Luwawa Bike Race

Now for a little time traveling, as we jump ahead six months from Dean's birth to this past weekend...


Yesterday Jorge raced in the Luwawa International Bike Race, an annual mountain-biking event that takes place a few hours north of Lilongwe on the Viphya Plateau, a wooded highlands. It was our first time to Luwawa, and I was looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet in the forest. What I got was quite different - noise, hyper-active children, and not enough sleep...the story of my life these days.


The race itself was extremely well-organized, and Jorge had a great time. He came in solidly right in the middle of the pack, which was fine with him, as his training for the 30-mile race had consisted of a couple of weekend treks through the maize fields behind our block (those of you have read about many of Jorge's past sporting exploits will not be surprised at his willingness to take on extreme feats of athleticism the way other people agree to an evening stroll).

When Jorge heard I was blogging about the race, he wanted me to make sure you all know what a hero he was, as well. There were many stretches of the course that were too steep to ride, and the racers had to push their bikes up the steep hills. Jorge, being the tireless runner that he is, figured he could make up some time be simply throwing his bike over his shoulder, and jogging up the hill. Halfway up one long stretch, he came across a woman who was struggling to get her heavy load up the hill. So he picked up her bike as well, and carried it to the top. My husband is such a gentleman.

Of course, he also apparently bit it so bad at one point that he ended up doing a flying somersault into the woods, where, in his words, he left a perfect "snow angel" impression in the bushes. So it wasn't all "Lawrence of Arabia" sophistication in the wilds of Africa.

Milo also had a great time. As he always does, he made some new friends about 3 minutes after walking through the door, and spent the weekend racing around on his bike and running off into the bush.

Hey look - even I was there! Here's photographic evidence!

The Lodge that hosted the race was packed full, and after the race, they organized an evening of local and international music acts. Which would have been really exciting, back in the days before I had two small children. As it was, I spent last night with a pillow over my head, willing the band to stop playing so that I could get at least 30 minutes of sleep before Dean started his nightly routine of waking up every 3 hours (alas, I only got 10 minutes of sleep before I had to get back up).

This morning, our friend Peter, who has been going to Luwawa for years, took us on a hike through the beautiful countryside. Milo loved it, and wanted to collect one of every wildflower he saw.

Of course, now I'm exhausted, but in one of those good, fulfilled ways. Still, I'm really hoping our next trip involves just a bit more sleep, and hopefully a lot more lazing around on the beach doing nothing!

Meet Baby Dean

Finally! The really exciting part of our trip back home to the United States! When last I left you, I was enjoying (OK, tolerating) the Thansgiving snow in Seattle. A week later, on November 30th, I got a call from my best friend Mary to tell me she'd had her son that day, a little boy named Lucas. I was 39 weeks pregnant, and for the first time, felt a little jealous. Normally I am COOL with waiting a little longer for a baby - I know all about the lack of sleep, the challenge of finding time to shower, the fact that you have a big lump in your arms (or at your breast) constantly. I'm not bamboozled by that whole cuddly newborn imagery they're pushing over there in Hollywood. I'd like my last few days of sleep, please.

But all of sudden, I wanted to have that darn baby. And what do you know? An hour later my water broke. Labor started soon after, and after just 14 hours I had Dean. He was born at 11:15 AM on December 1st, weighing 8 pounds, 5 ounces.


Dean's birth was a bit of a triumph for me. Milo was born via Cesarean 2 years earlier, after his heart seemed to not be able to withstand the pushing phase. But, ever a public health professional, I really wanted to avoid surgery this time unless it was strictly necessary. I can't say Dean's labor was quick or easy - I pushed for more than 4 hours - but thankfully I had an awesome, supportive midwife who really believed that I could do it. And thanks in large part to her encouragement, I just kept trying. And then all of a sudden, he was born, and Jorge told me, "it's another boy!" and then Dean had to be rushed off to the pediatrician because he needed resuscitation. Minutes later, though, he was doing just fine, and was sleeping on my chest.


