First blog

I am so cross: I had written my first blog and saved it on a stick and can't for the life of me work out how to upload it. So I am rewriting it. It might just appear at some time in the future in a different form when I get someone to sort it for me.  However ...

So I arrived in Malawi nearly 3 weeks ago now. A pauper I might be, but I have influential friends and so spent my pre-flight time in a business lounge at Heathrow, eating all the food and drinking all the wine. The flight was not too bad as it wasn't full, but I was a bit concerned when we stopped to re-fuel at Lumbumbasha in Congo. Now, I'm not one of those who gets wobbly about 'Africa', as you might have guessed, but since meeting a woman who was lying on the ground with a gun to her head and whose life was subsequently traded for the smallest tin of Nescafe you can get, and this was in Congo, I am twitchy about that place. But it was ok. The problem was a bit more that I almost forgot to get off the plane at Lilongwe.

I spent the first two nights in Lilongwe and then went up to Tanya's plantation in the north, and pretty cold it was too. Then on the Sunday off to Mzuzu, the nearest town to where I live now, stopping off at the school where I now teach, and up to the tea plantation where I was to live. Only I didn't stay there as it was too remote for me and I moved down to the village where the school is. I live in a brick-built, single storey house and my room is a kind of outhouse in the back. We have one tap (cold) in the back yard and we usually cook over an open fire, but we do also have single ring gas burner. The pit latrine is out in the garden, ok unless it's 3am and the dogs are barking ...

I won't write much more in case this doesn't go and I have to re-do it. If it's successful, expect to hear again soon. Goodnight.