Tracking Down Other Permaculture Teachers

Trip Start Jan 10, 2006
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Trip End Jun 02, 2006


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Flag of Malawi  ,
Thursday, March 16, 2006

I woke up and headed for an atm to fetch some kwacha. This was pretty easy, as was finding breakfast and a phone. The phone shops are literally everywhere in Malawi. My breakfast was half a fresh coconut (shelled for me), a muffin, two donuts and some fried potatoes with chopped salad on top. All this was about $1 or 130 kwacha.

I used a phone to call Stacia Nordin on her cell phone, as I was hoping to visit her and her husband at their home in Liliongwe, the capital. She was in southern Malawi, and said she would phone her husband and tell him to pick me up. In the mean time, I took the slow bus to Lilongwe. (If you ever have the choice, I'd say take a minibus. It's 700 kwacha rather than 540, but probably cuts off two hours.) The ride was long and hot, and the tape player was broken. It's much hotter and more humid in Malawi than in Zimbabwe. When you look to the mountains in the distance, Malawi is heavenly beautiful, but, if you focus your eyes in the forground, you realize that everything between the mountains is a sea of corn. It's no longer any wonder why Afrikans starve in drought and are poor and malnourished in general - they're totally dependent on one exotic and annual crop that eats up their money in seed and fertilizer and provides nothing but carbohydrates.

When I got to Lilongwe, I called Stacia again and she told me where to go to get picked up by Kristof. I finally got there after some bus confusion (very few Malawians speak English) and Kristof was waiting for me, praise Jah. It turns out that neither his cell or home phone was working. Stacia first got ahold of him at his favorite restaurant, and he waited for me too early and went back home. Then, when I told her I was in Lilongwe, she tried Kristoff at home, which only worked because the phone repair lady had the diagnostic phone hooked up to the telephone pole, which she then answered and passed to Kristof.

Kristof and Khalidwe, their daughter, took me out to their favorite restaurant (Sol Farm)which is run by an Ethiopian named Negus Solomon. He gave me a good contact in Addis Ababa. The food was great (house-raised free range chicken in a wrap with nice spice). We got back to the Nordins' house well after dark, and I was ready for bed.
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