Everybody has those days

                Yesterday morning we started the day with our boat safari. I also got lots of good pictures for that. I’m obviously not going to include them all because that would take forever but here are some of the hippos, alligators and such we saw. Henry told us that the two most dangerous animals in Africa are the mosquito and the hippo but in Malawi it’s the mosquito and the alligator. The hippos can be violent when you annoy them too much but mostly they’re just shy. The safari was really nice and warm and the water was nice and gentle and I’m pretty sure a whole bunch of us were ready to fall back asleep by the end.

A monitor lizard! Just like in Duck Dynasty!

Yellow Fever tree. It actually cures malaria (or yellow fever, I don't remember which) instead of causing it

These birds have a name and they were also everywhere

A raft of hippos. That's what they're called because they sleep on each others backs and made a raft

more birds

Alligator! We saw lots of these too. 

 After the safari was checked out and said goodbye to the good life to move on to our next adventure. We seriously spent the rest of the day driving to Lilongwe to stay there for the night. Our driver had to go back to SAFI Sunday so we didn’t have the van available to take us to church so Moses took half of us and the other half stayed at Mabuya. Sunday was a really lazy day. We didn’t do much during the day but when it cooled down, Nicolle and Whitney ventured out and met Edward. He works at Mabuya and is a really cool guy. I haven’t really met him but they really like him so he must be a cool dude. They also ran back into Gift who we met at the market last week. He helped us look for Adam. Gift was drunk and possibly on some other drugs so he was actually kind of annoying but funny. He was hitting on everybody. Obviously he didn’t get anywhere because he was hitting on the wrong group of girls but whatever.

That night we learned that game I talked about earlier, I keep hearing different names for it. This time is was called Bao or something along those lines. It was at Mvuu and Akim, our driver, was teaching Nicolle how to play and she mastered it with Gift and his friends and then taught the rest of us. Adam has been spending a lot of time trying to figure out this game and he thought he understood it so he and Camille were playing but it was so not the right rules. Good thing Nicolle set us straight. After we finally got away from Gift and convinced him not to try to get us to stay with him another day, we watched Alice in Wonderland and went to sleep.

This morning Emily had a meeting with Moses and then Nicolle and Camille talked to him, so that kept us entertained for most of the morning. After that we all went to do whatever while we waited for Akim to pick us up which ended up being around 4. Adam, Whitney and Nicolle went into town to get lunch and some other things they needed. Emily worked on the survey she wants to use for her project, John played video games and emailed home (I didn’t because you had to buy it, not worth it), I thought Camille went into town but she actually sat by the pool and tanned. I played Bao by myself and read the Great Gatsby. It was a boring afternoon. On the plus side, Whitney and I have a phone now! We get to share because we’re almost always together and it’s mostly just for when we go to town and split up and such so it’s no big deal.

We were expecting Akim and noon but there was something about dropping other people off in Lilongwe and two guys from BYU coming to SAFI that pushed back out pick up time to 2 which is why our afternoon was so eventful. On our way back we were excited to meet these new people that we weren’t expecting. When we got back it was time for dinner and we were told to save some for them so we thought we might meet them at dinner. One guy did pop his head in for a second but he didn’t look like a student. Then we finished dinner and left without seeing him again. I was walking back with Whitney and was almost to the hostel when I realized that I left all my stuff at dinner so I went back to get it. When I got there, Emily and Nicolle were talking to the two new guys. They are from a non-profit to just help SAFI improve for a couple days.  I think they’re from Feed the World or something like that. Anyway, they showed up on Sunday, they are not BYU students, at least no anymore and they were really awesome. They were telling us all kinds of stuff that we didn’t know. They work with tons of programs to make them work and they weren’t too impressed with SAFI but still thought they were doing some awesome stuff. Basically they roughly did what Nicolle and Camille came here to do in a couple of days. They had lots of information and gave us lots of help for our projects. Nicolle got a copy of their survey that they use in lots of places and we’re hoping to get a copy of their nutrition lesson plans. They were just really interesting to talk to. They are both LDS so we also talked a little bit about how we cannot bring the gospel to these people until they can feed themselves and think about something other what they are going to eat next. So in a sense we are doing pre-missionary work. They were just really smart and helped me understand this whole process a lot better. It’s very intuitive but hard so lots of people don’t really get into it.

Anyway that was awesome and then I came back to the hostel and got into my room to find something not awesome. When they were mopping the hall this weekend, or something flooding, there was tons of water on the floor and it got into my room. My room didn’t flood, it’s just in one corner but it was in the one corner that I had my clothes, blankets, sheets, suitcase and everything that would absorb water. So all my clothes are half wet. I didn’t have and furniture in my room to hang it one so we pulled a couple of chairs from other room and just hung everything everywhere we could find. Tomorrow we’ll put as much as possible on the clothes lines. It just wasn’t an awesome experience. After everything dries and a pack it all up in my suitcase, again. I’ll have to make sure I keep it away from the door so it won’t get wet if that happens again. Not my best day and I’ll admit I kind of just discovered it and pulled everything out of my suitcase and Emily hung it all up while Bernadette and Chimango were cleaning up the water. It was just one of those situations I was too tired to care about.

On the plus side, since everything was pulled out of my suitcase, while I was looking for my flashlight, I found (drumroll) my memory card! I totally don’t remember packing it and I swear it wasn’t in there before but it is now! Too bad there’s already another one on the way. Oh well. An extra memory card never hurt anyone.

I hope everyone is doing well and is happy and healthy. It’s almost June which means there will only be two months left. Time is flying by!