Cape Maclear, Malawi

Just passing along word that Jeffery has reached his final destination in Malawi. He's 7-10 hours ahead (depending on your timezone) so it was off to bed. Tomorrow Jeffery and Meg will begin collecting samples from the lake. He will be updating the journal while there and I am sure he will have many good stories to share.

-Karlyn

It is very hot here (I was expecting that) and pretty humid – but there aren’t giant waves of mosquitoes, really. I think the mosquito population (at least what I’ve seen so far) isn’t that much different than Nebraska – a few isolated critters late in the evening and (I’m told) a lot in the grass at dusk/dawn. I’m still sleeping under the mosquito net, though – since I don’t really want to tempt fate.

One other quick note - I apologize for the lack of updates (I popped a few from the early legs on tonight). It's been very difficult keeping up with it since the internet connection here is slow and sometimes problematic - and I have a gazillion photos - plus we work incredibly long hours most days, so I get maybe an hour at night after dinner before bedtime. I'll try to fill in some of the days I missed soon, though.

On my first full day here, I went directly into the field. The grounds here a fairly spectacular – it’s really a posh resort that is right on the beach. I could eat my dinner and stumble down the stairs to the beach and flop into the water if I felt like it. Meg told me that it hadn’t rained once since she arrived (4 days before me), but the first day I was here there was a massive downpore that lasted about an hour or so right after I woke up.

The people who run this place (Michelle and Howard) are obscenely considerate and generous and they just love making an environment where absolutely everyone feels happy and comfortable all the time. If you are coming to Malawi on vacation and you want to spend some time in some edenic place where you have all the amenities you could want – access to amazing sailing, diving, snorkeling, and yet still be a 5 minute walk from a local village, Danforth Yachting is your place. I think the rate for the real rooms (the ones with air conditioning) is $150 a night – which is outrageous for Malawi, but that include the cost of food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) which is prepared by a top notch chef that lives on the grounds (or actually just outside them). The big cost is getting to Africa, I suppose.

In any case, we had an elaborate breakfast, our stuff was packed on the boat for us (they are letting us use an old riverboat basically), and we headed out onto the lake to do some research. It was a couple hours to get to our site – and then I mostly ran the plankton net while Meg and the rest of the crew ran the surface sediment collector and some of the water chemistry reading equipment. It was hot and humid, but the boat is covered, so we weren’t in the direct sun much all day. We ended up heading back from the field a bit late (4pm) and it was a 3 hour trip home (which I dozed periodically through and listened to my iPod).

Dinner was fancy barbeque (I think they called it a “bry” (not sure about the spelling), which is the South African equivalent). I can’t even explain how crazy the dinner was – it started with chicken on a kabob, followed by Zulu Sushi (which is steak crusted in a brine, then cook on the grill) and then they brought out the actual dinner – fish, some local corn-based meal with salsa, more (different) steak, some traditional South African sausage, and a salad. I’m not even joking.

Anyhow, afterwards, we scurried off to our rooms.

Day 2 we decided to leave a bit earlier so we could get more work done. We only went about an hour away and then managed to get twice as many samples at the day before. Breakfast (for me) was French toast (they referred to it as Eggy Bread) because I mentioned that I liked French toast. They made a different breakfast for everyone else. Lunch we ate off of plates with silverware on the boat – which was basically some leftovers from the previous night’s feast. For reference – I’ve never eaten lunch off of an actual plate in the field. Dinner was an amazing fillet of beef on a bed of thinly sliced potatoes. Some actual company had arrived earlier that day, so they really did it up with the serving.

On the trips out, Meg and Reidwel (the Zomban geologist that is with us) spent long stretches where he taught here Chichewa (the native language). I’ve even managed to learn a few phrases.

We were back a little earlier, so Meg and I headed over to Chembe (the local village that is maybe a 5 minute walk from my room) – just to sort of check out the place. Meg had already been there a few times before and made friends with a few locals. People were very polite, of course, and everyone wanted to sell us something – but we didn’t bring any money with us and it was quickly getting rather dark. On the way out of town we were escorted by one of Meg’s friends, who seemed very considerate – and then a few people trying to sell us stuff – one of whom was nicknamed “Chicken” of all things. He was kind of sketchy, but harmless.

When we got back in the evening, Howard taught me, Meg, and Gerardo (Argentinian here as hired help for 10 months with his wife) how to play Bowa, which is a simple game played with seeds in little carved slots that isn’t entirely unlike “macala”, which is played in Tanzania and is more well-known in the US.

On the third day, the boat wasn’t available in the morning, so Meg and I went over to the village and bought a bunch of things – which probably amounted to roughly 60 dollars or so of actual money being spent. The thing about buying stuff in a village the size of Chembe – as soon as you spend something at one shop, then you get a group of people lining up to show you what they have to sell, and within 10 minutes, you have half the village around you, all trying to get you to buy something. I actually don’t mind it that much – at least they are selling something and they aren’t just begging (more common when I went to Ethiopia) or swiping your stuff.

