The Rev. Craig D. Townsend

We're on safari! We arrived at Mvuu after quite a drive – the last hour on yet another rutted road, this time through the heart of Liwonde National Park, spotting baboons and impalas as we went! The safari camp is great – open buildings, screened chalets, looking out on the River Shire, with hippos grunting and snorting at us all day and night. We went for a boat safari on the river right after arriving, saw many hippos, one crocodile, three elephants, and many fabulous birds. The next morning we took another boat safari, this time with more sunshine, and saw literally hundreds of hippos, many crocodiles, and got up quite close to one elephant feeding along the shore. Again, fabulous birds: goliath heron, malachite kingfisher, white-breasted cormorants, black open-billed storks.

After lunch we had communion together, singing a Chichewa hymn we've been learning and giving thanks together for the extraordinary time we've had. This group of Malawian youth have been so wonderful to get to know, so welcoming to us – and the priest leading them, Father Dan, is just a delight.

In the afternoon we went for a game drive, but the windy conditions seemed to keep most animals huddled somewhere other than where we were – we saw many impala, a warthog family, some bushbucks and waterbucks, but no elephants except at quite a distance. But we ended up on the shore of Lake Malombe, under a huge, ancient baobab tree that Dr. Livingstone himself is supposed to have slept under, and we enjoyed a beautiful sunset over the lake. One the way back, in the dark, our guides used a red spotlight to see what we might find without disturbing the animals – and we were rewarded with a herd of hippos feeding on land, another trio of elephants that again let us get up quite close, and even two large porcupines scampering alongside us.

This morning some took a very early walking safari to see insects and explore plantlife, and then we'll have another short game drive before we head back to Blantyre. Tonight is our farewell dinner – tomorrow we'll be heading home!

Getting online has been very difficult here in Zomba – my apologies for the lack of updates. What have we been doing?

We've had four workdays in Njovu – Friday, Saturday, Monday, and today, Tuesday. Sunday was taken up with worship – more on that in a bit. Let's start with getting there. We arrive in this little village after an hour-and-a-half or two-hour drive – an hour on a paved road and then who knows how long it will take today on a very bumpy and rutted dirt road through little villages and even smaller clusters of houses scattered in the countryside. The land is flat and grassy, occasionally studded with baoboo trees and other varieties, but with frequent groves of eucalyptus and bamboo – the native trees have been harvested for firewood, so the non-natives are taking over. In the distance we can see Mulanje, the highest mountain in Malawi and second highest (maybe?) on the continent. The going on the dirt road is slowed by the steady stream of bicyclists, who carry extraordinary loads on the back racks, which I've noticed are attached to the frames and axles with steel rebars – necessary due to the 50 kilo (100+ lbs) bags of rice or beans that are often slung on them. Ingenious woven baskets carry a dozen or more live chickens – empty 5-gallon jugs used for gas or more likely water are stacked twenty to a bike, held together with string – eight-foot-long bundles of wood or brush for thatch are laid horizontally across the rack – today I even saw another bicycle attached in the same manner! The drive is endlessly bumpy and dusty and fascinating.

The work: so far, we have moved bricks, molded bricks, mixed gravel with cement for the concrete base on which the brick foundation walls are being laid, hauled sand from the river to make mortar for the bricks, shoveled the sand out of the truck into a pile by the bricks, moved even more bricks, bought a truckload of new bricks so the village doesn't have to mold anymore, and then moved bricks again. In short, we've been focused on bricks. The bricks are mud – who knows what goes into this mud, but it is slung by hand into wooden molds that shape two bricks each (we only got to this part of the process yesterday). The molds are then turned out onto a flat dusty area to dry. Once dried sufficiently, they are then arranged into a huge stack – but this stack is cleverly arranged to have spaces underneath in which fires can be kept burning for three or more days – so that the bricks themselves have actually shaped their own kiln. This is what met us the first day: a stack of fired bricks some ten feet high by fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide. Over these three days, we have moved all of those bricks from the stack over to the actual house site, where the paid and skilled bricklayers have been building the foundation. We move these bricks by creating long lines of people passing one brick after another, hand to hand, to be stacked where the workers can reach them. It seems, at first glance, to be make-work – but it is actually enormously valuable. Without our bricklines, the workers would be forced to bring them over themselves by wheelbarrow, which would waste valuable time. And the great thing about the bricklines, as you can see in the photos, is that everyone works together – not just our teens and the Malawian teens, but the children of the village jump right in and help, and even some of the adults have joined us from time to time.

