Patience, Power Outages, and Laughter
Well the heat really hit us hard… we started off our Monday with travelling a bumpy and winding road for three hours. We were heading south of our home base near Blantyre to the Chigumukire Child Care Centre. With this came a change of weather (more heat in the lowlands) and we seen a little more of our true selves! Everyone’s patience was really tested. It wasn’t until we came to our air conditioned rooms, finished our showers (after waiting hours for the power to turn on) and the excitement of finding foreign animal feces on the bed….that we were able to share a few laughs after the long day we had. On Tuesday, we woke up feeling refreshed and ready to face the crowds of children…
On the way, Peter (the best driver ever) tested his breaks many times, whether it was for large potholes, speed bumps, goats, cows or oblivious people on bicycles…we arrived at the centre, let’s just say Malawi time😉 We found the language barrier was a lot more difficult here, than it was at our centre’s last week! It definitely was harder to adjust. The children were always eager to see your phone, always asking to take pictures, to “send to Canada”.
When it’s time to hand out snacks and sobo (which is basically watered down Sunny D) we noticed something different… instead of this centre providing cups for the children they all have empty pop or juice bottles, and some children had lotion and perfume bottles, that were unfortunately not all the way clean before we poured the juice in them. They keep eveything they can get their hands on! Many differences between the centres, but still the amount of joy we bring to children’s faces is similar! We have three more days this week, to make unforgettable memories and impressions.
