Biker Babe!

So I’m officially a biker babe! Motorcycle lessons were awesome! We started off practicing in the back garden of the NGO where we were learning. There were 2 bikes and 4 of us so we had to take turns. We were puttering around the nice manicured gardens so slowly that it was like a pony ride at the fair! Hilarious! In the afternoon we ventured out and our instructor took us to a soccer field where we had a good audience of children who were amazed as we drove up with bikes on the back of the pickup and then proceeded to do circles around the field dodging kids, soccer balls and pylons. It was getting a bit precarious so after a few rounds we decided to call it quits for the day. The next day we went out again to another field and I can say that after all that practice I’m feeling pretty good on the old “hog” but we’ll see how I do out on the real roads once I get my license!

Around and around the garden...

Our audience...

After a bit of an epic journey, we have finally made it to Malawi! We arrived in Lilongwe Sunday night after a 12 hour trek that began on a bus at 6am. We were on the bus for 8 hours arriving at the border town in Zambia. It was gorgeous to watch the big red sun come up and then watch as the landscape went by, villages, small marketplaces selling little bananas, fish, vegetables and biscuits and vast areas of open space with Acacia and other trees that seem typically “African” to me. We then took a cab to the border and walked across with no problems. On the Malawi side we took another cab to Mchinji and that’s where it all started to go awry. The cab driver had packed our bags rather precariously in the trunk as they wouldn’t fit into the car because we already had the 3 of us and our day packs as well as 4 other people crammed into a car slightly smaller than my Civic. He had secured them in place with a rubber cord and we took off whipping down the potholed roads at about 100km/h or more. Normally we may have been a bit concerned about the bags but we had arrived at the Zambian border in a similar manner and all went well so no need to worry. When we arrived in Mchinji, however, we were one bag short. The other volunteer’s bag had somewhere flew out of the trunk. So in a flurry, I was left on the side of the road with the bags and she rushed back to find it. Luckily a nice man had it on his back and was struggling to ride his bike with it and get it back to us. It’s definitely got a bit of road rash but remarkably everything survived except for a plastic soap dish!

This morning I had my first meeting at work and it went pretty well so I'm excited! There about 10 people in the office and they are all very friendly. It sounds like I'll be in Lilongwe for about 2 weeks getting familiar with the people and the programs of the head office and then I'll be headed to Machinga which is in the south (close to one of the to game parks!) to work with one of their partner organizations for a few months and get familiar with some of the field realities. They have a couple gravity-fed systems as well as some sanitation and hygiene programs underway that I will hopefully be able to help out with.
So tomorrow will be my first official day of work at 7:30AM and I have about an hour walk so I'll be up early! I'm looking forward to getting started and learning more about what they do.

Hope everyone is well back home! Hugs!