Departures and Arrivals

So, our adventure begins with the ringtone on my alarm clock at 4:30 am in our dark hotel room in Houston, about 2 hours after Dave and I had finally zipped the last bag shut and fallen into bed, and about an hour after Aine had climbed into bed with us and begun kickboxing me. Delirious but energized, we dressed the sleeping children and started piling our bags by the front door. The night before had been spent with several beers and a scale, doing luggage gymnastics, as we rearranged objects to ensure that each duffel bag contained exactly 50 pounds worth of goods and clothing. We arrived at the airport with time to spare, only to encounter a fastidious AirTran employee who not only weighed each bag individually (which revealed apparent deficiencies in our scale and forced us to pull our shoes and underwear out onto the airport floor in order to exactly meet the 50. Lb weight limit), but then measured the length, width, and height of each bag and charged us $50 more per bag for being over 66 inches. I do not recommend AirTran.
$500 and at least an hour later, we had 20 minutes to get through security and to our gate. As luck would have it, the Albuterol in our medicine bag apparently looked like darts of some kind, and Aine's mechanical dog Fluffy aroused suspicion, so we were bomb-checked, and the dog was wiped down. We ran for the gate as they were announcing final boarding.
Unbelievably, the check-in on Ethiopian Air the next morning was smooth and uneventful, facilitated by a kind gentleman who did not even weigh a single bag. The trip across the world was similarly (dare I say it?) pleasant, and the children watched movies until their eyes glazed over, then passed out with the help of Melatonin.
We were met at the airport on arrival by Joseph, one of the Baylor clinic's drivers, and 7 of our 21 bags. We rode through Lilongwe in one of the clinic's outreach vehicles, a battered white Land Cruiser with rows of seats across the back. The intoxicating and familiar smell of burning garbage and diesel fumes that is typical of the developing world hit me as I looked across barren orange plains sparsely populated with dry brush. Women in bright-colored skirts carried bundles on their heads along the roadside, children carried their siblings on their backs, and young men pushed decrepit bicycles along paths through the desiccated fields.
We were taken to our home and met by Tiya, the administrative coordinator for the clinic, and Tiwonge, the landlord of the property. The townhouse is amazing, by any standards. It is brand new, with black tile floors and stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. Of course, they have all been manufactured in China, so we can not read any of the instructions on how to use them, and we have occasional "brown-outs", when the electricity doesn't work, but we are making do. Each bedroom has an entire wall of gorgeous built-in closets with drawers and shelves, and sliding wooden doors, and there are no less than 4 bathrooms, two of them with both bathtubs and glass-enclosed showers. Our complete set of bags arrived two days after we did, and the children have been content to read and play with the toys they had not seen in two months, and to bounce on the trampoline (yes, we brought it...) for hours on end. They obviously feel safe and comfortable in their new home, and even survived our first actual blackout last night, putting on their headlamps to navigate the darkened house without fear or complaints.
Aine, as predicted, refuses to eat anything but potato chips and nutella, despite my daily shopping trips and hours spent laboring to make dishes that look familiar to her. At home our diet consisted mainly of Quorn vegetarian products, which I made into soups, stews, and casseroles. Here I have tried to make seitan, using a time-consuming method which involves kneading flour into a dough and washing away the carbohydrate portion, leaving only the gluten, then boiling it in vegetable broth to give it flavor. The rest of the family ate it with enthusiasm, while Aine carefully picked the pieces out of her meal. I keep telling myself that she will eat when she gets hungry enough, but seeing her induce gagging over everything from quesadillas to mashed potatoes (typical staples at home) has me wondering. We heard a rumor that tofu could be purchased from a Chinese food store nearby, so I will walk there today to try to purchase some, and hope that it is not rejected for being "different". Food here is exorbitantly expensive (8$ for butter, 10$ for 4 asparagus stalks, etc.), and each supermarket carries different foods, so assembling a meal often takes several hours of shopping and cooking, as well as proficiency in Mandarin in order to use the stove. We have been walking to most places, as fuel is not only expensive (10$/gallon), it is hard to come by, and it is not uncommon to see lines of cars stretching seemingly for miles outside of petrol stations, with people waiting for gas as long as 8 hours, hoping it does not run out before they reach the front of the line.
There is so much more to write, but using the Internet requires leaving Dave with the kids to walk 40 minutes roundtrip to town, and I still have to hunt for tofu. Tomorrow I start work at Baylor, so I'm sure there will be updates coming in the near future.