Food and Weather

Brian Yasvinski commented that I haven't mentioned the food or weather so I will rectify that here.

As far as food goes I would have to say that the warnings I was given turned out to be true. The food in Malawi, and from what I hear much of sub-Saharan Africa is nothing to write home about. Traditional meals are heavy on the carbs and light on meat and vegetables. The climate is conducive to growing all the vegetables that you would want but somehow in the cultural history the eating of vegetables either was lost or didn't occur. When we went camping at the lake we cooked some green beans alongside some noodles and the Malawian with us laughed at us and said "You crazy mzungus and your vegetables" while he carfully removed them from any contact with the noodles and then refused to eat them. The choice of fruit is great and we have been enjoying all the cheap mangoes and bananas, but things here work on seasons so you can't get anything you want at any time. You buy what is in season when it is in season. The staple dish here is nsima which is similar to porridge made from corn and huge slabs of it are eaten at a time. It is almost completely flavourless therefore it needs to either be dipped in the sauce your side dish may be soaked in or it needs a relish. One of the problems with starvation in this country is that 85% of the farming is devoted to corn (which they call maize) for feeding the country. Corn is relatively sensitive to precipitation so in years where there is too much or too little rain the yield plummets and there is large scale starvation. The message about diversifying their crops is one of the goal of most foreign groups working here in agriculture. That said, they have groceery stores here that have the same kind of products you would find at home as well as traditional markets so you can eat similar to how you would at home. The traditional markets have great prices so we usually go there as the imported stuff at the grocery store can be pricey for our budget.
Temperture wise it is usually in the high 20's to low 30's each day down to the low 20's to high teen's at night. It is the rainy season so it rains almost every day but usually just for short periods of time.