People I met

I have been reviewing my blog entries over the last couple of days. I don’t think that I have done justice to all the wonderful people that I had the occasion to spend some time with during my two weeks in Malawi last June. I am not just talking about the staff and volunteers working with the various programs that we visited, all but a couple being funded by the Global Aids Interfaith Alliance (GAIA). There were also people we met along the way: staff in the various hotels and lodges where we stayed, the children and adults we met in the villages we visited, storekeepers, customs officials at the airport in Lilongwe, South African Air employees at the airport, people we met in restaurants, etc. As I write this over four months after I returned home from Malawi, I am certain that there are people that I have left out of this list.

In some cases the people who stand out the most to me, over four months later, are the ones who are nameless, with whom I had the very briefest of encounters.

There was the smiling warm welcome of the customs officials at the airport the day we arrived.

All the children who mugged for our cameras.

The entire congregation at the Our Lady of Fatima Roman Catholic Church in Salima where we worshipped our first Sunday.

The foreign currency exchange teller the one time I exchanged currency at a bank. He had a nice smile.

The two young men at Senga Bay who sold me some beads.

A woman who worked at the Malawi Department of Health who told me where the restroom was. I did not know where to go, so I asked a woman in an office. She was very nice.

A couple of female police officers.

The students at the Lydia Projects secondary school.

One of the managers at the Hotel we stayed in Zomba.

The waiter who brought me some bread to eat during a power failure because I was feeling queasy from taking my malaria pill on an empty stomach.

A woman tending pigs in one of the piggeries we visited.

Some boys learning carpentry.

Our guide for our two-hour trip on the Shire River in Lilondwe.

A child with AIDS sitting in his mothers lap.

A village chief.

A young Malawian man who is a mountain biker.

Our guide at the Mua Mission who told us about tribal customs in Malawi, and how they differed from region to region.

Girls jumping rope.

After clearing customs at the airport in Lilongwe for the first leg of my flight home, Lilongwe to Johannesburg, I found that the rest room in that portion of the airport was closed. The customs official let me back into the main terminal to go to the restroom without having to clear customs a second time.