My Third Day

Today we tried to walk all the way to Salima downtown, which is about 8 km away. We got picked up along the way by Martin and Henry though, which were meeting us in the city. By then we had walked for about 1.5 hours. It was really nice to just stroll along the road, hearing kids scream “mzungu” from everywhere and waving at us, people smiling and greeting us and so on. A woman with a bucket of washed clothes on her head, and a “gans” under each arm, still managed to wave her hand at us and smile. Just watching a Malawian road for a while is quite impressive, to see all the transportations of any thing you can imagine, on heavily overloaded vehicles (also overloaded by people in the back, or goods and peple), bicycles, or by foot. The people who were talking to us were often surprised that we were walking so far by foot. They asked “where is your tranport?”. In twon we bought 76 l of water, which will hopefully last for the next ten days. We also changed some US dollars to kwacha, which is always a bit adventurous in Malawi. You have to bargain about the exchange rate and we had to go to a back room of a grocery store, to exchange it. We exchanged it with Riswan, according to Martin, you can exchange money in almost every shop that is lead by Indians, which many shops are.

In the afternoon Tobi and I played some ball. We invented some of our own games. He also teaches sports, so we can do a sports program together in the weeks that he will be here too. We were gathering some ideas. I brought a volleyball ball and a rugby ball, and I think there are plenty of soccer balls here. There are two soccer goals and two whoops for netball, a kind of basketball without the backboard (“Korbball”). So we thought of some games we could play with the kids. **For non-Swiss readers the next two sentences won’t make sense** For instance “Wer hät Angst vor em schwarze Maa”, or maybe not ;) Or we could turn it around and make it a “Who is scared of the mzungu” and catch them ourselves ;) Some other, more serious ideas apart from soccer contained various relay races (“Stafetten”) with several funny ideas, touch-rugby, maybe build a net for volleyball, maybe basic orienteering on the school campus (but it might be difficult to draw an accurate map), and just running. Ultimate Frisbee (and maybe Frisbee golf) would be cool too, if we can get our hands on some Frisbees. If you have any other genious ideas, don’t hesitate to comment!

There was no school yet by the way, this week almost all of the students are in Blantyre at an arts festival. School recommences next week. We are going to Blantyre tomorrow morning though, to see the arts festival.