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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

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Adapting to Life

30 January 2017

I’m again on the bus to Lilongwe. I paid for the AXA Executive Coach, which is non-stop and has snacks and a bathroom. It is always totally full, crammed with people into tiny, distinctively not executive seats. I missed it, thinking it left at 7:30AM. It left at 7 so I’m on the local, which gets in an hour later but is only half full. I have the entire rear seat to myself; if I were tired, I could stretch out and snooze. I’m not, so I can spread out my stuff and write, knowing I am probably in the safest seat in the unlikely possibility of a crash. (That sounds a bit like the Carlsberg beer slogan, “Probably the best beer in the world.” Not totally convincing.) Unless the engine explodes underneath me, in which case I shall take the little red hammer from its hanger and exit a window promptly. The very back of the bus exaggerates the bumps in the road, however, and I often type gibberish or grab my laptop before it sails off onto the floor

Yesterday we rented a car and drove to Mulanje. Linda’s very long-time friends, Pat and Stacy, are here from Santa Fe for 3 weeks. Pat’s a gastroenterologist and will teach at Queens; Stacy’s a retired attorney who will help with fundraising at Samaritans, the orphanage where I consult. We drove to the massif and partway around it on a dirt road, heading toward a forest lodge for lunch. On the way we passed through a small village and were approached by all manner of young men trying to sell us hiking sticks carved from Mulanje cedar, wanting to guard our car, and asking us to hire one of them as a guide to hike to the well-known nearby waterfall. I heard, “George” and looked up to see Lucius, who was a guard at a home on our street last Fall, fired for being drunk at work. (If I were a guard, making next to nothing to do next to nothing, I’m sre I’d drink, too.) Needless to say, we bought the hiking sticks and hired both Lucius as guide and his friend, Alex, as guard. The hike to the waterfall was gradual, took about an hour, and the destination was very lovely, with a deep pool for swimming. We waded, not having bathing suits. On the path I spoke with Lucius about his life. He grew up in this tiny village at the foot of Mulanje. When he was in 10th grade, three years ago, both parents were travelling to Blantyre in a minibus that collided head-on with a truck. 15 dead, including his mother and father. He had to drop out of school to support the family. His two sisters are in school and he plans to return when they finish. There is a rueful sadness in his face as he tells me his story. It is like so many here, totally unfair and tragic. Only an extreme and heroic effort on his part, tempered with plenty of luck, will allow him to move beyond scratching for his subsistence for the remainder of his days, and he’s not yet 20yo.

I saw a 10 yo girl, Tokozina, as my last child patient for the day on Thursday. It was our second visit and promised to be lively. She’s had cerebral malaria and is the most hyperactive child I’ve ever seen. She is only moderately learning disabled, I think. ��On the first visit she bounced all over the room, running like a flash, grabbing and tossing things, singing loudly while her mother ineffectually tried to contain her by reaching out as she flew by, etc. This mother is built like a tank and could give Mike Tyson a run for his money. On Thursday I told her they could only come into the room if she held her daughter on her lap. Well, that lasted about 15 seconds as the girl squirmed away and bounced all over doing her mischief. Seeing how ineffectual the mother was, I decided to model a safe, painless restraint. Needless to say, I ended up lying on the floor restraining her while she spit in my face and then urinated on me. I held fast and she calmed. Then I gave her to her mother who did the same and, after some tears, the girl accepted the inevitable and fell asleep in her mother’s arms. After wiping off the spit with my handkerchief and letting the pee dry on my soaking pants, I congratulated the mother on her success and impressed upon her the importance of training her daughter by performing a similar restraint whenever she was beyond the control of words. We’ll meet again in 2 weeks and assess the results. It felt like a very successful intervention. I, of course, will need to explore with the mother why she has held herself back so much.

A 12 yo boy was brought in by his mother. He’d undergone a “personality change” since being attacked by a neighbor in their village. Andrew ate a peach from the man’s tree so he threw Andrew to the ground and stomped on him, fracturing his left tibia. Andrew, always a gentle boy, has become aggressive, beating up his friends. He was expelled from school for fighting, despite being very smart and an excellent student. Another boy, like Japheti, with a persistent and loving mother who is determined to help repair the damage to her son. He was seen in Peds Emergency and, since he had a personality change in this land of cerebral malaria, HIV encephalopathy, and various forms of meningitis, instead of taking a careful history he has had performed all variety of laboratory investigations, including a lumbar puncture. Again, some training is needed there, which we’ll do soon. His response to the beating includes “identification with the aggressor”, his adaptation to feeling helpless in the face of a threat. It is the particular form his PTSD has taken. He and I had a good talk, he was very engaged, and he agreed to return to school and attempt to not fight when he was upset. We’ll see. He is very bright, speaks English well, and is an incredible artist.

