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

Traveling for work in Kenya last month I got to visit one of Nairobi’s high density suburbs – Kayole. It’s a dense, organized, gritty, sprawling area with lots of colour, sadly little of which comes from nature’s green. All around is grey concrete or brown earth. Persuasive advertising, colourful clothes and bright smiles help to raise your spirits in the midst of the litter and poverty.

Housing in Kayole

Kids in Kayole suburb

Bleak school grounds in Kayole

Beauty Salon

Cake shop advertising

Lucid dreaming paraphernalia

In spite of my mound of work and my workaholic temperament, I took this past weekend off to do a Lucid Dreaming workshop at the Buddhist centre, Kagyu Samye Dzong in Harare. Out of curiosity, earlier in the week I went to listen to the introductory talk by the teacher – a young, enthusiastic guy called Charlie Morley. He’d come highly recommended by two people for whom I have high regard: Lama Yeshe Rinpoche and Rob Nairn, so it seemed foolhardy not to at the very least go and listen to him for a few hours.

Charlie’s talk was really interesting and spoke to my desire to incorporate into my life practices that build self acceptance, awareness and kindness. Many others in the large audience fell under Charlies spell and by the end of the talk a number of us signed up for the workshop.

The training ran from Saturday morning through to Sunday afternoon and included a sleep over to practice the techniques on Saturday night! About 3/4 of the group stayed for the night, and that evening the Buddhist shrine room was transformed into what looked like a refugee centre with mattresses and sleeping bags and blankets laid out around the large room. What a beautiful setting for this new learning experience. Come morning, sunlight poured through the many windows and glass panes, warming our sleepy gathering as we slowly got up and tidied our books, pens, ear plugs and other paraphernalia away.

It’s going to take some practice, but I’m looking forward to unlocking the secrets of the night!

Lucid dreamers the morning after

It’s almost 10pm on a Tuesday night in Njiro, a mellow outlying suburb of Arusha, Tanzania. I’m staying at a B&B just down the road from Farm Radio’s office where we’re running a week-long technical training for a group of techies supporting community radio stations.

It’s a bit noisy as at the moment – Phil Collins is playing on a radio up at the owner’s house and a man is talking loudly on a mobile phone nearby. Actually, that makes it quieter than usual!

Earlier today Tich & I forgot to make dinner arrangements at our B&B. Thanks to a hearty lunch when suppertime came round we weren’t  hungry enough to go in search of a proper meal. Instead, we walked up the road to the neighbour’s duka - a small hole-in-the-wall kiosk that sells an eclectic assortment of goods including Cold Beer.

Dinner Duka - friendly hole-in-the-wall kiosk

Dinner ended up being a shared Kilimanjaro beer with Bart, our host at Farm Radio. The 3 of us sat in the dark shadows cast by the kiosk’s light, side by side on the wooden bench against the wall.

A beautiful night sky sky provided a starlit canopy as we chatted quietly about life in Africa. Next to us a stranger sipped a beer and smoked a cigarette. All of us looked out onto the  dusty, uneven road in front of us and watched the dark forms of passersby.

An hour later we got up to pay for our drinks. Waiting my turn to pay, I leaned against the burglar bars separating shopkeeper from customer. Inside, sitting atop a table drawn up to the counter, a little boy concentrated on his homework, oblivious to the passing trade in front of him.

Flying to Arusha, we went via Lusaka making it a 7 hour flight. We were in a big plane that was barely full, so it was a comfortable flight. The wait between flights in Nairobi was just long enough for a cup of coffee and a bun and then off again on a smaller (but not tiny) plane to Kilimanjaro airport. I was hoping to see Kilimanjaro from the plane but no luck as it was on the other side.

The road to Arusha is good tar but Very Dangerous. We came within a whisper of slamming into the back of a large truck with no lights or reflectors. Thank God for Tich whose sharp eyes saw something ahead. People pay no attention to solid white lines and overtake and push back in, willy nilly. Yikes.

We grabbed a bite to eat at Tony’s – a basic fish and chicken joint where the food is cooked outside over a braai and you wash your hands at a central urn that contains hot water and has a bottle of liquid soap attached to it. The only veg – braai’d bananas. All the tables are outside on a dusty little road where the cars park. People around us fed their scraps and bones to 2 stripey cats and 3 or 4 happy African hunters. All very laid back.

During my stay at the El Mouradi Gammarth Hotel in Tunis, I’ve been surprised by the number of women walking around with bruised, bandaged faces.

To begin with I thought I was seeing the same woman each day, but gradually came to realize that in fact there were at least 4 different people staying at the hotel with what looked like similar injuries – a broken nose and bruised, swollen eyes.

On one night I stopped short at the eerie sight of a woman seated at a table in a dark corner, her bandaged face lit by the glow of a laptop computer. And on another occasion, a woman sat in the hotel foyer looking at her face in a hand mirror whilst she fiddled cautiously with the plasters covering her nose.

After a quick Google search I discovered that Tunisia promotes itself as a high quality and affordable plastic and cosmetic surgery provider.

Inflict enormous pain on yourself then recuperate poolside at one of Tunis’ holiday resorts.