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7 quick takes...
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| Can you spot the snake? |
- Good morning! It’s a bit of a different one
in the Jagau household as it started a little slower. I slept till quarter to
8! I don’t know when that happened for the last time. And then the girls
brought me a smoothie and toast in bed, so I could relax some more… So yeah,
good morning! Now Hartmut went to work, but only for a few hours, and after
that we can enjoy the extension of the weekend a little more. The girls are in
the bathroom, washing all their animal figurines so it’s a perfect gap for me
to quickly write a blog.
- Happy birthday Malawi! 56 years ago the
country gained independence of the British colonial rulers so it’s certainly a
day to celebrate. We were in Lilongwe last week and you could buy Malawian
flags and other things in the colours of Malawi (red, green and black)
everywhere and shops were starting to get decorated. Malawi has many national
holidays and most of the time people don’t even know which one it is, but
Independence Day is a big one that people certainly celebrate with patriotic
speeches, flag raising ceremonies and family get-togethers. I was thinking
about making a traditional Malawian meal but it won’t make my family very
happy, so I think I’ll bake a cake instead to celebrate this beautiful country.
- ‘What’s this?’ Doris shows me a remote
control and her face is one big question mark. ‘First I thought it is a phone,
but there are too many buttons and there is no screen. Is it some sort of
robot?’ Sometimes I forget that she has lived over half her life in Malawi, and
certainly the part of her life that she remembers. And that, because of it, she
doesn’t know things that I assume she does. We don’t have a TV, and we hardly
spend time with people who do have one, because most people don’t have one
anyway, so it’s very likely that she never came across a remote control. But
now we are in Lilongwe, spending the night in a house with a big flat screen
(that wasn’t connected, so we could not enjoy it anyway). I explain what a
remote is and what you use it for and Doris is impressed. ‘That’s so cool! So you
don’t even have to get up to make the volume go up or down? They really make
cool things!’
- Doris is not the only one in Malawi who has
missed out of some big global trends. The girls and I are waiting in the car
while Hartmut went to the bank to draw money. It always takes a while as the
queues are long. The parking lot is full of merchants who are hopeful that the
possession of freshly pulled money will make people generous. They are selling
fruit, CD’s, Malawian flags, chargers, screen protectors and many other things
that one may or may not need. My open window is like a magnet and one after the
other comes to tell me that what they are selling is exactly what I am looking
for. It doesn’t really matter that I wasn’t looking for anything. The CD seller
is clever and starts the conversation with a question. He asks me what my favourite music is. I don’t really want to buy
anything, so I say ‘classical’ because I am pretty certain that he doesn’t have
that. Classical music isn’t very popular in Malawi. ‘Ah, classical, I know
that. It’s like RnB, right?’ I open my phone so that he can hear what classical
music sounds like and start playing a piece from Tchaikovsky’s Swan lake; a
firm favourite with the girls. His facial expression betrays that he isn’t
impressed but sales are more important than his personal taste. ‘Ah, now I
know’ he says. ‘It’s like jazz. I have something that you will like’ and he
shows me a cd from ‘Lawi’, a Malawian artist that I haven’t heard of. I google
his name and a few youtube clips pop up. The cd-seller is right, I do like the
sound of it. ‘1000 kwacha, madam’ he says with a smile on his face because he
knows I will buy. He is right. But he isn’t done yet. He has spotted the girls
in the back. ‘ I have cartoons too madam, cartoons for your children.’ He shows
me what he has. Just like his cd’s, these are illegal copies ripped from the
internet or, worse, recorded in the cinema. When I lived in Kenya, before
internet was fast and big like it is now, we bought those all the time. It
meant that we could watch relatively new movies, as long as we were okay with
shaky quality and now and then a silhouette walking through the screen as
people in the cinema where it was filmed would get up to go to the toilet or
so. The selection of my salesman isn’t very big . He has a lot of action movies
and a few cartoons that I have never heard of. And one disk with Madagascar
1-4. I didn’t even know they brought out so many. I know which movie will make
Sophie and Doris happy, so I ask if he has ‘frozen’. Again the smile. ‘Just
wait mam, I will get it.’ And he runs away. He is not the only person selling
these, he will probably go to a friend who has it. He comes back and presents
me what he got; a disk with all the versions of ‘Ice Age’. I cannot help myself
but burst out laughing. Yup, it’s also about a frozen world but not what I am
looking for. Somehow it’s also nice to know that there are people in the world,
even media sellers, who don’t know what ‘frozen’ is. Disney’s arms reach far,
but they haven’t reached everywhere.
- The girls and I open the gate and walk on the beach,
blissfully unaware of what we just passed. One of the gardeners is working on
the beach and runs to me. ‘Did you see that?’ ‘See what?’ ‘The snake, right
there!’ He points it out to me and now I see what I didn’t see before. Right
next to the gate, in plain sight, sits a snake on the fence, completely
motionless, basking in the heat of the sun. He is about 150 centimeters long
and I cannot believe how we didn’t see him before. Isa, the gardener, tells me
that it’s a ‘nalikukuti’ and that it will kill you if it bites you. He doesn’t
know the English name. In Malawian culture, people are petrified of snakes, and
most people will always tell you that a snake will kill you, so I am not
entirely convinced. Fortunately there is facebook and on there is a brilliant
group with snake and bug fanatics in Malawi. If you post a picture of a reptile
or insect that you spotted, within minutes somebody will identify it for you.
It’s great! So I risk it and come close enough to take a picture with my phone
to load onto the group while I tell the girls to stay back. A few minutes later I learn that Isa was right. It’s a
highly venomous nalikukuti, or vine snake. Fortunately it’s also a very shy
snake that is reluctant to bite. It’s still a bit shocking though, that we did
not see it, and it makes me wonder how many snakes see us, without us seeing
them.
- Let’s talk about bread. Hartmut and I love
bread. Fresh, toasted, brown, white.. any bread. So you can imagine how happy
we are that Lilongwe got a new bakery that is trying all kinds of innovative
different bread. Whenever we are visiting the city, like we did last week, we
pop in to see what kind of exciting breads they have got, and they never
disappoint. A firm favourite is the honey oat loaf for us and the french
baquette for the girls. Last week we bought the charcoal-macadamia-sourdough
bread and it is definitely making us happy. Thank you Maravi, for making our
meals a little happier!
- It’s time to go. Hartmut is on his way back
home, the girls are still washing their animals and I want to organise a few
things. there is not much planned for this week, but you never know what will happen. Enjoy the week!