It hasn't been so hard adjusting to life as a family of four. Everything takes about five times more planning, but we've learned to adapt. Milo adores his little brother (when he slows down enough to pay him any mind), and Dean is delighted to just be in Milo's presence.


As for Dean (who, like Milo, remained nameless for the first few days of life, while the anxious nurses kept nagging for a name to put on his birth certificate request), you've never met a more steady, mellow child. His first few weeks of life, he never cried - he just squeaked. Even now, he is usually easily consoled, and rarely gets particularly upset over anything. He's mostly content to just watch the world around him and smile.


And, most remarkable of all, my little Colombian baby came out with a head full of golden blonde hair, and my blue eyes to match!

Milo's first snow

It's the weekend in Lilongwe and that means lots of just hanging out with friends. I'm on my own tonight, as Jorge has gone out to watch some soccer game which is apparently a Very Big Deal. Milo just called me up to his room handed me a book about the rainforest which apparently was giving him the heebie-jeebies and told me "I want it go downstairs." Now that the scary frog is taken care of, I'm hoping both boys just go to sleep and stay asleep. My little guys are growing up so fast...


But that's a post for another day. I'm continuing with the flashback posts for now.


So shortly after we arrived back in Seattle intact (but only after the immigration department decided to hold us for an hour and put the fear of God, or at least the government, back into Jorge once again) we flew down to Los Angeles to visit my grandfather who had been ill. Milo got to trick-or-treat for the first time, and boy, was he sold on that concept.


And then in no time at all it was Thanksgiving. Just before the holiday, a big snow hit Seattle.



First off, let me just say that I have not been a fan of the snow since I was 8 years old and schools got shut down for 2 weeks after a big storm. That was really the last time it was fun. Since then, I've just found snow to be cold, wet, slippery, and terribly inconvenient. My childhood home is down at the bottom of a very big hill - there's no way to get out without going uphill. So once it snows, you're stuck. And being about as big as a whale by this time, I wasn't exactly going for any 3 mile walks through the snow to get to the shops.

However, making lemonade out of these lemons, I thought it would at least be great fun for Milo. I was wrong. we took him outside, he looked around, asked to get into his stroller, then never got back out. Here he is, hiding under a blanket.

My hubby, on the other hand, loves the snow, having only experienced it a handful of times in his whole life. So he took us around on a Siberian gulag march, throwing snowballs and refusing to let us go home until he was satisfied we had thoroughly experienced the snow. Then Milo and I holed ourselves up inside the house playing Wii and trying not to go stir-crazy for the rest of the week.

So there you have it - a post about snow just in time for summer to start! But it's heading into winter here in Malawi - I may even need to throw on a cardigan occasionally. So I am thankful for the experience, for reminding me that truly belong somewhere close to the equator, and I think Milo would agree.

Still here

Thought I disappeared, didn't you? Well, I'm still around.

So, we went to Seattle for 6 months. And to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. And some other stuff happened. and now we are back home in Malawi, in our little (palatial) flat in Lilongwe, getting used to being back to "normal" life.

I thought about doing a big long "what I did on my 6-month vacation" post, but A. that would be much too much work, and B. who would want to read that?

So instead, I'll start at the beginning. Waaaay back to last October, when Jorge and I loaded up 6 bags, 1 stroller, 1 carseat, and a fidgety toddler into a taxi and took off for the US. But on the way, we made a little pit stop in Paris. Not bad, eh?


So first things first, if you ever get a chance to take an international Air France flight, keep in mind that when everyone else has gone to sleep, they have free Haagen Dasz ice cream bars in the flight attendants' galley, just there for the taking. Jorge ate 7. I'm dead serious.



We had a lovely time, despite the riots and strikes. We were warned that the museums would likely be closed, the trains wouldn't run, the shops would be closed, but in fact, everything went pretty well. The ticket takers for the train to Versailles refused to take our money in silent protest of the French government's decision to raise the retirement age, so we got to ride for free.

We spent much of our time visiting the many museums of Paris.



