A day in Lilongwe

On Thursday the 26th we traveled down to Lilongwe to pick up a women by the name of Lonia. She is in university in Israel and studying drip irrigation. She is traveling different African countries to learn more about the drip irrigation systems they use and problems that they might encounter. Lonia was tipped off by another student to contact the Malawi Project for help in finding drip systems in Malawi, so Dick sent us to go fetch her from the airport. Oh the joys of having a car in Malawi, Jarrod always becomes the chauffer. But for all the mom’s out there she doesn’t seem to have the look of an axe murderer.
We stayed the night in Lilongwe at the Chewa House (the Guest House at Blessings Hospital). We talked a bit about our travels and her travels through Ethiopia while we drank tea and entered data into our computers. She entering study information and I the over 6000 titles and authors for the Para Library (yes, even though we are far from Sam I am still working for her).
In the morning we went down to the Mentendere Village, the 150 child orphanage on the Blessings campus, and talked to their farmer Richard. Mentendere sits down in the valley of the Blessings Complex. The Orphanage was started by the Malawi Project and is now being run by 100x Missions. There are 150 children that live there as true orphans (have no mother or father), there is one house mom to ever 5-7 children. The set up of the compound is just brilliant. The children live in homes with their house mom and each house has a shower and toilet. The grounds also have a library and school rooms plus washing facilities and a very large kitchen and mess hall. The farm that is on the grounds is to just feed the children and the produce from the farm alone has cut their food bill from 90,000 MK a month to 30,000MK a month. There are hopes of having the children farm the land but for right now Richard runs the farm brilliantly. In addition to the spectacular farm and compound there is a large rain water collector that fills during the rainy season and helps to water the crops in the dry season. The Malawi Project had plans to build more rain collectors but the government stepped in and said because they are piped city water they are not aloud to build anymore rain collectors. The Project has done such an amazing job setting this compound up, if you find yourself in Malawi it is a must see.

Lonia got all the info she needed and we were off to Capital City. After some time trying to find the US embassy a nice gentleman told us the way. I understand that this is a 3rd world country and street signs are not always their main focus but you would think the US Embassy would at least have a sign but no the only thing that marked it was a half staff flag (Kennedy) that you could not see from the road because their giant wall covered it.

Lonia and I went in, she had to check on a visa for Kenya, since I had no business to take care of there they would not let me past their little, very cold, waiting room. So I sat their looking at there very American pictures of cow boys and eagles hanging on the wall. Then off to the left was a picture Mr. Obama and Hilary but no Joe. There was clearly a spot for his picture but no one seemed to care to get one. Very funny to me, see even in Malawi they care not to honor a guy from Delaware.
After Lonia was finished we went 2 blocks over to the National library to pick up 4 boxes of books that they had donated to the Para Library. Many of the books were math books and learn to write books but they also gave us those really big children’s books that Mrs. Irvin (my first grade teacher) used to read aloud to the class with. No Misses Wishy Washy but still totally cool.
Once I Tetris styled the trunk and made everything fit so nice and neat we were off to Senga Bay for the weekend. Lonia had a farm to see there and we could spend another sunny weekend at the lake.