A few interesting things about the names of people here: you might expect that since we are in Africa, in the proverbial heart of the Dark Continent, that people would have some crazy foreign-sounding names, but Meg’s two friends from Chembe (who live in the same little complex) are named “Nixon” and “Wilson”. Yes, both first names from last names of US presidents. We ran into all sorts of people – most of them have English-sounding names (Nelson, Bernard, Mike, Reece) with a few that sound not far from English names (Linkston, Reidwel, Ryce). In fact, I met a guy wandering around in Chembe who said his name was “Dude” and that even his mother calls him Dude. Welcome to Africa.

Around noon we loaded up the boat for scuba and ran over to a nearby site to do some scuba. I was all prepared to dive, but it turned out we didn’t bring enough weight for me to actually get under the water with my wetsuit on – so I ended up snorkeling around looking at the specialized Malawian fish.

Later in the afternoon when we went to another diving site, Meg and the dive guy who is with us “Bernard” we down while me, Reidwel, and Linkston (the guy who drives the boat) hung out and talked. I feel that Reidwel and I have made a good connection, but I hadn’t talked with Linkston much. I found out a lot about the local culture just from asking them questions. For example his brother named his children. Apparently this is fairly common (as an honor) in their culture. Also his brother was murdered last month – poisoned by his wife – who then ran off with everything his brother owned and apparently got away with it. This murder your husband and run away thing (as unbelievable as that sounds) is pretty common here (or was, up until a few years ago). Linkston is a nice, quiet guy. He works here at Danforth, but he supports his family and his mother (his father is dead) – so he makes so little money that he can’t even afford to fix the tire on his bike that he used to ride into work, so he has to walk 45 minutes in every day.

Reidwel, who has a salaried job at the Zomba Geological Survey (with a college education) makes ~$4,500 a year. He is one of the lucky and very bright people who got chosen to go to public university. Apparently Malawi allows 1,000 people every year to go to university for free (based upon their grades) – that’s from the entire country. You can go to private university, of course, but you’d have to be fairly rich to afford it – so it’s not a luxury that a lot of the people here have.

We bought a bunch of amazing stuff today – I got this awesome ebony carved hippo for 1,500 kwacha (about 9 dollars), a set of keychains – and then a bunch of bracelets and a bead necklace – I think the whole bunch came to something like 60 bucks. I also have a small hand-carved table on order for about 30 bucks. Pretty crazy stuff.

We were up early this morning (6:30) to discuss sampling strategies – part of the issue is that we need to scuba dive to accurately sample for Meg’s research, but it hasn’t been working out too well – since ostracodes mostly live on muddy sediments and we’ve mostly been finding sandy sediments in the depths were we can safely scubadive (10 – 20 meters). We’ve more-or-less come up with a system now, but it’s not ideal. Shallow areas usually have lots of mud, but anything muddy in the 1-5 meter depth range is basically crocodile and hippopotamus territory and both are not the sorts of animals that anyone in our group has any interest in swimming in, particularly in low-visibility, murky lake waters. That said, we spent at least half the day in shallow water and we saw no hippopotami and something that was probably a flash of a crocodile, once. Still, not something to gamble on – but I’m hoping that by tomorrow we will finally get to at least see one hippo.

The fieldwork flies by – we are often to lunch before any of us realize it. This morning we left a bit before our lunch had been loaded (some kind of communication error with the staff) and Howard (Danforth) ran one of their faster boats out carrying our lunch to hand deliver it (we were headed back, knowing we had no lunch, but Howard didn’t know that). Seriously, for the second day in a row, we’ve eaten our lunches off plates in the field. We got a view of Chembe by boat, though, since it is right on the lake shore – kind of cool to see everyone out brushing their teeth and washing their clothes in the lake.

We found out a bit more information today about the people who are on the boat with us (Linkston, Reidwel, and Bernard). All of them are really nice, very friendly guys. They pitch in at every stop in the field, where we each have sort of self-assigned jobs. Reidwel has no responsibility to help out – he’s mainly there to observe as a government geologist, but he always helps. Bernard is very helpful – he has sort of assumed the role of our professional depth-finder, always reading out the depths to us as we near our sites… and Linkston drives the boat – all three of them help with the winch (not wench) that is used to pull up our samples – so much so that Meg almost never has to do anything unless she sort of muscles her way in and forces them to let her do something. Linkston supports his mother, his wife, and his two daughters on roughly $1,200 a year. Bernard is an incredible diver – he barely seems to use any of his air tank – and I guess that he often will help any of the fishermen in the village if their nets become stuck or entangled – coming out and diving for free to get them out of jam. It’s not clear exactly how much Bernard makes a year – but it’s probably somewhere between Reidwel and Linkston. It’s really kind of incredible to me how they manage on so little.