I’m going to Lilongwe in order to use the notary services at the American Embassy to finalize papers for the sale of 2840 Webster Street in Berkeley, our home for 25+ years. That should be the last formal exchange between my ex and myself, which will be a relief to us both, I suspect. I’ve felt I was in the grip of a python during the divorce---each time I exhaled (made a settlement offer leaning in her favor), the coils tightened. Rather than becoming more flexible and fair, she’d demand more. I’m certain she has her own version of the process. So, as sad as it is to me to have not been able to grow in our love for each other as time passed, there is a time to hold ‘em and a time to fold ‘em. I only can hope that my children, each of whom I love dearly, can accept their disappointment at the end of the family as they knew it and wanted it to be and can view each of us as individuals with flaws and foibles but basically having given our best for them. I miss them both very much.

These are the hungry months in Malawi, when the maize is growing tall but not ready for harvest and last year’s supply of corn meal is exhausted. Many of the 85% of the population that are small-hold farmers and their families are lucky to have a single, modest meal a day. It kills me to see the greed and waste in America and to hear the “America Firsters”. It is a sad fact that we, of all the animal species, appear to have an insatiable desire to buy and possess. It is powerfully fed by the advertising/marketing industry and the mythology of our lives -----that it is better, somehow, to have more and bigger and newer and more extravagant stuff. Rather than to have enough for reasonable comfort and to take pleasure in the greater good that everyone has the basics. It is so easy to see someone on Welfare as a “loafer” and “getting a free ride”----I think they are sad, have low self-esteem, and have lacked the good fortune, perhaps the gumption, and the skills to do work that will bring them satisfaction. Let’s re-establish the WPA and employ the unemployed while they learn skills and repair our infrastructure. But then, I have never wanted to not work.

I’ve had thoughts of spending the summers on the island in Maine and the rest of the year travelling, writing, and schmoozing with friends. I understand that most people haven’t had the good fortune to have trained for, sought, found, and performed work that they truly love and which remunerates them reasonably. This is often for lack of opportunity but may have multiple and converging reasons, including their drive, intelligence, health, capacity to persist, lack of skill, market forces, and so forth. So people cannot wait “to retire”, understandably. For me, I find learning and being inspired by people’s struggles irresistible, so it doesn’t feel like the time to fold up my tent.

I find Mr. Trump’s lies and hatred---just look at the expression on his current wife’s face after he reads her out in the 8 second video on YouTube---frightening, since he sits now where he does. We’re not just in for a fire sale of America to the superrich. That has been going on for the past several decades. We are now rapidly heading toward a fascist state, seeking total control of media with an essentially slave underclass that will include most of us. It seems there may be a violent revolution, given how polarizing, aggressive, and dissimulating Mr.T. is. One can hope for a coronary event or a cerebrovascular event or perhaps a metastatic event (in response to his near-constant exposure to Agent Orange!). I’m not savvy enough about economics to fully understand how we’ve arrived here. Our industrial output is up but well-paying, secure jobs are down, partly due to outsourcing but hugely due to automation. Paradoxically, I suspect that many of the same people who have been left behind in our economy shop at Walmart, buying those inexpensive outsourced products made by people in China and Bangladesh who have taken their jobs, keeping those sweatshops going. The latter have certainly been eased into slavery, out of personal desperation. Just read about their wages, their working and living conditions, their polluted air and water, and the fragmentation of their families and their society, if you doubt me.

This post has gone on too long. I am passing through emerald hills, dotted with thatched mud-brick huts, all covered by the fluffiest, most towering cumulus clouds imaginable. Even all the plastic trash has vanished from the roadside, hidden by the tall grass. It is stunning.

Early in the morning one day last week as I biked past the local open market on my way to Queens, I saw the stall keepers arriving with their vegetables or used clothing as they do each day, often 7 days/week. I realized, at a new level, this is their life. They may instead sit at a card table and sell lollipops or AirTel phone top-ups, but they have no hope of a better living or life than they have right now. No kids in college, no promotion in the works, no end-of-year bonus, no cashing in on the sale of a start-up, no job or food security, no minimum hourly wage, let alone no luxury items, no increased reimbursement from a health insurance company, and so forth. And this is largely because of the cards they were dealt. Most are smart but have little schooling. Yet they are cheerful, laugh, and are pleased when I say a phrase or two in Chichewa to them as I buy some bananas or a pineapple. Humans are amazingly adaptable.

