Joshi loves his Blantyre life

Hello

Since our trip to the bush we have been staying in Blantyre getting more settled in. This week we are sadly saying goodbye to our friends Will and Meg who have been here for the last year. It is one of the hard things about living abroad – you make wonderful new friends and then say bye to them after what always seems such a short time. But Will and Meg live two streets from us in Queen’s park, so we look forward to catching up when we are back!

We are getting excited about Helena coming back after her long trip to the UK, and Roshina coming out to start a year here replacing Meg, and Joshi is especially excited about Granny Lou and Grandpa Stephen arriving on Wednesday for a 2 week trip – we will update again when we have some pictures of our travels around Malawi with them (diesel permitting). I am getting things together slowly to start my study when I go back to work from maternity leave, and Gav is working hard getting the kidney services up and running here. There were supposed to be more demonstrations here this week, but they were cancelled at the last minute, it seems due to various pressures being applied on the groups. But the causes of the unhappiness and unrest that triggered the original demonstrations on the 20^th of July remain so I don’t think it will be long before something else happens. This weekend the President Bingu dissolved his cabinet and assumed all the posts himself, so we shall see what happens next – we live in interesting times…………….

In the meantime here are a few pics of Joshi around Blantyre – he especially loves going for a walk around the neighbourhood, although we get a lot of stares as not many people here carry their baby on their tummy in a baby bjorn………….

Lots of love

Emma Gavin and Joshi J

Bush baby

Hello!

We finally managed to get out of Blantyre this weekend. To save diesel we went to a local national park Liwonde National Park, which is on the shire river as it flows out of Lake Malawi on its way to Mozambique and the coast. The entire park is based around the river and has a huge elephant, hippo and croc population plus masses of birds. We drove up on Friday afternoon and arrived at sunset at the camp site, where we stayed in a ‘luxury’ tent – double bed and ensuite hot shower is pretty luxurious in the African bush. . The camp was run by a charming Carlsberg-marinated muzei muzungu (wise white man) called Darren, who immediately supplied us with cold beer to watch the sunset over the baobab trees. We did two safari drives the next day and saw masses of beautiful birds but no large animals close up – this is typical of safari in Malawi as the big animal populations have been severely decimated through poaching in the Banda years and are now starting to be restocked. But the trees, light, river and birds were utterly stunning and we had a really relaxing weekend, and Joshi even managed to sleep in his travel safari cot and instead of sleepy music he had the sounds of the African bush including grunting hippos to lull him to sleep!

Gav has started work full time as a lecturer in the College of Medicine today and managed to get diesel today, so we are celebrating our full tank. Blantyre is very quiet when there is no diesel. Our water problems might get better if we can get a special valve fitted (on average we have hot showers currently twice a week, usually v late at night and Joshi gets washed in a bucket each night) so fingers crossed the valve will sort our problems. More demonstrations are planned for August 17^th and we are all hoping they are more peaceful this time.

That’s all the news for now – we hope you enjoy the photos of our trip

Lots of love Emma Joshi and Gav

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……………….