African birthday

We were hoping this weekend to post about our first trip to lake Malawi to celebrate our return here, but due to lots of political problems including riots here in Blantyre we decided not to go. Everything is fine here now and we didn’t encounter any problems, although 2 protesters were killed in Blantyre and more injured. The main issue for us is the chronic lack of fuel due to the lack of foreign exchange in Malawi, and if we can’t fill up we can’t go anywhere. We calso ontinue to have water problems and don’t have enough pressure most nights to fill the hot water tank, so Joshi has a bath in his red bucket, which he loves, true African style. This is living in Africa and as it is winter season currently it is sunny and 20-25 in the daytime and 5-10 at night so we sleep under a mozzie net with a duvet!

So instead we stayed in Blantyre and chilled out with Joshi and welcomed Nick back from the UK. The main birthday treat was drinking Pimms (thanks Imo) in the garden on Friday evening yum yum and a trip for lunch to Fisherman’s rest, a restaurant on the edge of the escarpment where Blantyre plateau drops down to the Shire river valley and Mozambique. The views were stunning as always and Joshi loved it, as was brunch today on the Khondi (veranda) with hard to come by bacon sarnies. We hope to get enough Diesel to get out of town soon and will update after that.

More soon

Lots of love Emma Gav and Joshi

Second arrival in Malawi

Hi and welcome to our second proper African blog. To cut a very long story short our first Malawian blog never really got started as we made it to Malawi for only 3 months before Emma had to return home to have baby Joshua. We had just started to get settled in Malawi in our beautiful house after staying with Nick and Helena for 10 weeks (thank you again guys so much!) when we found out there was  a complication in our pregnancy and I had to go home in the middle of January. In our first time here we managed to get to the lake for a few days and to the tea plantations outside of Blantyre and had a real taste of what life was like here.  Back in the UK we stayed with my parents in Clapham while waiting for Joshi to arrive, which he did on the 11^th of April at 36 weeks. Our lives have been transformed immeasurably for the better and we are totally in love with our gorgeous boy. We finally made it back to Malawi this week after a month in Wembley with Gavin’s parents and a week in Johannesburg with the Sarkin family. All our families have looked after us so well and we can’t thank you all enough!

So I just wanted to introduce Blantyre in southern Malawi, and a little bit about our life to start the blog off. Our house is in a suburb of Blantyre called Sunnyside, and we have furnished it with all our stuff from the UK that came in a very slow shipping container. Our landlords are friends and colleagues at work and renovated the house for us – we have three bedrooms, a study and a massive garden which when the weather gets better will have hammocks and swings put up, along with more veg and hopefully some livestock and cats…………

 We have bought a car from a leaving colleague, and we have nicknamed it ‘the beast’ as it is the biggest car either of us have ever driven before. We are about 5 minutes drive from the hospital where we are both based, which is called Queen’s. My maternity leave runs for another three months while my study gets ready to start, and Gavin is back at work full time as the country’s most hard working nephrologist on the first of Aug. He is setting up Blantyre’s first public dialysis service and running a specialist kidney care clinic. My research is going to be a clinical study testing if improving medical treatment of adults with bacterial meningitis is feasible and effective in Malawi and should start in Oct-Nov hopefully.

We have put up a few pictures of Joshi in and around our house and will do our best to keep this blog more updated than before. We are so excited and happy to be back in Africa and Joshi is going to love it we hope, and we have space for lots of visitors so hopefully this blog will entice you to think about coming to visit……………….