I hope our country doesn’t adapt to what our president offers to us, or tries for force upon us.

�� ƴ

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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

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A timely sign, given the reason for our stop.

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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

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Manufactured by the “(almost) Good Enough” tire company.

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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

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Changing a flat on “The Big Bus”

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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

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Dedza/Mzuzu

22.1.17

As we squeezed into two of the three tiny seats in row 2 on the “Big Bus” to Dedza, the ample man in the third offered me the Saturday “Nation”, one of the Malawi dailys. Reading it was much like other issues: descriptions of government officials being dismissed or investigated for corruption, tales of young girls in villages having to perform sexual favors for their chiefs or aid workers in order to get their ration of food aid, etc. I thought I’d write about that but as we got off the bus, it turns out he gave me the paper before he’d read it, so I returned it to him and don’t have it as a reference.

Dedza Pottery is a very large compound 5 km. outside the town of Dedza, which is between Blantyre in the south and Lilongwe in the middle of Malawi. It has been around for decades and the potters make lovely and whimsical stoneware pottery. There is a lodge and restaurant, as well, and Linda and I spent two nights here before I headed north to Mzuzu to teach some child psychiatry to clinical officers and nursing students at St. John of God College and to learn about their remarkable (by reputation) programs for the mentally unwell, the addicted, and the mentally retarded (Learning Disabled) children. Linda will return to Blantyre to teach this week.

The Pottery is in a lovely setting, surrounded by lawns and flowers and trees and, beyond the property, hills. We happily walked here after the 3 ½ hour bus ride and the countryside became increasingly beautiful, always shockingly green and punctuated with small (800-1200ft) mountains. The area has been clear cut but there has been an active reforestation project here for 10 years and the young pine forests soften the rocky slopes of the hills. On our second day we climbed to the top of Dedza Mountain with a guide; the view of all the undulating greenery below was refreshing after the plastic trash and deforestation in a lot of the South.

During the past week before leaving Blantyre, I evaluated a man, 50yo, who was lying on the concrete floor of the clinic for a couple of hours, screaming. We were very busy and after briefly assessing that he wasn’t perishing, I left him to his several friends and family members and worked my way down the list of patients who had signed in earlier than he. When his family finally carried him in to see me, as he apparently couldn’t walk, it was quickly clear that he didn’t have a functional psychiatric illness but was delirious. Why? It turns out he has been HIV positive for some years, although his family had not been told. I needed to get him back to the ED where he could have a lumbar puncture to look for signs of infection and be admitted to the hospital for definitive treatment of his HIV/AIDS and whatever secondary infection might be consuming his brain. He’d been in the ED the night before and they, seeing he was deranged, sent him to Room 6 (Psychiatry Clinic) to be seen the following day. We really need to do an in-service with the staff there about distinguishing delirium from schizophrenia or mania, as this happens not infrequently and it delays treatment considerably.

Room 6 received two consultation requests. One was for a woman, 42yo who’d had pre-eclampsia and who’d given birth to her 6th child and gone home, only to become disoriented, confused, mute and not taking food or fluids after 3 days. She tried to harm her child, as well. After two more days the family brought her back to the hospital where she was found to have extremely high blood pressure. Treated with two antihypertensives, she, astoundingly, completely cleared and was discharged by the time I went to see her. [It was been wild in clinic this week, with an extra patient load, two of the three nurses out, no residents present, and only one psychiatrist, me. As a result, I was late to get to the consultations.] From reading the consultation request I thought she had a post-partum psychosis but it turns out she had eclampsia psychosis without a seizure, also known as “Donkin psychosis”. I have never heard of it but looked it up online.

After I found her bed empty (She was only in hospital for 2 days before she recovered.), I tried to locate her medical record. The ward clerk pulled out two large cardboard boxes full of loose papers and proceeded to go through them, finally pulling out 3 pieces stapled together with her name on them. That is how the records are delivered to Central Record Storage. Electronic medical records would be wonderful, except there are no computers and often no electricity.

The other consultation request, whom I also didn’t see, was a boy with epilepsy who had a fit and fell into a cooking fire. He was about to have an above-the-elbow amputation of one forearm and hand because he had so badly burned the nerves and tendons that they were irreparable. He’ll be seen by the other psychiatrist who is now back in town from holiday.

