Full hearts

To answer the burning question: We are doing great! 

Am I storing my underwear in a pot because we have no dressers? Yes. Have we learned the correct amount of pressure to use when smashing a cockroach (enough to kill it, but not so much it gets "juicy")? Also yes. (You have to "bop it".)

Our toilet is missing a seat. We haven't been able to organize the kitchen because the maintenence team is still painting in there. Our shower head is actually the head of a watering can that's been MacGyvered on*. We don't have hot water. The yard is mostly red mud from daily rains; it gets on everything. Our shopping list looks like those scrolls in funny movies that drop and roll out across the floor, covered in tiny print: broom, bedside lamps, clothes hamper, dish drainer, wall anchors, mirror, scrubby sponges, cockroach poison...

Those are some of the things we don't have, but what we do have more than makes up for them. I'm not being saintly, it's really how we feel. We had heard Mulanje was pretty, but we were not prepared for just how beautiful it is. We feel like we have stumbled into a little piece of African heaven. 

The mission hospital sits 5 km outside the village of Mulanje. It is like its own little college town, with over 100 staff houses spread out around the perimeter of the hospital grounds. There is the midwifery & nursing college, and a primary and secondary school in the middle where kids are always playing football, and a squat Presbyterian church, and a tiny market center, and a handful of shops where Matthew is rapidly making friends. Today someone fixed our broken fan in 5 minutes for $1.50. A single road cuts through it all and the main thing you have to look out for are bicycle taxis wobbling by. Directly to the east are kilometers and kilometers of tea fields, which in turn are butted up against the base of Mount Mulanje and its protected forests. The mountain is just... right there. Always in view. Big and misty, with waterfalls like veins and arteries streaming down the rock face. I don't want to be accused of romantic exaggeration, but I promise you that as we rounded the highway and it came into view for the first time, there was a big rainbow in front of it. We all screamed.

Everyone is Malawian except for us and two Dutch families. All have been warmly welcoming and generous in helping us settle in. The house was in dismal condition just a week before we arrived, but the whole maintenence team rushed to paint and repair and brighten it for us. It is perfect for our needs. We live next door to one of the Dutch families, who have five children, including a 7 year-old boy and an 8 year-old girl. It took about 24 hours for all the kids to become good friends. Now they rove between the two yards like a gang of muddy blonde children shouting in a mixture of English and Dutch, chasing off vervet monkeys, playing Sardines, and catching millipedes. They're taking a week off school for us to settle in, then they'll start with their Malawian teacher in what is essentially a micro-school. Today Mavis - the neighbor's nanny - took the gang to a sparse playground somewhere, where they played tag and ran amuck with about 15 Malawian kids. "It was fun and kinda crazy!", Thea confided, wide-eyed.

I went jogging around the tea estate the last two mornings, and what struck me most is how much people ignored me in a good way. This hospital has existed since the 1890s, so folks are used to seeing a few azungu around (white people). (People who willingly expend energy for no good reason at all, running by while they hoe the fields for a living). Matthew and I went for a evening walk through the community, leaving the kids at home. It was just so... peaceful. That's all. It was really nice and we're still getting used to that astonishing fact.

We're often hot and dirty and leaning hard on that watering can head to cool ourselves down. (We're each taking 2-3 frigid showers a day** and this isn't the hottest season.) The electricity has been out for several hours the past two mornings, making it impossible for us to cook anything or even boil water for tea, because we still need to buy a countertop gas range as a back-up. The kids picked 16 ticks off a friendly dog with fleas that's been coming by and who goes joyfully racing with me in the fields at 6 AM. (The kids wanted to name her Mr Thumbs, but she already has an owner and is named Piri.) I give a toilet without a seat zero stars. Besides beds, a table, a small fridge and an electric oven, our house is largely empty. What we have is mismatched and piecemeal. But I truly couldn't care less. 

Our hearts are full. We haven't started work and know there will be plenty of challenges to come. But that doesn't discount these essential blessings: that we already feel so at home; and feel immense gratitude to have landed here, of all the places in this wide world, amongst these good people.

Our home. 

Lev with a giant snail. 

On the road at dusk. 

* This is the kind of resourcefulness that gets me excited. The watering can head disperses the water really well. 

** Why does cold water feel so much worse when it hits your back?