On Tuesday I met “my” driver – Chola – who will be picking me up and dropping me off each day. He’s very nice, and likes photography and music, so we will do just fine.
Ruth and I talked about too many things, and worked on Koha a bit. Then she showed me around the building, introducing me to people. There are lecture rooms, offices, labs, and examination rooms with quiet gloomy people waiting outside of them – usually mothers with small children watching the too-loud televisions in the hall.
The labs were very interesting – I kept thinking of my friend Cass, who also does HIV research. The one that we went into was Level Two, and we had to wear pink robes that said, “visitor”. I met several researchers, including one who did microbiology, in the quieter lab. There were humming and throbbing machines, piles of old manuals and lab binders on shelves, refrigerators full of reagents, and at least twelve busy people in lab coats. They are running HIV tests, CD4 counts, malaria tests, TB tests, and many other things.
After the tour, we ate lunch outside – there is a woman who comes to make and sell lunch things each day. They are Malawian foods – chicken, liver, beef stew, chambo fish, rice, nsima, chips, red beans, lape greens, and more. It was very good but they give too much! Ruth was afraid that I didn’t like it because I didn’t eat all of it, but I really did. I was a little squeamish about the chicken – I hate eating off the bone – but the vegetables were great. We ate sitting on the edge of one of the concrete lined narrow water ditches that are everywhere here – dry now, because it’s winter. A whole group of other Malawians were also eating in the same area – it’s the regular lunch crew, apparently. I didn’t bring a bottle of water, though, and I can’t drink the tap water – I’ll know better tomorrow.
We had met the manager of the guest house earlier in the library – Godfrey – and he really wanted me to see it, as I would have been staying there if it had not been full. I wish I had – it would have been nice to really meet some of the other Chapel Hillites who are here. The hotel’s pretty nice, though. Anyway, we walked around the Lighthouse facility next door to see it – it looks basically like a long duplex, with a big porch.
There are goats! Godfrey keeps his own brown goat, and also takes care of one that was given to a now-departed Chapel Hill student that remains. Goats are the perfect domestic animal – small enough and hardy enough for most people to keep them, providers of milk and cheese, and eventually a nice dinner. 
They’re also cute, and smart, and I like them. I will still eat them, though.
We met a med student who’s there for a year with her surgeon husband who complained that the goats had eaten the mango trees that they’d tried to plant in the yard, but I still like them. She also took us into the guest house to meet a student who’s returning to Chapel Hill on Saturday – I’d met her earlier on the tour, a researcher who’s studying diarrhea (and had lots of jokes), and another student. The other duplex is full of other visitors, but I don’t know who they are. Maybe the students from Dundee – there are also three Scottish students here, from Dundee University, who work with the UNC Project.
The med student told me all about getting an article from the Health Sciences Library while here in Lilongwe (she unwittingly got a big fine because she didn’t realize she needed to pay) – she’s very thankful to us, and so Melanie, for it. I promised to tell Melanie. Ruth and I talked about possibly setting up some sort of easier method to get articles from the HSL scanned and emailed to the UNC Project Library, if we can figure out how to manage the expenses and administration of it. I will talk to Melanie about it when I get back, and then she and Ruth can work it out, if it’s possible.
So, the server keeps resetting, interrupting when we try to download the pieces that we need to install Koha on a Windows machine (it’s supposed to be on a Linux machine). Very aggravating. We managed to get all the pieces, finally, and will ask the IT people to install them tomorrow – we can’t, as we aren’t administrators on the machine.
I ate in the Indian/Pakistani restaurant tonight, and it was excellent – I kept wishing my friends Janie and Allie were there, because they would have liked it. It has mutton instead of lamb on the menu, like you’d see in the US – I really wish it was easier to get mutton at home. Cooked right (which is problematic), it has more flavor than lamb. I had Peshawari Mutton – I’ve only had the dessert-type Peshawari Naan before, nothing else Peshawari.
The power keeps going out briefly, in the restaurant and in my room – load-shedding. Luckily, this thing runs on battery in between and I haven’t lost any data.
