This morning Craig picked us up and dropped us at the airport. Security is so easy to go through, and so few people were flying this morning, that I went in and out of it.
The obnoxious South African passenger from the ticket office yesterday was not there, but a very inappropriately dressed Western teenager was. I wondered if she would seem so slutty in the US and decided she would. There was also a Muslim woman in a full veil with a baby, a man in Arab robes and a woman’s leather jacket, assorted business people – it is a commuter flight – and several knots and groups of tired grumpy people. I didn’t care – at least we were moving somewhere. Much better than yesterday.
They called Kasunga, Mfuwe, finally Chipata! The plane was tiny – the same as the propeller plane that Dow Chemical was flying to Plaquemine when I worked at their air hanger one summer. So, I read the air safety card and away we went, very noisily. The woman in the veil spoke when we were figuring out the difficult seatbelts and surprised me – almost no accent in English. I suppose I imagined that women who took the full veil – almost a burkha – wouldn’t speak English, or at least wouldn’t speak to me. Stereotypes!
They served juice and cheese and tomato sandwiches. I’d like to know why even tiny Zambian Airways is able to serve decent food on a one-hour flight when great big airlines in the US like United and Northwest can’t manage to serve ANY on four-hour flights? If anybody had an excuse for being short with food it would be a Sub-Saharan African company, yet they manage to be very generous.
Anyway, we arrived in Chipata, which is very pretty and green – it’s in the mountains. The airport is smaller than the one in Brazoria County that I worked at – no wonder they use small planes. Its restroom was unspeakable, but luckily I had a packet of tissue in my bag.
A friend of Craig’s and Chimwemwe’s met us and waited until a taxi came to take us to Chimwemwe’s uncle’s office – he was going to facilitate our ride to the border stop to cross into Malawi. He was kind enough to make up the difference for the taxi ride – Craig had guessed wrongly on the price. I met really kind, generous people in Zambia – Chimwemwe and Craig and their family were only a few. We were really lucky!
So, we rode to the border, passed through one police stop, thanked the taxi driver, and sailed through the Zambian side of the border crossing. The police were looking for unlicensed taxi drivers – a big problem in Zambia, apparently. We knew to get only a licensed driver with the right permit, in a blue car with red numbers.
There were backpackers, local travelers, people selling fruit and offering to change money, and safari jeeps. We dragged our luggage down the road toward the Malawian side and up into the border office. I filled out paperwork, waved my passport, and was passed on through.
While there, we saw a pair of Polish backpackers – they had failed to get a Zambian visa, and were trying to somehow get the Malawian border guard to produce one. They were very obnoxious, and finally they tried to bribe the guard! So bad… He looked completely disgusted, as were everybody else who was waiting. I saw the two jerks wandering back towards the taxis, looking disgruntled, later on. They’re lucky they didn’t get arrested.
So, we walked out of the border stop to meet our driver, coming from the UNC Project. No driver. Ruth walked out of the stop’s parking lot to go see if he might be at the taxi stand – she knew them all. Nope, no driver.
We were almost an hour late because of the taxi switch-off – the driver should have definitely been there. We were worried that they’d come and left, or that something had changed from when Ruth had last spoken to the person who’d arranged transport. Okay, Ruth would call. No minutes! She had no Malawian minutes to use to call – only enough to send one text message asking them to call. So, she did. They didn’t call. I thought maybe the building was interfering – that happens to my signal at home. So, Ruth walked across the road. No, they didn’t call.
A boy who was selling crackers – and would not believe that I didn’t want any – heard us talking about minutes and offered to get us some. He took Ruth over to a man by the side of the road who was selling them, and Ruth managed to get 100 (very few) – she also had very little Malawian money! We’d expected to be picked up by her husband Mafera at the airport, and this entire border-crossing circumstance was unplanned.
She tried again, flashing them to get them to call her back and save our few minutes. Nope! They didn’t call.
We were just starting to talk about alternate methods of getting back, when we finally spotted the driver! There had been a mix-up – he’d been at the border at 7:20, when we had to be at the airport. Finally. He was probably thinking the same thing, seeing as he’d had to drive to the border and back to Lilongwe twice today.
We drove to Lilongwe past stalls made of thatch instead of scraps, farms, brick kilns, brick houses and huts, businesses, many, many goats, small herds of cattle, villages, shops, and lots of green sedge. Malawi is greener than Zambia – at least this part of it. People dig bricks out of the red mud and make them harden by building structures to dry them out – I thought they were big storage units at first. Most of the houses here are made of brick with thatch roofs, instead of all thatch as in Zambia.
I saw several ox-drawn carts and lots of goats, and at one point it seemed like we were going to run into a herd of cattle being driven across the road. The houses seem sturdier and tidier than in Zambia, but that may be just that so many of these are made of brick, and that we are further away from the city. It’s very pretty, though – it’s semi-arid, too, but it has many more green plants and seems less dusty. There are some hills and mountains further off, but Ruth says that Lilongwe is flat, although it seems to have a lot of low hills to me. Not as flat as Houston, I say.
We got into town, and I was dropped at the hotel. My hotel is very nice and is called the Crossroads (apparently, it used to be a Cresta but isn’t any longer). It has an Indian/Pakistani restaurant associated with it, which I’m happy about – I could happily eat Indian food every day.
I changed and washed up, and then Ruth came back to get me – we went into Tidziwe Clinic, where her library is, for the afternoon. The library is very small – about half again as big as the meeting room in RMS. There are bookshelves along all of the walls, with Ruth’s desk in the corner nearest the door, three computers in the middle of the room, and one work table. It reminds me of my old library in Phoenix, the first year I was there. It was bigger, but had a similar bookcase layout. This one has windows that open, though. Distant crying babies and music drift in from them, and a light breeze and the smell of dust from the driveway.
We looked around and talked about what we wanted to do this week – KOHA is at the top of the list, followed by a formal collection development plan. The library needs more books – and several of the central texts have newer editions out, and need to be replaced. We’re hoping a formal plan will move us closer to the funding to do such a project.
So, a weird thing – I got back to my hotel and opened my door to hear a crunch! There was broken glass everywhere. I looked immediately to see that my bag looked undisturbed, and then looked down – the light fixture had fallen! There was broken glass in the entire entryway – it had smashed into hundreds of pieces. I was just lucky I wasn’t there, to either be terrified or hurt. I really don’t want to need stitches and have to go to the public hospital here. They came and cleaned it up and switched me to a new room – one of their two Suites, to make up for it. Very nice. 
At least, nice as I wasn’t there and nothing was damaged.
