Naughty Knees and Naked Boobies: City girl meets Malawi

Malawi Post One
Week One, Monday:

For a girl who is terrified of insects, frightened of the dark, and who has a healthy distrust of venomous snakes and man-eating crocodiles, coming to Malawi is akin to exposure therapy extreme enough to make even the most sadistic psychotherapist cringe. For the record, it is not ALL types of bugs that send me into full blown panic, mainly spiders, cockroaches, grasshoppers, locusts, large ants, and any insect that flies with erratic and unpredictable motions. Loaded with 6 cans of bug spray, malaria prophylaxis, 2 massive suitcases filled with medical supplies, knives of various sizes, emergency power bars and iodine tablets, I felt armed and ready! Of course that was only until the plane touched down in Ethiopia, at which point realized that I was in a continent where I did not know a soul, did not speak the language, and had been foolishly tricked by AT&Ts promises of international phone reception. My first night passed uneventfully, in that I was lucky enough to be picked up by Dr. Kim, the head of the (only) nursing school in the capital city Lilongwe, in an ambulance, which disposed of its hopefully not-so-sick patients in honor of my arrival. I would stay one night with a local volunteer doctor and and his wife, and the next morning start my bus ride to a rural village up north, forgotten on most maps.
In addition to my aforementioned obstacles, I am also plagued by severe motion sickness, which is very unfortunately aggravated by oppressive heat and pungent smells. Further complicating the journey, in which I am attempting to lug over 150lbs of luggage, there will be a complete absence of bathrooms stops. While many of my fearless friends offered foley insertion, or adult diapers in come cases, I figured having a bag of urine attached to my leg would only add to the unwanted weight I would have to carry. So based on further suggestions, I was now bravely equipped with a "you go girl," female, compact able, reusable, urinal, of a feminine lavender color, whose package boasts utilization during camping trips, while canoeing and at concerts!! So those of you accompanying me to my next Backstreet Boys performance- watch out- I plan on zealously chugging down rum and cokes (joking mom, orange juice) no longer constrained by the nuisance of bathroom lines!
Because buses here are overcrowded, with no discernible schedules, I arrived to the central bus station at 630 AM, only to sit in the baking vehicle for two and a half hours before it was decided that they were full enough to depart. With no organized waste management in the country, I was surrounded by a pool of discarded plastics, rotting foods, decaying animal carcases, and feasting flies. As the smells wafted in, I was already off to a bad start, and might be the first person alive to become motion sick in a completely stationary vehicle. A woman with a young child on her back, chose to sit next to me. While the child was a little angel sleeping, the minute she awoke, all hell broke loose. Like other mothers on board, the woman pulls out a breast in attempts to appease the child (although showing knees are forbidden), and yanks and pulls for a few minutes before she looses interest. Tired of her kicks and wails, this mother thought it would be most suitable to lay this child across both of our laps for the remainder of the journey, and give her a whole mango, which she preceded to consume with voracity. Having also a fear of sticky children, my mind was attempting to reconcile the mothers plan of cleaning her mango-laden offspring. Luckily for me, she chose to let her child remain covered in pulp and juice, now the new epicenter for all the flies in the area. Now, covered in mango, flies, and coca-cola that the mother had ingeniously spilled across both my shirt and pants, my already-peaked anxiety level (so I thought) was only augmented by the now sputtering engine. As I gazed out the window for distraction, I noted that vendors selling samosas and eggs have been replaced by lush green foliage dotted with bursts of color as women dressed in blues, yellows and purples, walked along the side of the tarmac with jugs of water balanced on their heads, and sleeping babies on their backs. Now if only my lap child would do the same...
As we pull off the road in one of our many stops, on a particularly desolate part of the road, the engine succumbs to heat and exhaustion, and refuses to restart. Four hours into the journey, just as I breathed a sigh of relief at the halfway mark, all one hundred of us, plus luggage, are forced to disembark in the midday sun. Efforts to repair the engine dissolve into workers napping in the shade of the engine block. The promised 20 minutes turns into two hours, and as sweat pours off of me, I revisit my four-sips-an-hour rule, and decide that passing out form heat stroke, tropes having to use the go-girl, but barely...Digging through my luggage I withdrew my mom-approved sun safety items, and sitting on a pile of suitcases with my Fendi sunglasses and wide-brimmed floppy hat, I am sure I was a site to be seen.
As promised, a replacement bus did arrive. However, it was already filled with people, without a seat to spare. As people with sacks of rice and chickens balanced on backs and heads, crowded to climb into the bus, I succumb to the realization that me, my wide hat, and my obscene amount of luggage, would never fit. Amazingly, 45 min later, all of us refuges had been successfully crammed into the now heavily weighed-down bus. Laps are piled with briefcases, small animals and children. Packed so tightly in the isle, I have no ability or reason to hold on. As famous Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is fond of saying when describing crowded market places, "if one were to throw a grain of rice in the air, it would never touch the ground."
I arrived at sun-down, and much to my relief, found one of the employees, Dan, waiting for me at the police roadblock, as he had been, for the past four hours. Together, with my luggage, we trudged the 2.5km over dirt, rocks and sand (and environment on which I would later be hilariously and painfully learning how to ride a bike), to my final destination. Never had my arms been more numbly tired, never had I been more thoroughly exhausted, never had I been happier to have a group of people call out my name, sequester my load, and hand me a cold beer.