I’m having a new sign painted for our clinic, on my dime. Our current one says, “Room 6 Psych”. It is written, as the other signs in the hospital are written, with red letters on a white field, but it must have been painted in place because the red paint is dripping. It looks like an invitation to a horror movie. Mine will have the same regulation color scheme but will be allowed to lie horizontally until it is dry and will say, “Room 6 Mental Health”. The director of the hospital, when I said I would pay for it, was happy to approve it. Tiny steps.

My trip to Mzuzu was an eye opener. The further north you travel in Malawi, the less congested it becomes. There are many fewer people per square kilometer in the north and, consequently, there are still beautiful standing forests. Of course, there are the denuded hills but a vigorous reforestation project has been underway. When the government shut it down a few years ago, however, some disgruntled employees set fire to great swaths of pine trees, killing them. I guess if desperate and hopeless and angry enough we all will foul our own nest.

I was late getting off in the morning when I was to meet Amelia, a GHSP volunteer teaching community mental health nursing in Mzuzu. I walked a bit of the 30 minutes to the hospital, realized I wouldn’t make our meeting time of 7:20AM, and jumped on a bike taxi. Basically, a bike with a padded seat over the rear wheel and foot pegs. I had no bike helmet so if Peace Corps had seen me, I’d have been in hot water. It was pretty scary actually but certainly got me to the House of Hospitality quickly.

St. John of God is a standout series of programs: a lovely 26 bed mental hospital on a hill, a separate 30 day inpatient drug and alcohol detox center, and, across town by the College, a truly amazingly comprehensive program for Learning Disabled children and teens. They are starting mental health services for children and adolescents, in addition to the LD program. It was fun teaching the Clinical Officers, although at the end after thanking me, their instructor requested that the next time I would please give a lecture. I quickly said that I have never felt lectures were particularly useful for teaching, favoring a more interactive approach. I then realized that may have been offensive and said that I can certainly focus my remarks more the next time. The Mental Health Nursing students presented 4 different cases that we were able to discuss; they were a lively bunch.

The best part of the experience for me was driving to a small district clinic on the road down to Lake Malawi. It was a brick building sitting in the woods constructed by the community with a slab concrete floor, two rooms, no water or electricity, and window frames without windows. It was packed with people sitting quietly and patiently on benches. The nurse and the village representative made a list of who was there, charts were pulled from the wooden box we brought, and the nurse, the clinical officer, and Amelia all saw patients for 3 ½ hours. Most were established patients, most had chronic mental illness or epilepsy (which is treated by mental health professionals, not neurologists, in the developing world) and required medication adjustment or refills. It was an efficient, humane operation. St. John of God goes to all the district clinics once per month to provide these services. True community mental health. Basic but effective.

The three GHSP nurses working in Mzuzu took great care of me. We ate at Midlands, a really good and inexpensive Indian restaurant, at the chapatti lady’s spot in the midst of the market where two of us had lunch for about a dollar total, and at a couple of wonderful restaurants run by ex-pats in beautiful old houses set in gardens outside the city. There is a great chitenje market and I bought Linda 4 meters of black with electric blue dragonflies, thinking Ken the Tailor could make a stunning cocktail dress with it. We’ll see.

My bus ride back to Blantyre, all 10 hours of it, was entertaining as I chatted with a very interesting man who’d completed medical school at the College of Medicine, hadn’t practiced for reasons I didn’t explore and he didn’t offer, and was now finishing a Masters in Public Health at a university in Durban, SA. He gave me a really good perspective on Malawi’s slide downhill over the past 15 years. Even though the prevalence of HIV is considerably down, the population explosion and the fact that the country cannot feed itself has wreaked havoc on the economy and the environment.

We are going to have to leave our house, I fear. One of the others in our compound was invaded by 6 armed men who stole batteries and other things from the 3 cars parked there. Peace Corps is concerned about our safety, having had some very serious incidents over the years with regular volunteers (mostly people just out of college). We’ve each protested strongly but are also looking at other houses which Peace Corps will have to rent. We feel totally safe here, with bars, gates, guards, alarms, padlocks, and so forth. I’m certainly much more concerned about getting hit on my bike, being in a minibus crash, or being able to exit the house if there is a fire. We love our porch, our view, our spacious dwelling, and the possibilities for a really good garden but are working for an organization and must toe the line.

