Lake Malawi is stunning
We reached Cape Maclear after a crazy dirt road trip from the main Highway that was total fun. Approaching our rest stop at Malembe Camp we drove through the back roads of a Malawian village asking directions from incredibly helpful local people and arrived at this backpacker oasis, right in the middle of a thriving and throbbing Malawian settlement. And I do mean throbbing judging from the volume of the music coming from the bar next door!
It's beautiful here. My hut opens straight onto the beach and we eat under a shaded bamboo canopy in a newly formed community that has joined here for a few hours together. We also got to visit Paper For the People, a local project to reclaim waste from the village and recycle them into art and paper journals. The project is both kind to the environment and provides dignity and employment for local women.
Malembe camp is kind of a meeting point for travellers and volunteers and today I have met wonderful people from the UK, Germany, Portugal and Belgium, all of whom are here volunteering.
Volunteering gets a bad rap in some blogs and websites, as part of a backlash against Westernization and bad development. There is a feeling that most volunteers are in it for personal gratification and not because they are passionate about service.
Well, not Georgia, Marie, Mike, Steph, James and Katrina. These young students from Bristol University are giving two months to help a local school reorganize and develop new teaching practices. They are living in tents, eating cheap food and giving their all. They trained for a long time in cultural sensitivity and how to avoid "Voluntourism" before they came. When they go home they plan to work with the organization that they volunteer with to make its methodology and practice even better. We spent a wonderful couple of hours just talking under the shade by the beach about their lives and how this has affected them, about what makes good development and how they are learning far more than they are teaching. And I got to swap stores about The UK Greenbelt Festival and faith with Georgia and Marie, which made me yearn to visit that wonderful place again.
And not for Mathilda and Simon. Mathilda is a 20 year old student teacher from Portugal who has been volunteering at an SOS children's village school. She has a passion for special needs children and as we sat over breakfast talking, she told me of one child she had poured into. On the day she finished he was devastated and ran home to change into his best clothes to say goodbye properly. She had been pouring dignity and worth on this child while others had been passing him by. Who knows what that will mean for the future.
Good volunteers can change the world. They inspire us to be better people and to live justly in a way that impacts the places we are planted. For the right people with the right motivation, experiences like this can lead to changed lives that take a direction no one could have expected. I like volunteers.
In other news, we have a trip based development.
It has been a wonderful trip for Andrew and the Youth Hub, meeting so many new people and contacts. There are many more people they want to engage with and the Wordspace App has been well and truly launched in Southern Africa.
This combined with the new team that is just getting started in Cape Town means that there is a major need for Andrew to return earlier than expected. So, after resting at Lake Malawi and chatting things through, we have agreed together that Andrew and his father will turn around at the Tanzanian border while I carry on for the rest of the trip solo through Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and into Rwanda. The bike is running superbly and we have given its full service today so I'm confident all will be well
Tanzania marks the start of Eastern Africa which is Wellsprings area of operation so it feels like Andrew is handing off the baton to me. Lot's of adventure and wonderful people to meet so on we go!