Our group of teens each made a small donation toward a final gift to the village on this, our last day: we came up with enough money to buy 11,000 more bricks, which should be sufficient to complete the house. This afternoon we made the first part of that purchase: after a half-hour drive that brought us near the Mozambique border,1650 bricks were loaded onto the back of a truck and driven back to the village. The road made our usual ride to the village seem quite smooth by comparison!

What else have we done? We've had huge soccer games in a nearby field – we've sung songs – we've skipped rope with the little ones – we've visited a nearby river and had a ride in a leaky canoe – we've eaten raw sugarcane and goat stew and fried chickens and nsima, the national dish which is just white glop made from pounded corn – we've driven up to Zomba plateau, behind our hotel, where we saw spectacular views of the surrounding country and passed a pair of baboons loping up the road – we've relaxed at our hotel and enjoyed each other's company. And today we said goodbye – formal speeches of thanks and farewell in the church were concluded with a raucous dance party as the village women one last time sang their thanks. We will miss Njovu, but we leave with a great sense of accomplishment and warm memories of hospitality and joy.

Tomorrow we head to Mvuu Safari Camp, in Lilonde National Park – hippos galore! My next report will come on Friday, when we return to Blantyre before heading home.

We spent the night at the Malawi Sun Hotel, a resort/​conference center in Blantyre. This morning we packed up and headed in the vans over to the offices of the Diocese of Southern Malawi. The diocese has taken over a former office/​school complex, and are slowly renovating it – one wing is a sort of hostel, and the Malawi teens had stayed there. After a brief tour of the offices we met up with the Malawi group, headed up by Father Dan. They're a great group of kids, ranging in age from 14 to 24 – most are younger, but some are on the older side. Our normal pre-college/​post-college divide doesn't seem to have much meaning here. Our kids range from 14 to 17, and they all seem to be getting along just fine.

Just as we were getting ready to leave the diocesan offices, we realized that a noon eucharist was about to be held, with Bishop Tengatenga celebrating. We quickly put our travel on hold and joined the service, quadrupling its normal congregation. The staff attending the service were now joined by 21 enthusiastic singers and participants, and then 12 Americans who agreed that the service looked just like ours but the language was certainly beyond us! Bishop James graciously preached in English, however, so at least the homily was understood. It was great to get to worship together to get the two groups linked as a faith community.

Then it was into the vans and off to Zomba, a large town in central southern Malawi that has a university and an Anglican seminary. This will be our home base for the work portion of our stay – we have rooms at Peter's Lodge, and each day we'll be driven by our vans to and from the village of Njovu to work. Today was just about arriving and getting settled – a process unsurprisingly complicated by traveling with both Americans and Malawians in four vans! We had to pause in a village along the road for a funeral procession to go by – crowds of people singing and walking down the road, a mob of cars and trucks as well, all heading to the cemetery for the burial – the whole village had turned out, which our driver explained to us was normal. We also stopped at a police road block, whose purpose and presence remained unexplained. But we did finally get here in time for a very late lunch, followed by a buffet dinner less than three hours later! Oh well – schedules are always the first things to go when traveling, right?

We gathered at JKF airport on Tuesday morning - eight teenagers and three adults from St. James' Church. Our plan: to go to Malawi, an extremely poor country in southeast Africa. We flew fifteen hours straight to Johannesburg, South Africa, where we changed planes and flew two more hours to Blantyre, the capital of Malawi. We were six boys and two girls, along with two adult parishioners and me - and we were to meet Leeanna Varga, the parish's Associate for Mission and an experienced leader of these trips, who had been in Malawi for a week getting everything in place.

When we arrived, we were met not only by Leeanna, but by eleven teenagers from Blantyre and three adults accompanying them - this was the rest of the gang. We will travel together tomorrow to the town of Zomba, where we will stay for the next six nights. From there, we will all drive together each day to the village of Jovuu, where we will assist in the building of a house. Apparently there will be a lot of bricks involved.

After settling into our hotel in Blantyre for the night, we went to dinner at the home of Bishop James Tengatenga and his wife Josie. It was so gracious and kind of them to host us! We are now 21 teenagers and 7 adults - quite a group for dinner. Conversation was lively, boding well for making good connections this week.

Keep us in your prayers - and enjoy the photos! I'll be in touch whenever internet access permits, so check back regularly. - Craig