8 - Chaotic weekend

After the distributions were done and we distributed soccer balls to the last schools on Friday, Helen, Mike, Josh and myself were pretty keen on getting the heck out of Mulanje. If there was no more work to be done there, we would have nothing even remotely interesting to do. One of our drivers, Shareef, drove us all to a camp in Liwonde national park called Bushmans Baobob, named after the beautiful trees in the safari regions that you often see on TV and in movies with the massively wide trunks and bonsai tree-like branches on top. The trip there was a bummer however since we took a wrong turn and had to drive back through a police checkpoint, where some dirty corrupt cop made us pull over and demanded a bribe since we had a "tail light bulb out", which I doubt for one since we were in a close to new Toyota Hilux. The camp was a pretty awesome set-up, which I'll discuss more when I go back with Jen and Alecia next week. We stayed up late that night around the fire talking to Darren the owner, an old white guy that was raised in Malawi and had been running businesses related to tourism and animals for a couple decades. He was a but of a drunk, but amazingly smart, blunt, and into his business, really my kind of guy. We learned that the reason why it was so difficult to find his camp is because we were looking for his old one in the park boundaries, and where we were staying was a new one he opened under a new name outside the park, as he has a bitter relationship with the park director who represents the government and unexpectedly forced him to close his previous establishment. He had some great ideas about controlling the hippo population, getting affordable nutrition to local children, training uneducated workers and creating energy from bio-waste. All really interesting stuff. The next morning I did a jeep Safari with a guide appropriately named "Spy". He said to me "yes I'm spy, like James Bond, but I spy animals". We saw a group of elephants, warthogs, water buck, baboons, impalas and an eagle. It was an awesome tour. Had breakfast and hung out with the others before parting ways, which consisted of me getting dropped of.f at a mini bus stop where I asked a kid which van went to Blantyre and initiated a frenzy of yellin for a Blantyre bus and ripping my bags from me to insist on helping with my journey. I hopped in the hot smelly van, that clearly someone had recently been in with warm raw fish and thought to myself I hope to God I fall asleep on this 4 hour nightmare. Of course I didn't, and of course at one point we had 25 people loaded sitting 5 per seat which included a few children, but still... I mean these vans are the size of an old school mini van with an extra row of seats. At the end of the trip I had to play charades with the driver and fare boy to get them to drop me at the Save the Children office where the country Director of Concern Universal, Robin, picked me up. More chaos with trying to figure out where Jen and Alecia were, our 2 new volunteers from PwC that had arrived in Lilongwe that afternoon. I'll spare details, but chaos just continued to ensue and after we finally finished dinner around midnight, so the girls and I were glad to finally get some sleep.