Questions.

A good friend sent me an email asking a lot of excellent questions that she had after reading the blog. I thought that others might have similar questions, and decided to post my answers.If you learn anything from the answers thank her.


1. Is an ex-pat a non-local person?
Yes, an ex-pat is a non-Malawian. It largely refers to non-black people, although there are white Malawians. It is the community of people who are here from other countries and kind of stick together.

2 What type of food do you eat in Malawi (when you are feeling up to eating)?
They eat pretty bland food. NSIMA is one of the main components. It is a thick porridge that gets serves in a patty form. You roll chunks of nsima into a ball in your hand and then dip it in the meat or vegetable side-dishes. Actually pretty good and eating with your hands is fun!
I eat Malawian food only when I am out. Otherwise, I buy most of my food at the western grocery store and eat a lot of pasta with vegetables from the market (tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, eggplant, beans).

3. What language do the people in Malawi speak?
There are many dialects. The main language in the region I live in (central region) is called Chichewa. I am going to try to learn some so that I can communicate more effectively at work……

4. Do you feel like so far what you have learned about Africa in school and the way Africa is portrayed in movies and stuff is very representative of what it's actually like there?
Yes and no is the short answer. And the only experience I have is in this one country. There is a lot of poverty. And it is visible in a way that I am not used to in North America. Woman do carry buckets on their heads and the market will randomly break out into song. People do ask me to take them home to live with me or send them to Canada. There is corruption in the government and it filters down to all levels of life. Girls are indeed disadvantaged in many ways. These are things I learnt in school – that have turned out to be fairly accurate. The way that white people’s experiences in Africa are often depicted in movies also feels fairly accurate. I get a lot of attention every where I go for being white. Am often offered a seat at the front of functions and my walk to and from work is filled with cries of “azungu, azungu, how are you??!!!” by little children (translation is “white girl, white girl, how are you?”). I was told by one of the intern organizers here that one of the reasons many Malawians don’t like foreigners to take pictures is because they don’t want these images going back to the West as the only representation of life in Africa. Everyone wants to take pictures of the huts, goats running around, and little naked children – because it is foreign to our lives in the west. So I think that those are the images that are most presented in movies and the media about Africa, and are the majority of the pictures that I am taking as well. The pictures that I don’t take as much of or show on Facebook are the things that are similar to North America. Like the Italian restaurant I go to eat, the bank, my house, ….things like that. So I think that it is a mixed answer. Many of the images presented in movies about Africa are correct. But there are many other sides to Malawi……I will try to take more pictures of that J

5. Do people living in more rural areas only go to the market or do they go to the grocery store too?
That depends on whether there is a grocery store. Some of the smaller cities (which may look like villages to our standards) do have small outlets of grocery chains. Most only have markets. Filled with basic Malawian foodstuffs (rice, maize flour, tomatoes, beans, mangoes).

Any more questions?