The Maize Mill

Today at lunch, I went to buy maize with my coworkers. We picked up a bag of maize kernels, and brought it to the maize mill to be ground into flour. There are two machinese that are used. I'm not quite sure what the first one does, but it looked like it was cleaning up the maize kernel and separating all the dust/dirt (actually, it looked like saw) from the kernel. After that, some woman would put some of the maize kernels into a woven basket, and swish the maize around to get out all the ground up dust that was still there. She let me try it too, but I ended up spilling out more maize kernels than dust. She was an expert. After that, the maize kernels were put into another machine which did a bunch of grinding and spit out this fine, white maize flour. It was pretty cool. Until the maize flour started spraying everywhere and flew into my eyes, blinding me temporarily. Good thing I was wearing my thick glasses though, because most of the maize flour just flew straight into my lenses. Only those tricky ones that would swirl around a bit got past my glasses and into my eye!

Overboard

A couple of weeks ago, we experienced a severe, torrential like rainstorm that lasted 4 days. After the first two days, there were some water spots on the ceiling of the office, but nothing too intense that couldn't wait till Monday. On Monday afternoon, I was talking to one of my coworkers, when he looked into the hallway and said, "hey, what is going on over there?" I went to the hallway and saw a downpour of water coming from the ceiling, down the walls, flooding the back section of the office!

My roommate and I rushed over there, and the whoe section looked like an aquarium. Water was pouring down the walls, water went up to our calves, it was ridiculously crazy. So I hiked up my chitenje to my knees, and we got 10 buckets to catch the dripping water, and started scooping water from the floor and dumping it into the shower. Water was dripping through the wiring where the lights were hooked up, and after 5 minutes, one of the lightbulbs started sparking, and then went dead.

It was a little frightening, and the crazy thing is that no one else in the office was helping us two girls! Later that night, once the water had stopped pouring through, we spent 1 hour mopping up the floors, getting rid of all the water. It was a crazy night. And all we could think about was, "We did not even experience a severe flood." There were towns in the next district that had been victim to severe flooding that had wiped out tens of hectares of farmland, hundreds of homes, and left hundreds upon hundreds of people homeless.

The Spinster

So today I made my first full on Malawian meal...but with rice instead of nsima. I made an eggs/tomatoes dish and an tomato/vegetable dish. And I was eating it in the front foyer where you walk in to the office, and my coworker said "You are eating a bachelor's meal." And I was like "huh?" And he said "That is what bachelors eat. It's simple and cheap, and meatless." To which I replied "I'm not a bachelor." But before I could say "I'm a bachelorette," he responded with "That's right. That's a spinster's meal!" Oooh. I was about to pop one on the side of his face.

The Nightcrawler

Every night, as I'm working away in my office, I'll hear this soft moaning sound coming from the hallway. It might not seem like much, but at 10pm in a house/office that is humongous, it can be quite frightening. I went out into the corridor once to see what was making the noise, and I saw some wild cat standing in there, making that odd sound. The cat must crawl into the office from one of the windows that is left open. Let me tell you, it is a scary thing. I was sleeping once when I heard the moaning noise, but I was so scared, I just slid further under the covers and covered my ears until the moaning noise stopped. Who knows what kind of disease/wild fighting skills this cat might have, so that prevents me from getting too close to it. And what kind of cat makes moaning noises? Granted, there are some strange animals here. People interbreed dogs, and they turn out crazy and hyper. I even saw a dog with something like 10 teeters. No joke.