Bureaucracy and bikes

Hello again! It's now the end of my second week in Malawi, but it definitely feels like I’ve been here much longer. Whereas most of the others who arrived with me went off to their respective placements last weekend, I moved to the VSO guesthouse in Lilongwe, along with Imogen, the doctor who’s going to be in Chitipa with me. The reason she couldn’t leave was that there was a fuel shortage and her employer had to time her pick-up with a meeting they had in Lilongwe. So it was nice to have some company and in fact the guesthouse has been quite lively (it’s a free place for volunteers to stay who are passing through Lilongwe) so I’ve met a lot of volunteers from various places. There’s a lovely family who take care of us, although we do our own cooking and they have their own house attached.

The VSO guesthouse

Joanna and Hilda

This week has certainly proved a lot of what we were told on training – in other words, you need a lot of patience to deal with bureaucracy and there is no point in getting worked up. Having thought that I’d start my first day of motorcycle training on Monday, it took til Wednesday for us to actually go to the Department of Road Traffic to apply for provisional licences, which you need before you can start training.  There’s one other volunteer doing training with me, from Uganda, but he already has a licence there so isn’t a beginner like me. We got to the office at 7:45, thinking we’d be done by lunchtime. How wrong we were! We sat in the queue for literally 8 hours, watching people slowly going in to get their photo and fingerprints scanned into the system, but somehow we didn’t seem to be moving at all. A lot of young guys were cutting into the queue and joining their friends, which didn’t help matters. I hadn’t brought a book or anything to distract me, so it was a very painful 8 hours.

The Department of Road Traffic

The queue

At the end of that day I swore I would not go back there, but of course, there was no other option, so Thursday morning we got up early and got to the queue by 5:45. It made absolutely no difference, and we ended up there for 12 hours (thankfully I had my book this time). Finally, at around 5, they called loads of names at once and of course everyone tried to pile into this tiny office at once. I didn’t even want to try but someone said the women should go in, so I was practically forced into the crush, and ended up pushed against a wall with absolutely no space to move – it was a very horrible experience and I don’t know how long I could have lasted but thankfully someone forced a load of people out and made a sort of queue, with a separate one for the women (there were only 3 of us). I was so relieved I started crying! Anyway, once we were scanned, we could finally see the back of that place.

So motorcycle training only started on Friday, and it’s been going ok so far. I remembered more than I expected from my previous training, but it still requires a lot of concentration. We went onto the roads today for a while, which was exhausting, but ok. The problem about the roads in Chitipa is that they’re not tarmac, and it’s a very hilly place, so I’m going to have to contend with a lot of obstacles! Still not sure how I feel about riding there, but I have another week of training so let’s see! I finally have some photos of me on the bike :)

Our trainer Lovemore and the other volunteer Hoska