When you live abroad, you find yourself noticing parallels between the world you’ve come from and the one you live in. The longer you are abroad, the more tenuous the parallels become. But there more far-fetched the parallel, the more glee is taken in the connection.
Case and point: the search for a plastic bucket yesterday brought me to what is affectionately know by the Peace Corps volunteers around here as the Malawi Container Store.
(Three quarters of the shop is visible in this photo)
While the modest size of the shop occupies about the same size area as the hanger display of the last Container Store I was in, the selection of various colour- and sized-receptacles is certainly impressive. The space is actually so well arranged, it makes the closet-organising section of The...
Being a New Yorker and having spent the last two years in a city so large, it was of indeterminable size (best guess on Kinshasa: somewhere between 6 and 10 million), life in Lilongwe is dramatically different. For starters, if you didn’t know where City Centre was, you wouldn’t know you’d driven straight through the middle of it.
Lilongwe, despite only having about 600,000 residents, is about as sprawling as African capitals get in the sheer sense of distances between anything of significance. To get to a friend’s house in an adjacent neighbourhood, one more or less has to drive through the bush.
Case 1: Just the other night on the way home to Area 43 from Area 10 (they are next to each other and I’ll come back to this), I saw a snake in the road. For those...