We took Milo to see the Venus de Milo, but he was unimpressed.


We also took many long walks through the city, until my poor pregnant hips couldn't take much more.






One day we took the train out to Disneyland Paris, where Milo was struck dumb by the sight of Mickey Mouse live and in the flesh.

And it being one of OUR vacations, it was impossible to leave the country without mishap, of course.

We rented a tiny little closet of an apartment for the week, up on the 4th floor, with no elevator. Did I mention the 6 bags, packed to the maximum weight allowance? On our last day, we booked a taxi to collect us at 5AM to take us to the airport. Piece by piece, we shuttled the bags down to the curb. We had to leave the keys inside the apartment, so to make sure we didn't accidentally take them with us, we left the apartment wide open, the keys on the counter, as we loaded up the taxi. Finally, with only Milo's car seat still waiting in the apartment, Jorge handed me the backpack that was propping the building door open so that I could load it up.

The only problem? He was standing outside the building, not inside. In slow motion, I yelled "nooooooo"....and we both watched the door close, locking us outside.

I would have admitted defeat. But not Jorge. No, my husband's a problem solver. He recruited the mortified taxi driver to translate for him, and then he pressed every.single.doorbell for all the apartments in the building. Until finally, a rather peeved and disheveled French woman answered. After looking out the window and determining that yes indeed, we were stupid American tourists and not creative burglars, she buzzed us in. And we made it to the airport in time after all, on our way back to the U.S.

While I'm at it

Since I'm doing old photos this week...

Tomorrow I fly off to Ethiopia for 10 days. Nothing fun, just a work trip. I seem to be traveling quite a lot for work lately. Add that to the stress of trying to finish out a number of major projects before my maternity leave kicks in, and it's a pretty hectic time.

I wanted to go to Ethiopia years ago, after reading one random story in a National Geographic magazine about Lalibela, the famous town where, hundreds of years ago, the Ethiopians carved a labyrinth-like complex of churches and tunnels straight down into the rock.

So when I got my first overseas job, an internship in Eritrea, I took advantage of my connections in the UN to secure a spot on the UN cargo plane that flew in between Asmara and Addis Ababa - the only way to fly directly between the two countries.

My dad and his wife Joan met me there, and we spent two weeks traveling around the historic sites of the North, seeing the medieval-style churches of Gonder, the ancient, boggling stelae of Axum (no one nows how they ever erected these huge obelisks), and of course, the churches of Lalibela. It was a really wonderful trip, one I have never forgotten. So even though next week I will be spending all my time in a hotel conference room talking about how to design a child survival project and how to prevent chronic malnutrition, I will be remembering this trip. And eating lots and lots of shiro. Mmmmm.

The Blue Nile Falls


A royal castle in Gonder.

The most famous church in Lalibela - was it St. George's? I can't recall anymore. But it's stunning.

A view of the top of the church in Lalibela.


This priest in Lalibela spends so much time indoors, and has his photo taken so often, that he puts on sunglasses to guard against the flash! :-)


One of the incredible obelisks in Axum. Sorry for my dad's thumb in the photo...


Dad and me out for a walk in Axum

Has it really been 5 years?

And yet it feels like such a long time ago, when Jorge and I were heading off to go watch "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" despite the protests of my mother-in-law that we would surely be killed the moment we stepped out the door. We were hours away from the eye of Hurricane Katrina by then, though, among the very few New Orleans residents who decided, against general wisdom, to go East into Florida to evacuate ahead of the storm. I mean, when a hurricane's a-comin', who decides the safest place is FLORIDA? Everyone else is usually trying to get to sunny Texas, not the storm-magnet state. But there we were, the rain pelting down, the wind whipping around us, and the news showing the same old shots of frantic palm-branches in the wind and giant waves. So we figured, what the hell? Why not go to the movies?

