So HAPPY LATE TURKEY DAY!!! I hope everyone was ridiculously stuffed with turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and apple/pumpkin pie!!! I was definitely missing everyone in the US the last few days... especially family. (Love you guys!). My Thanksgiving here was pretty fabulous... Spent this past Thursday in Blantyre. VSV in the south had a welcome/orientation for the new education and health volunteers that arrived in July. Technically they've been stuck at site for the last 3 months and are "officially" able to travel, so it was supposed to be the first time we all got together. Definitely a fun time... we all stayed at Doogle's, the backpacker's lodge there. We pretty much just hung out and chatted... and drank... probably a little too much, but that's ok. And ate really yummy food. Amy and I also had a good time shopping and hanging out with Mary, a girl from University of South Carolina (I think...) who's doing research for her Ph.D in Mulanje district...
Friday was an exciting travel day. And by that I mean we got on a bus at 630 am, and didn't move from our seats until 11. Got some stuff done at the Peace Corps office in Lilongwe... and by that I mean I played with my new computer for about 4 hours! Its absolutely beautiful! Its a burgundy & black on the outside and has a pretty largish keyboard for a net book, and has an amazing battery life (very important when you don't have electric... :), and there's a digital camera thing that might mean if I can get a high speed internet connection I can try skype! Super excited because I've already used it a ton to write these two grants that I will explain soon...
Saturday was the official Peace Corps Thanksgiving dinner! It was delicious! The needed a few additional volunteers to help cook, so went to that... It was insane and awesome! Feeding 100 people is a ton of work but we all had fun. Main course was a roast pig (turkey is way too impractical...). Also had mashed potatoes, mac & cheese, mango pie (almost like apple!), green bean cassarole, salad... you get the idea... yumminess... And there was lots of dancing! Vic, our country directer provided music and has a really good collection of random stuff... Afterward... we just all hung out... then went to Chez Ntemba, a night club... I'm constantly amazed at night clubs here... and how much more comfortable I am dancing... Until a dance-off went down, followed by a techno rendition of Jingle Bells that I was just not feeling. So a bunch of us went home...
So... grants... A village right by me called Namwera is currently having a major water problem. They have 2 boreholes (think giant hand pump) for getting water, but one has no parts... a problem you can imagine, and the other is in need of replacement parts, so right now its operational, but takes about 2x as long to fill up a bucket as one that's in good condition and the hand pump part sounds like its going to fall apart at any moment. In addition to this, the "working" one is at the bottom of a hill, while the majority of the village is at the top... And this is a steep hill. For those of you who know my Dad's house, imagine walking up the hill my driveway is off of (Grapevine Rd), to the top, with a 20L bucket of water on your head. Not a fun time. Which means either more work for the women and girls here, or they drink untreated stream water. So, I'm writing 2 grants. One is to fix these 2 boreholes, plus one in my village that hasn't been working for awhile... Also, when I went to go talk to the village chief about the boreholes, he asked for help with another project. There's a pipeline system running from my village... an intake pipe takes water from a nearby stream, treats it with chlorine (when available), and then pipes take the water to parts of my village and a few others south of Maliera... Namwera's Village Development committee managed to raise ~US$200 to get some pipes to extend the system, but were struggling with the rest (~US$500). So, that's the second grant. Anyways... keep your fingers crossed that they get approved! The grants are through a really cool organization called appropriate projects that is all about water projects under US$500. They fund projects upfront so it gets finished asap, and then they ask people to sponsor the projects and donate the money for it. So... if anyone is interested in helping out... check out appropriateprojects.com
Very cool charity organization, good luck getting the grants!
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