I'm here. I might even say that I'm back.
I got to Malawi (with luggage, which seems to be the exception to the rule of others here) yesterday without a hitch. I left Boston Sunday night, got to London early Monday morning; after a 4 hour layover, flew to Nairobi, arriving late Monday night and spent the night there. I flew out from Nairobi (with a touchdown in Zambia) to Malawi Tuesday morning and landed around noon. I tried hard to plan my sleep strategically over the flights so that my body adjusted at least to London time, but I was much less successful than I'd hoped. I went to bed last night around 9:30, and after a particularly restless hour between 3 and 4 a.m., got up again around 10:00 a.m. I'm hopefully back on track—I'm going to find someone's water kettle to borrow for coffee when I'm done with this, which should help.
A couple of thoughts from the trip*:
The world is really small, especially that of development work and workers: 1. I was sitting next to someone on the London-Nairobi flight who did her masters at KSG (er, HKS), who was a former classmate of someone who works in the same division of one of the UN agencies as a good friend of mine (another alum of the same program a few years earlier). She was going to Kenya to do cash transfers work. 2. The person I was staying with in Nairobi apparently did a story on this woman who runs a small medical shop in Kibera (the Nairobi slum) whom I had also interviewed for the project I did through the business school this spring. The nature of the interviews was different (hers was to highlight the program, funded in part by her organization, in light of the post-election violence earlier this year; mine was more to understand the medical system and how we might be able to build on the model of her clinic), but still quite odd that we'd spoken to the same person.
These places feel familiar: Driving to the house I was lucky enough to stay in Nairobi, I realized that I could totally follow the route we were going (and knew that it was sort of cross town from the airport). I could also do the same in Lilongwe yesterday; we had to run a bunch of errands in town, and I remembered all the places we were going and how to get between them. I also remembered my way around the Shoprite (the big supermarket), which is just as handy as getting around town. There's something really comforting about feeling like I know where I am, even though I also know that navigating the newness is what's fun and what makes it all stick in my head in the first place. We'll likely be leaving Mchinji for either the north or the south soon, so the newness will come soon enough.
I figured out that over the 15 months from June 2007 to August 2008, I will have spent roughly 6 of the months out of the country, 5 of them in Malawi or Kenya. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this familiarity.
The more things feel like they're the same, the more they've changed:
At the same time, it feels really different being back here. Last year I was here for the experience and this year I'm here to work. Obviously, I'll enjoy myself here and get into the field as much as possible, but I feel much more focused this year, which, while focus is potentially good or bad, at the moment it feels pretty good. I spent a lot of the restless hour last night thinking about stuff--taking stock of last year and making sense of what's next—and it felt good to be here to do it. In some ways, I feel like Malawi is my place to think; it's where I decided for sure to apply to doctoral programs and now I'm back to imagine what I want out of that experience. I'm also here to get a sense of what this project is all about, and whether (and how) I might want to work with this data in the future.
I guess in the end, it's day one and I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store. I'm also looking forward to figuring out how the hot water in these showers work again—cold showers are one thing I didn't miss.
*I should mention as a general disclaimer my usual hesitation about what this blog is all about. I ramble about professional stuff, update (rather explicitly) about my day-to-day goings on, and generally post things so that my mother doesn't worry that I'm dead. So I don't know how this will play out this time through, but here goes nothing.
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