21 October, 2004 - 14:42

My arrival gait was kind of slow and pained from the back of my knee. I guess from traveling for over 40 hours and sleeping for one of those hours will do it.

I am in Malawi. Outside my window I can see a Jacaranda tree and a sausage tree which is a tree that bears fruit about 10 inches long and five inches around that look like sausages or in my opinion, penises. Image a tree with about two hundred 10 inch flaccid penises hanging off of it and you get the picture. There is red dirt everywhere and a sky that seems to think that it might rain even though everything is completely bright. The temperature is 32 degrees although I don't feel hot because of the warm breeze blowing through. It's definitely not humid - just hot.

I am currently staying in a house with two UNICEF workers who will be here until January. The house is surrounded by a thick, white wall and there is a night and day guard who are always on duty. There is also a gardening man and someone else who does some sort of work. I get driven to work in a white UN jeep and on either side of the red, dirt road there are children walking and adults carrying important-looking things. It's a scene from National Geographic but I'm actually here now. It's hard to believe that almost one-in-four of the people I meet everyday have HIV for which they most likely will not receive anti-retroviral treatment but rather a patchwork of temporary treatment designed to ease opportunistic infections.

Today Geoffrey, the driver, took me out to see a bit more of the "city". It is basically a large area inhabited by people and houses and separated all-to-often by large stretches of low-lying bush. The city is divided up into numerical areas and presently I reside in Area 12. This is a developing country city.

The phones don't work at my office now, otherwise I'd be calling home or calling the woman that I would like to rent a room from. Power is cut quite often - we went to a Danish UNICEF worker's house last night for dinner because at our house it generally goes off some time after 4pm. My coworkers are amazing so far. Today I ate roasted chicken and rice inside the UN compound because Geoffrey said that it was safer than outside the gate. So, mainly to appease him, I stayed inside the compound. But I'd rather eat the 150 kwacha chicken than the 310 kwacha chicken inside the gates. I guess the main advantage inside the compound is the lack of flies constantly buzzing and landing on food.

There are a lot of malarial mosquitoes at night, too. We all sleep inside the necessary treated net, so every room looks like a chapter from a Barbara Kingsolver book. A lot of people can't believe I'm taking lariam as an anti-malarial. See for yourself - type in "lariam" and "psychotic effect" into the Internet and see what comes up!