I’m in Lilongwe for the week to run Freedom Fone training. We’re based in Area 6, a suburb popular with hotels, b&b’s and NGOs. The reason for this clustering is because Malawi’s demand for power has outstripped it’s power generation capacity, so businesses try to locate themselves on grids with minimum power disruptions. Nearby is Maula Prison, an institution that is deemed to have a priority for electricity supply. No surprise if you want to limit opportunities for prison breaks I guess. Unexpected was the Welcome to Maula Prison sign!

Welcome to Maula Prison!

The short walk between my hotel and the training venue provided a number of other delightful photo opportunities.

Mr MaDogs

A vendor's table of wares

From a Kubatana subscriber:

Believe it or not, the challenge of mind-set change is  still a facade and far out cry in the post-independence Zimbabwe! Grotesque levels of corruption, poor health service delivery, hatred, policy shelving, duplicity of politicians, violence, citizens apathy and absence of rule of law continue to spell a bleak future for our country.

On Saturday we held a memorial celebration of the life Nola Kate Reeler
Tony’s mother, who left us 2 weeks ago at the age of 87.

Her hand is one of the oldest Elijah and Daniel – her 2 great grandsons – will ever hold

Who was the oldest hand she ever held?
her Huguenot grandparents?
who left their grandparents in Europe
to come and grow grapes on the other side of the world?

What stories this hand has lived through
from her Afrikaner childhood in the Cape
to a home she and her husband made in a newly developing Rhodesia 60 years ago

A home which held the lives of her 3 children
her neighbours and friends and all of their children
members of the Benevolent Helping Hand, the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Legal Aid Clinic
her political allies in her fight against Ian Smiths ‘illegal regime’
her dinners and celebrations,
the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas

The home she only left only a week before she died

On Saturday her children, and the children of her friends, and the friends of her children
whose lives she had touched
met in her home and spoke of the part she played in their growing
and her grandchildren spoke of the magic she had brought to theirs
weaving together the different threads this grand old lady
had loved, challenged, educated, inspired into being
and fed with her wonderful cooking

Three more of her great grandchildren will be born within the next 5 months

One day these new, innocent  young hands
will be the oldest hands a new life will touch
and their story – threaded together with all the stories that came before them
their light and dark,
the changes and challenges,
the love and laughter
will hold the continuum of our lives

tiny hands holding old fingers
carrying stories that touch through time

Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
- Joan Didion

via browsery