Why I’m moving

(Monday, July 11)

Today is moving day – I’m leaving behind a bed, electricity, a lockable door, tv, and (if I time it right) hot showers. Instead, I’m moving in with a family a short walk outside of Ntcheu town.

I’ve posted pictures of my previous house, where I stayed for the first three weeks I was in Ntcheu – it was lovely. Then I went to Lilongwe for 2 weeks for meetings. I’ve now been back in Ntcheu for a week, and have been staying at a guest house attached to the bus station, while looking for a new home.

I could have moved back in to the same house, but decided not to.

My “List of things to do before coming to work in Africa” / life plan, included that I should live alone. It was something I was worried I would not be good at – not so much the logistics of taking care of myself, but more that I tend to rely on roommates for a lot of social time, either directly, or through their friends. This has been awesome – I’ve lived with a lot of great friends, and have met even more this way. But I thought I should make sure I was able to live on my own and build up these networks independently also, predicting that this previous tactic would be harder to rely on in a completely new place. When my 3-5 year plan was fast-tracked, living on my own didn’t happen.

My previous roommate was only around about 1/3 of the time, which meant I was basically living on my own. And I was right, I still am not good at it, and relied way too heavily on work, episodes of How I Met Your Mother, and weekend trips to the market to keep myself busy. Living alone is a skill I will have to learn, but Malawi has enough logistical and social complications that I’m adjusting to that I don’t want to try and force myself to learn this right now.

I’m also really excited to learn more about life in Malawi. The family I’m moving in with speaks little English, so my Chichewa will have to improve a lot. I have been promised lessons on how to cook nsima (the near-tasteless staple food in Malawi, with a texture somewhere between mashed potatoes and undercooked pancakes, made from maize flour and water) over charcoal. And I’m looking forward to meeting a completely new group of friends, who don’t work for NGOs or watch satellite TV.

I’ve also been quizzed a few times by people I’ve met on what I actually *know* about Malawi, whether I have lived in “the village” yet. These questions are a combination of things. Part of this seems to come from the fact that Peace Corps volunteers are fairly prevalent in Malawi, and do exactly that, from a “rough-and-tough proving yourself” sort of motivation. Part of it is a dare, people testing how legitimately I am interested and invested in Malawi. And part of it is probably just wanting to make sure I learn about Malawi outside of cities and meetings and short field interviews. I want to be able to have the right answers to this question, because it impacts how people see me, but (I hope) more because I see some truth to those concerns, and do want to understand Malawi as much as I can.

By a lot of EWB standards, I’ll have it pretty good. I have my own room, and a tap with running water outside. The roof is metal, the floors are cement. I’m a 10 minute walk from the edge of town, and a hop-skip-and-jump from paved road. By other standards, it’s pretty basic. No electricity means cooking on charcoal, saving laptop battery power, and headlamps. I’ll have bucket showers inside a circular wall of reeds, use a squat latrine behind the house, and sleep on the floor. I’m sure a lot of that will get annoying, but I’m hoping the household living environment will make up for it.

ps- I’m also very glad to be leaving behind Justin Beiber as the morning soundtrack of choice for my former roommate, and the “boom-ch boom-ch boom-ch” from the bottlestore beside the bus depot guesthouse.

(This is part of a three-part series about my first week in my new house. Next post to come tomorrow.)