructions the night before, and it sounded relatively simple.
I got up not long after Mari left, and sat in the front room writing in my notebook. After a while Lin got up and we had a leisurely breakfast and sat around gassing for a while, and watching the different birds in the garden – Lin, of course, trying to catch them all with her long lens. We pottered around till about 11 and then set off for our walk.
We walked out of the gate, up the hill and across the track at the top, up a road which I had never previously noticed, as the ride down to Mitsidi is so bumpy that I am usually just hanging on for dear life and not noticing too much of what is going on around me! We took the track up to the phone mast, as instructed, and sure enough, just as Mari had said, there was a house in the middle of it! We walked round the house, and into a square of other houses, to cries of “azungu, azungu” (which basically means “white skin”) from the children over the other side of the square.
At the top of the square we reached a road and turned right, following the road round almost in a square. Lin and her enormous camera had, by this time, attracted a crowd of under 5s who were screaming with excitement as she took their photo and showed them on the screen. But it was becoming clear to me that something had gone wrong, as the road turned back on itself again, so that we were about to head back towards Mitsidi.
In the end I phoned Mari and confessed I had managed to get lost. It turned out we should have turned left not right, but it was easy enough to get back on track, and we soon found ourselves walking along a busy little road, with people selling vegetables, a water tap, a mosque and various schools and nurseries. We were viewed with curiosity, and some amusement (possibly the hats?) and not only by the children, but it was all quite friendly. What amazed me was that I had assumed that Mitsidi was in the middle of nowhere, because the road down from Chilomoni high street goes through fields and over a stream, but in fact there are people living right behind where we are; in fact quite a lot of people.
We got to the site in time for lunch, and met up with Mari and the others.
After lunch Mari took us down to visit Maureen and her nursery. There were no children there, apart from Maureen’s own, as the nursery finishes at 12 on a Friday, which Mari had forgotten, but Maureen showed us round anyway, and then we stopped for a Fanta and a chat. It was interesting to see the impact that Mari’s course has had on Maureen, who is one of her students. She has put more pictures on the walls, created a story bag, with things in it to bring a story to life for children, and there were splatter paintings on the wall.
We walked back up to the site and Mari and Sarah did some work while we waited for David and Marc to come back with the car. Once they picked us up, it was off to the Liquor Garden, for a well-deserved Friday afternoon drink! David drove, and Mari, Lin and I were in the back of the pick-up, standing up and holding onto the roll bar. It was exhilarating, if a little scary, and again caused some amusement to passers-by. The scariest moment was when a man jumped out in front of the pick-up and started waving and shouting. David screeched to a halt in order not to run him over, and it turned out it was (sort of) a friend of David and Marc’s – a man they know from the Liquor Garden who is harmless, but generally out of his head on something or other.
We spent a couple of hours drinking beer, and trying not to watch the television, which had a particularly gory and unpleasant programme on called something like “1000 ways to die”! Lin made friends with the man sitting next to her, who was the pastor of a mission, called Happy.
At about 5.40 everyone over 30 (of the Mitsidi volunteers) left in order to get back for dinner, leaving “the children” to spend the evening in the bar. Mari agreed to go and pick up Marc and Sarah at 9, as she worries about them either walking home in the dark, or driving or being driven by someone who is over the limit.
The rest of us had a pleasant dinner together, and then Lin, Mari and I went back to the house to pack for our trip to Dedza and Lake Malawi.
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