By 5pm we were all hot and exhausted and arrived back at the dock. After a quick shower to clean off the lake, we went down to the dinner area and Howard suggested a round of pool (billiards) – so we played doubles and 3 games before dinner – which was themed Asian food for the night. Meg was tired and went to bed early, as did Howard – so Michelle, Gerardo and his wife Lucilia and I hung out and just chatted for an hour or so after dinner. It was really nice – they are all such pleasant people.

We’ve finally gotten into a solid groove doing the field work. We were a little slow getting out this morning, because they took a while to prepare our breakfast (probably just some communication issue between us and the staff) – but we took the boat right out to the site, hit the first transect with a plan, and then got quite a few samples. The Danforth staff prepared us hamburgers (cold by the time we were in the field) for our lunch, which was quite nice – clearly they were aiming to appeal to our Americana.

I learned a few new words in Chichewa (the native language) today. A funny coincidence that makes some words easy to remember is that they often sound like other words I know. As an example, ‘a big thunderstorm’ is chipenzi (I may have the spelling wrong, but it is pronounced like that), where the prefix “chi” just means really big and “penzi” means thunderstorm. For anyone curious, a chimpanzee is the same word in Chichewa as it is in ours. Another coincidental word I learned today was “sokoro” (again, spelling might be wrong) but that’s pronounced exactly like the Spanish word “socorro” (meaning “help”) and, of course, that’s also the name of the city where I did my MS grad school courses.

When we got back to Danforth, we scurried over to the village (I was referring to it as Chembe, but I was informed today (by Chicken) that Chembe is the family name of the chieftain (same family has ruled over the village since its inception, I guess), and the town is actually Cape McClear. Interestingly, even Google has Chembe listed. In any case, we met up with Linkston’s brother – who was selling paintings. Neither of us actually wanted to buy any paintings, but I guess Meg felt a little guilty and got one anyhow, since it helps out his family.

I, on the other hand, came armed with an old t-shirt. Why, a t-shirt? Well, the locals are actually just as willing to trade in clothes as they are in money. And I didn’t really want to part with my t-shirt, but it’s just a t-shirt and I wanted to see how much I could sell it for and to participate in this custom that seems pretty strange to me. Plus, it probably is a trade that is going to be a win for the locals, so it feels good to do (and opens up some space in my beleaguered luggage bags anyhow) I managed to get 2 bracelets for my t-shirt - I was told that the starting price as 800 kwacha for one bracelet or roughly $5.25, but no one in their right mind would pay that much for a bracelet, since you can usually haggle them down to at least half that price (if you were really persistent, maybe as low as 250 kwacha ($1.65) – but I honestly don’t want to fight that hard to save a dollar. So I estimate that the going price for a previously owned t-shirt is somewhere around $4 to $6 on the open market here – not a bad deal, really. If I had known about it, I probably would have brought along more old t-shirts, since they aren’t worth much at home and I have a lot of them.

Afterwards, we came back to Danforth (it was dark and we both needed to reapply bug spray before dinner). We had a nice, simple dinner of chimunga (corn, but with bigger and harder kernels), chicken and vegetables. All of the guests who had been here the previous week are now gone, replaced by a couple from South Africa here on their honeymoon. I think they are here for a day or two and then it will just be staff and us by Thursday evening.

Everyone called it an early night – Meg and I tried to connect up with Andy via Skype, which didn’t work out. For the first time in quite a while, the evening is actually fairly cool, breezy, and I’m nearly ready for bed and typing up my journal entry before midnight – which means I might get a bit longer night of sleep!

We woke up a bit early today to run over to pick up our “happy pants” – which are a local phenomenon (I guess?), made of typical bright African colors with a draw string and a bit of cloth that you fold over the top. Thursday night (we are leaving for Zomba/Blantyre on Friday) we are having “happy pants night” here at Danforth – all of the actual paying guests will be gone and I guess we are doing something corny and fun. Anyhow, they will make really nice pajamas and they cost something like 8 dollars – which is not bad at all, considering that they were tailored to fit me.

The field work went fairly well today – it took about 3 hours to get to the general area where we were sampling. When we got there, there was a couple of fishing boats pulling in their nets and Bernard asked them if the shallow waters were safe for diving and we were told don’t even think about it, they are full of crocodiles and hippos. But for the 6th straight day, there weren’t any hippos or crocodiles visible from the boat while we worked.

We took as many samples as we had time for, turned around and got in to the dock right around sunset. It was sprinkling on us for most of the trip home and the air was fairly cool, so for once I didn’t power-nap through that portion of the day.

A shower, some bug spray, and a bit of dinner and then I came back to my room. Pretty quiet day.

Tomorrow the plan is to try to fill in some holes around a site that is much closer to Danforth and that will pretty much finish off the field work – since we can’t really effectively sample areas that are farther away than about 3 hours.