Adventures

So I didn’t have internet all day Thursday… it really sucked. We were switching ISPs, and I couldn’t get my computer to connect until the very end of the day. Boo. Anyway, I went to bed really early on Wednesday night and slept forever. It was great. So I felt pretty good Thursday. I went to the main branch of the useless police station, where the woman told me to come back at three because the report wasn’t ready or she couldn’t get to it or some bullshit. I had noticed Wednesday at the mini-station that no one really seemed to be doing anything but hanging around. I asked the woman at the main station if the police would bother to look in the area where my bag was probably ditched to see if they could find it, and she was all, no. I guess they don’t do things like patrol the area to keep people from being mugged and/or actually investigate crimes. Then again, I’d probably be better off with a random citizen finding it, because I don’t really trust the police here to actually give me back my stuff if they found it. The constable at the mini-station was just sketchy… he seemed like a would-be criminal who decided being a police officer would give him enough power over others.

At the embassy I gave them my passport photos so they could get my limited passport together for today. I have two photos left which I kind of want to give to Joe, although the smart thing to do would be to hang on to them for when I get a real passport back in the states. My hair looks funny because the guy said I had to have my ears showing, but they’re otherwise rather cute.

We went shopping for office supplies and cookies, which was exciting. Other than that it was mad boring without the internet.

Friday my two new RAs came in, and we all met to talk about the study. Then the three RAs went through the questions with S in charge while I went off to deal with more passport madness. First stop, police station, where this woman basically filled out a really short form and then charged me a few bucks for it. Stupid. Then I went to the embassy, where they made me wait forever. I think all the people in the consular’s office were having a meeting. But eventually I got my freebie limited passport along with a letter telling me what I need to get a real one and some photocopies for me to carry around instead of the passport. Which is what I should have been doing in the first place. On the other hand, if I had to lose something, the passport wasn’t the worst thing by far – it was fairly easy to replace, at least temporarily, and the old one had an ugly photo.

After that we went to Immigration for a visa. But since there are no computer systems in this country, they sent me to the airport where I got the initial visa, because that is where the record is if you fly in. The driver, G, and I were talking about how there’s no way they could possibly know if you’ve overstayed your visa until you’re leaving, at which point why would they care because the whole point of a visa is to limit your stay. At any rate, they re-stamped my passport with the original date, as if we were going back in time to the day I arrived (I even had to fill out the card they give you on the plane), which means I have to go back to Immigration next week when the visa is up to get it extended.

Going to the airport was a little too tempting. :) It made me think about how happy I’ll be when the study is done and I’m headed home.

If my schedule goes to plan, I should be done with my study by June 1 or so, giving me at least a sold week to do some fun things around Malawi. Trouble is, I’m having a hard time wanting to do these things by myself, and after the whole mugging, I’m a little freaked out about doing anything anywhere, frankly. I don’t want to spend loads of money, but I also feel like I should minimize my risks as much as possible, which might mean things like car rental instead of buses to places. I could check out some of these tour operators – this might be the way to go, because they will have packages and maybe even companions. Part of me wants to say fuckit and just go home early, but it seems like a waste to come here and not take advantage of it a bit. I’m pondering a southern route down to Blantyre and then up through Liwonde National Park to Cape Maclear. That way I get other city, national park, lake.

Saturday I went with K to a village called Mabulabo near Mzimba for a 10th anniversary celebration of their HIV/AIDS group there. It took about two hours to get there, thanks to low traffic. The landscape didn’t change a ton, but there were some interesting rocky hills and trees. Once there, K asked someone at the office where we were supposed to go. This person turned out to be the Traditional Authority, who K didn’t recognize because he was new – the old one had died. The TA is like the big super important chief for the whole area, so it was kind of funny that she just was like, hey, we’re lost, help. We were met by a posse of Japanese people! Apparently Japan also has some development and HIV/AIDS projects in the area, so that was cool to meet those guys.

It appeared that although festivities were supposed to start at 9, they were waiting for us to even start getting things prepared. We didn’t arrive until nearly 10. Things didn’t actually get started until like noon, which is just crazy amounts of delay. We had to sit in a classroom the whole time trying to make conversation. Finally the events began. The TA and K (designated the guest of honor, despite the fact that she was hoping just to hang out and have fun) were surrounded by the impi, the traditional zulu warriors. They wore all kinds of crazy hats and animal skins and beads and jingly ankle bells and carried spears and shields. There were also women accompanying in blue dresses and beads. They all sang and the men stomped so the bells all rang. We proceeded to the field and sat under a tent.

It was kind of like Commencement: sitting under a tent, some musical entertainment and other fun intermixed with boring but ceremonial speeches. I noticed that the inside of the tent was decorated with bright blue toilet paper. I guess when you make bright blue toilet paper, you might as well use it for decoration. Ironic, though, that in the bathroom there were only actual pieces of paper instead of teepee. The day was only really fun when the entertaining stuff was happening, because I couldn’t understand any of the speeches. Although the plays were also lost on me, which was sad because it seemed as if they were pretty hilarious. But there was dancing and an acrobat show, so that was cool.

K had to be the one in her speech to note that condoms are useful and part of any good HIV prevention plan, because the frigging district AIDS coordinator basically neglected them in his desire to focus on abstinence only with maybe a dash of be faithful. She said there’s still this whole attitude that there are no real ways to prevent HIV, so you might as well do whatever you want once sex is involved. So annoying.

The drive back took about three hours thanks to a lot of big slow trucks on the road. The M1 is only two lanes, so you have to do a lot of that passing on the other side’s lane. It reminded me of driving around northern NM. With every small town on the road being like driving through Cuba, full of things you don’t really want to stop to visit.

Upon our return I went to K’s house for a Cinco de Mayo barbecue. The power was out when we got there, and B was running around, poor guy. Someone brought tequila, so there were margaritas, which was exciting. The food was good, as always, and there were many fun people there.

I had terrible dreams Saturday night. One involved the characters of Dexter; Doakes totally beat the crap out of Mazuka because he thought he was hitting on some girl he liked, but it was so horribly violent that I was screaming at the television. Yech. I also dreamed that Citizen’s bank charged me $300 for an address change I didn’t notify them about, and they were planning to charge me $300 a week the entire time I would be here. But fortunately in real life they’ve been totally awesome and a woman from there even called me at the office to help me get a new debit card issued and cancel the stolen checks since I couldn’t call them. They definitely win in my book. The rest of my dreams were normal and fine.

News on the TV about things diappearing that makes me feel better about my lost possessions: 1) Kid being abducted in Portugal – losing a camera pales in comparison to having your kid disappear. 2) KA flight disappearing in Cameroon. 3) Town in Kansas getting totally f’d by a tornado. I was wondering why this one was all over the national news on the radio yesterday, but now that I see the TV coverage, I can see why. It’s crazy. The trees don’t even have bark anymore! The whole town is rubble!

Sunday I watched movies because I didn’t have any money and couldn’t go anywhere. I started to watch Romeo + Juliet, but then the power went out halfway through. I watched Gandhi. I planned to watch Logan’s Run, but the power went out again, so I watched Little Miss Sunshine on my laptop instead.

Today we did our pilot test of the study... thank goodness. I'm moving from a pre/post design to a post-test only design, because our grand plans for everyone to fill out little forms full of numbers as we read questions for the post-test totally doesn't work here. Everyone is just confused, and then they confer with all their neighbors about what to do, meaning that none of their responses are private. For the pre-test we were doing one-on-one interviews, but the post-test is the actual important part, so we need to do one-on-one interviews for that and just forget a pretest. Anyway, we did that in the afternoon and it seemed to go well.