The inauguration was pathetic. The women’s marches all over the world have been inspiring. It is so sad to see our magnificent democracy, for all its flaws, being led by someone so unsuited to do so. And is he in Putin’s pocket, as it seems? But the mobilization of so many gives some hope. We unfortunately are reaping what we’ve earned by leaving so many poor, unskilled for this economy, and uneducated in the dust. It takes a dose of narcissism to run for president. His tops the heap, however, and will hopefully lead to his collapse soon.

Given all this, I’m going to stay another year. I realized, thinking about it this morning, that if I leave at the end of my contract in June, I’ll feel like I’m going home with my tail between my legs, slinking off. I can’t say I won’t feel the same after two years but at least I can see a few things through that I have begun. The needs are greater than I can ever hope to substantially improve, in a real sense. But I can try to do a bit. I also feel that I have no pressing work drawing me home. It is nice to feel needed here.

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georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

Text

Dedza, Mzuzu

22.1.17

As we squeezed into two of the three tiny seats in row 2 on the “Big Bus” to Dedza, the ample man in the third offered me the Saturday “Nation”, one of the Malawi dailys. Reading it was much like other issues: descriptions of government officials being dismissed or investigated for corruption, tales of young girls in villages having to perform sexual favors for their chiefs or aid workers in order to get their ration of food, etc. I thought I’d write about that but as we got off the bus, it turns out he gave me the paper before he’d read it, so I returned it to him and don’t have it as a reference.

Dedza Pottery is a very large compound 5 km outside the town of Dedza. It has been around for decades and the potters make lovely and whimsical stoneware pottery. There is a lodge and restaurant, as well, and Linda and I spent two nights there before I headed north to Mzuzu to teach some child psychiatry to clinical officers and nursing students at St. John of God College and to learn about their remarkable (by reputation) programs for the mentally unwell, the addicted, and mentally retarded (Learning Disabled) children. Linda will return to Blantyre to teach this week.

The Pottery is in a lovely setting, surrounded by lawns and flowers and trees and, beyond the property, hills. We happily walked here after the 3 ½ hour bus ride and the countryside became increasingly beautiful, always shockingly green and punctuated with small (800-1200ft) mountains. The area has been clear cut but there has been an active reforestation project here for 10 years and the young pine forests soften the rocky slopes of the hills. We climbed to the top of Dedza Mountain with a guide; the view of all the undulating greenery below was refreshing after the plastic trash and deforestation in a lot of the South.

Room 6 received two consultation requests. One was for a woman, 42yo who’d had pre-eclampsia and who’d given birth to her 6th child and gone home, only to become disoriented, confused, mute and not taking food or fluids after 3 days. She tried to harm her child, as well. After two more days the family brought her back to the hospital where she was found to have extremely high blood pressure. Treated with two antihypertensives, she, astoundingly, completely cleared and was discharged by the time I went to see her. [It has been wild in clinic this week, with an extra patient load, two of the three nurses out, no residents present, and only one psychiatrist, me. As a result, I was late to get to the consultations.] From reading the consultation request I thought she had a post-partum psychosis but it turns out she had eclampsia psychosis without a seizure, also known as “Donkin psychosis”. I have never heard of it but looked it up online.

The other consultation request, whom I also didn’t see, was a 16 yo boy with epilepsy who had a fit and fell into a cooking fire. He was about to have an above-the-elbow amputation of one forearm and hand because he had so badly burned the nerves and tendons that they were irreparable. He’ll be seen by the other psychiatrist who is now back in town from holiday.

My trip to Mzuzu was an eye opener of what is possible. The further north you travel in Malawi, the less congested it becomes. There are many fewer people per square kilometer in the north and, consequently, there are still beautiful standing forests. Of course, there are the denuded hills but a vigorous reforestation project has been underway. When the government shut it down a few years ago, however, some disgruntled employees set fire to great swaths of pine trees, killing them. I guess if desperate and hopeless and angry enough we all will foul our own nest.

St. John of God has a standout series of programs: a lovely 26 bed mental hospital on a hill, a separate 30 day inpatient drug and alcohol detox center, and, across town by the College, a truly amazingly comprehensive program for Learning Disabled children and teens. They are starting mental health services for children and adolescents, in addition to the LD program. It was fun teaching the Clinical Officers, although at the end after thanking me, their instructor requested that the next time I would please give a lecture. I quickly said that I have never felt lectures were particularly useful for teaching, favoring a more interactive approach. I then realized that may have been offensive and said that I can certainly focus my remarks more the next time. The Mental Health Nursing students presented 4 different cases that we were able to discuss; they were a lively bunch.

