Saturday

We just got back from a morning hike. Our neighbors left for a long weekend in Zomba, so it's just been the four of us today and that's been nice. 

Lev is now making oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies ("but I'll put in less chocolate chips, of course," he clarified with a knowing nod of his head, since they are a limited commodity from home). Matthew is on the patio, sending a series of voice messages back and forth with a friend from home, discussing commerce and AI. Thea is communing with the goats, which is something she does daily - just hangs out in their pen, petting them, feeding them leaves, talking to them in a low voice. (In fact, she just wandered in with a sheepish look on her face and confessed she took a small nap in there.) I'm on our loveseat, wearing a tank top and the shortest jean shorts I have, since the inside of our house we treat like an American embassy: it is American soil, thus I may, as a 46-year old woman, wear shorts and show my shoulders when it's 82 degrees out (though if someone comes to the door selling charcoal, as just happened, I either have to grab a chitenje to cover up or not show my body at all).

The hot season is upon us, at last. We arrived during the wet & hot season, which transitioned into the cool season in April. I was pleasantly surprised at how long that season lasted, since in Mozambique it seemed far shorter. Now, it is getting hot again. People are busy burning their fields (to clear out old harvests and sometimes to catch field rats), and the air quality is the worst I've seen. We live right at the base of a big mountain, but some days there is so much smoke and haze in the air that you can't see it at all. Not one bit. It's very weird. We had a quick rain recently, after months of no rain at all, and suddenly the mountain was back!

Our hike today was at the foot of the mountain, about 45 minutes from here. People told us that you could swim in a river there, so we came with swimsuits packed. (Well, except Lev, who assumed I had packed it for him, so he wore Matthew's rash guard shirt instead.) The hike was confusing, as they always are here, with no signs or maps, and dozens of other footpaths intersecting with the trail. We gave up on anything "official", and simply made our way up the base of the mountain, through a sparse forest that has been severely deforested and - in many places - recently burned by locals to reduce brush. Women with heavy loads of firewood balanced on their heads kept passing us on the trail, barefoot and in skirts, along with a handful of six or seven-year old girls, also carrying heavy loads, focused and unsmiling. It's a hard life, out in these rural areas. 

I know Thea is pretty short, but even so, I couldn't carry a load like this on my head. 

Matthew did some successful birding, but the kids got overly hot and began to complain, so we called it after an hour or more and started to descend back toward the river. It was a pretty spot, with lots of small clear pools pouring into one another; better yet, it was gloriously empty of other people... for about 5 minutes. 

Right after we changed into swim clothes and dipped our feet in the frigid water, a crowd - a literal small crowd! - of local kids somehow sniffed us out. They started by shouting and waving enthusiastically from a distance, then creeped closer and closer until it was us on one side of a pool and them on the other side, huddled in disparate small groups, just sitting and watching us. All the time in the world.

This is a reality here. You're almost always on display. Malawi is the most densely populated country in southern Africa that I've been in, and it can feel challenging to have so little opportunity to be alone when outside. I do miss the wide-open expanses of Zambia or Mozambique. 

Lev splashed around for a bit, but soon began to feel shy and self-conscious about his unconventional swimwear, until I pointed out that many of the boys were wearing only underwear. Thea stood knee-deep in the water and skipped stones, seeming unperturbed by the little boys studying her from a distance of three feet.

Eventually we headed back to the car, stopped at a restaurant for some lunch (where we waited more than an hour for our food, but that is typical), and drove home. We all rated the hike "meh." There simply isn't much to do around here, not in a conventional sense. But you still need to try. It was good to get out of the house. 

We always have a lot of fun discovering nature up close: a giant sunbleached millipede, dead and hollow inside ("it looks like he has eyebrows!", Lev pointed out), the irridescently-purple flowers blooming in the jacaranda trees right now, the ball-shaped ant nests in trees, made of leaves glued together with some kind of ant-silk, made by ants! A favorite moment was when Lev noticed two small frogs mating in a stagnant pool. "Look, look!," he shouted.* A string of... something was coming out of the female frog but it was so long, nearly three feet, that at first I thought it was simply algae or grass. But it kept growing. We realized she was laying her eggs in a beautiful long necklace of slime, with each egg perfectly spaced.

It was a fine day, in a slow-paced African kind of way. This year and a half of being here, precisely because there is so little to do, feels like a still frame of quality time with our children, while they're still young, in a way we'll likely never experience again. Which means, even when it's underwhelming, it's special. 

Now for those cookies.   

* Actually, what he said was, "Look, look, two frogs having sex!", at which I responded, "Yes, but say 'mating'."