Another day

Well, it’s the end of yet another tense day here in Lilongwe. Again, the city basically shut down, due to the ongoing protests, which have now seemingly collapsed into anarchy. All of my meetings were again canceled today, so it was basically a snow day for all of us. I didn’t get much done, as Jorge and I kept checking the updates on Twitter. We worried for some young friends who had been traveling around Malawi and Tanzania, and who were supposed to be on a bus back to the city. I wondered how we were going to get food for the week, with the market shut down, and the gorcery stores reportedly looted. I worried about the violence and chaos coming closer to home, closer to my babies.

To deal with the anxiety, I baked cookies. And then ate LOTS of them.

Then, sometime after my lunch of cookies, I had this strange sense of déjà vu. I have dealt with perilous situations before – my time in Darfur was basically one crisis after another. So at first I thought all this conflict was bringing back memories of difficult times I had experienced in Sudan.

But then I realized, it wasn’t a conflict I was remembering, it was a catastrophe of an entirely different sort: Hurricane Katrina.

In the days and weeks after I evacuated from New Orleans in 2005, it was so hard to tell the fact from rumor. Who can forget the melodramatic interviews on Oprah, the (eventually disproved) tales of babies being sexually assaulted in the Superdome? And every horrible misdeed that was reported was just taken as truth, because of course, that’s what people’s stereotypes of New Orleans residents allowed them to believe.

And here we are again, imagining violent Africans wielding machetes and wreaking havoc…after years of being shown Africa only in the light of famine or war, is it any wonder that we don’t even doubt that people are capable of such violence?

Once the dust clears, I wonder what I will find – the battleground of burned-out cars and smashed, looted buildings that the reports have been evoking; or the ghost-town, shell of a city where most people just want to keep their heads down and get back to their normal life – the vision that my friends who have been in town today tell me they’ve seen. I hope it’s the latter, but by now I just don’t know what to believe.

O . M . G .

OMG OMG OMG....! THIS just crawled across my hand:


And why do those things always come after me when I am sitting on the toilet? It's the second time I've been ambushed that way. This time, the monster was under the toilet paper. I went to grab a bit, and it raced out, right across my hand, and sat there on top of the toilet roll.

My reaction? What do you think? I screamed like a madwoman for a few seconds, then got my wits about me and ran out with my pants down!

And then of course I called for my husband and went for the camera. Meanwhile it retreated to the corner:

I shut Jorge in the bathroom with a can of Doom. He'd come out every 30 seconds or so saying "OK, it's dead now". Then he'd go back to dispose of it and call out "Oh, never mind. I lost it." So Milo and I stayed locked in the office, a towel shoved into the crack in the door, until the thing was good and flushed.

I'm such a wuss. I am still shaking.

Halloween must be getting near...

Well, some good news today: My heart is in good working order. I tested it.

I just went to the ladies room at my office. Used the facilities, went to wach my hands. No soap. Grr. Went to turn on the water anyway - a little rinse is better than nothing - and stopped myself just in time. Because there was a TARANTULA IN THE SINK DRAIN. (I know, it sounds like the sequel to "Snakes on a Plane")

Sorry, no camera on hand. You'll just have to believe me that it was the size of Shelob and was staring out at me over its horrible hairy pincers [shudder].

I swear, my heart just about stopped, but I managed to survive.