0 notes

georgeinmalawi · 8 years ago

Text

Dedza/Mzuzu

22.1.17

As we squeezed into two of the three tiny seats in row 2 on the “Big Bus” to Dedza, the ample man in the third offered me the Saturday “Nation”, one of the Malawi dailys. Reading it was much like other issues: descriptions of government officials being dismissed or investigated for corruption, tales of young girls in villages having to perform sexual favors for their chiefs or aid workers in order to get their ration of food, etc. I thought I’d write about that but as we got off the bus, it turns out he gave me the paper before he’d read it, so I returned it to him and don’t have it as a reference.

Dedza Pottery is a very large compound 5 km. outside the town of Dedza. It has been around for decades and the potters make lovely and whimsical stoneware pottery. There is a lodge and restaurant, as well, and Linda and I are spending two nights here before I head north to Mzuzu to teach some child psychiatry to clinical officers and nursing students at St. John of God College and to learn about their remarkable (by reputation) programs for the mentally unwell, the addicted, and mentally retarded (Learning Disabled) children Linda will return to Blantyre to teach this week.

The Pottery is in a lovely setting, surrounded by lawns and flowers and trees and, beyond the property, hills. We happily walked here after the 3 ½ hour bus ride and the countryside became increasingly beautiful, always shockingly green and punctuated with small (800-1200ft) mountains. The area has been clearcut but there has been an active reforestation project here for 10 years and the young pine forests soften the rocky slopes of the hills. We climbed to the top of Dedza Mountain with a guide; the view of all the undulating greenery below was refreshing after the plastic trash and deforestation in a lot of the South.

My trip to Mzuzu was an eye opener. The further north you travel in Malawi, the less congested it becomes. There are many fewer people per square kilometer in the north and, consequently, there are still beautiful standing forests. Of course, there are the occasional denuded hills but a vigorous reforestation project had been underway. When the government shut it down a few years ago, however, some disgruntled employees set fire to great swaths of pine trees, killing them. I guess if desperate and hopeless and angry enough we all will foul our own nest.

I was late getting off in the morning when I was to meet Amelia, a GHSP volunteer teaching community mental health nursing in Mzuzu. I walked a bit of the 30 minutes to the hospital, realized I wouldn’t make our meeting time of 7:20AM, and jumped on a bike taxi. It is a bike with a padded seat over the rear wheel and foot pegs. I had no bike helmet so if Peace Corps had seen me, I’d have been in hot water. It was pretty scary actually but certainly got me to the House of Hospitality quickly.

St. John of God is a standout series of programs: a lovely 26 bed mental hospital on a hill, a separate 30 day inpatient drug and alcohol detox center, and, across town by the College, a truly amazingly comprehensive program for Learning Disabled children and teens. They are starting mental health services for children and adolescents, in addition to the LD program. I enjoyed teaching the Clinical Officers, although at the end after thanking me, their instructor requested that the next time I would please give a lecture. I quickly said that I have never felt lectures were particularly useful for teaching, favoring a more interactive approach. I then realized that may have been offensive and said that I can certainly focus my remarks more the next time. The Mental Health Nursing students presented 4 different cases that we were able to discuss; they were a lively bunch.

The three GHSP nurses working in Mzuzu took great care of me. We ate at Midlands, a really good and inexpensive Indian restaurant, at the chapati lady’s spot in the midst of the market where two of us had lunch for about a dollar total, and at a couple of wonderful restaurants run by ex-pats in beautiful old homes set in gardens outside the city. There is a great chitenje market and I bought Linda 4 meters of black with electric blue dragonflies, thinking Ken the Tailor could make a stunning cocktail dress with it. We’ll see.

We are going to have to leave our house, I fear. One of the other yards in our compound was invaded by 6 armed men who stole batteries and other things from the 3 cars parked there. Peace Corps is concerned about our safety, having had some very serious incidents over the years with regular volunteers (mostly people just out of college). We’ve each protested strongly but are also looking at other houses which Peace Corps will have to rent. We feel totally safe here, with bars, gates, guards, alarms, panic buttons, padlocks, and so forth. I’m certainly much more concerned about getting hit on my bike, being in a minibus crash, or being able to exit the house if there is a fire. We love our porch, our view, our spacious dwelling, and the possibilities for a really good garden but are working for an organization and must toe the line.

BTW, for some strange reason I cannot post photos here, so I may shift my operation to Facebook.

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