It wasn't for another full week before the enormity of the situation finally dawned upon me. As we all did after the storm, Jorge and I spent much of our free time watching the cable news channels, trying to decipher what was really happening. And I said to Jorge, "So have you talked to work? When do they want you to be back?" And Jorge looked at me like I'd just grown another head and said "Baby? There IS no work." And it hit me that everything we knew and counted on - friends, jobs, homes, Tuesday nights at the Maple Leaf Bar - all that was gone. At least for the time being. And back then, you never really knew if it would all come back. And finally I cried.

We counted ourselves among the lucky ones. We lived in a two-story apartment that only got a couple feet of flooding, meaning most of our home stayed dry. We had friends and family who happily took us in while the landlord gutted the place. Jorge's employer managed to accomodate the changing needs of the community, and suddenly he temporarily found himself in the tree-removing, blue-tarp-laying, mold-killing business. After a few weeks, we went home to a very desolate, lonely place. Where if you wanted to eat out, you had better plan ahead, because the few places still serving food shut down at 8 for the night. Where the shuttered coffeeshops seemed to have left their modems on, so that when the power came back, we could join the lines of people sitting on the sidewalks to catch up on e-mail.

Some of our friends were not so lucky; a couple of them lost their entire homes and everything in them. Some went away and never returned. We all coped with the scars of going off one day, feeling like we were just having a weekend holiday and waking up Monday with our city just disintegrated, all our friends gone. (What did I pack with me for the 6 weeks I spent evacuated? One miniskirt, one pair of shorts, a few shirts, and TWO bikinis. I'd be useless in a nuclear holocaust, I tell you.)

In honor of the city we love, our second home, here are some photos from that time:

Just another beach weekend, right?


Jorge got home early, before any of the really basic clean-up could be done. There were power lines and trees down everywhere. And still a few bodies on the streets.


Cleaning out the apartment. Notice the bath-tub ring of mold.

Dora watching over all our ruined junk. The city looked like this for months, discarded refrigerators and ripped out carpet everywhere.

Our apartment after being gutted.

Our friend Jonathan's neighborhood was one of the worst-hit. This photo was taken six months after the hurricane.

Jorge had the unfortunate job of searching for Jonathan's passport in this mess. What you see all over the floor is sodden insulation from the ceiling.

And a few more minutes...

...so here are a few more photos. We are on our way out the door for another weekend trip. This weekend we are going to Mount Mulanje, the third highest race in Africa. Every year they have a race there, where the porters - you know, the guys you pay to carry your bags up the hill for you? - race up the mountain, across it, then come flying down the side, often barefoot. Every year a few crazy foreigners also run (usually coming in a few hours after the porters) and Jorge is running again this year.

Also, I'm turning 33 on Sunday. ::shudder::

So we've rented a nice house on a tea estate, and will spend the weekend with another family who are friends of ours.

Anyway, here are some more pictures from Zambia:

I have 5 minutes...

And I will fill it by posting photos from our safari trip to South Luangwa, in Zambia, last weekend. three of my favorite people are here in Malawi visiting us - my sister-in-law Alicia and her two beautiful and rambunctious daughters. We pulled out all the stops for them - we managed to see two leopards, 3 hyenas, countless buffalo, elephant, zebra, giraffe, and an entire pride of lions.






Alas, I have now used up my entire laptop battery, and there are sleeping children in the office where the power cord lives. So I will have to leave you now with these teasers and hopefully get more up tomorrow!

Photos from Argentina

In front of the central courtyard in the ´Casa Rosada´- Argentina´s White (well, pink) House, which is open for tours on teh weekends.

Milo playing with the wildlife at the Buenos Aires Zoo. They pretty much let you feed everything except the lions and bears!




A particularly lovely tomb at the Recoleta Cemetary

Jorge and Milo playing soccer in La Boca, the neighborhood famous for its soccer team and rabid fans.



Milo and me in front of a beautiful old home in Colonia, Uruguay



This is the police car in Colonia. I am not making this up.



Milo in Colonia

Tango



Standing at the top of the ¨Devil´s Throat¨ waterfall at Iguazu falls



Just a few of the many waterfalls making up Iguazu Falls