a bit overwhelming

5 of us walked down to the city center of Blantyre today. It was an adventure, and a wee bit overwhelming. I have never before been the minority, but we are definitely the minority here. Everywhere we go people stare at us. I can't wait til we know more of the language so we don't seem like such outsiders. The city center is hard to describe. There are people EVERYWHERE! I mean EVERYWHERE! There are billions of little huts set up everywhere in the city. Huts on top of huts. People in the huts are selling everything, from DVDs to clothes to shoes to candy to fruit and everything in between. Everything is very cheap (at least cheap by our standards). Today we bought a dozen tomatoes, 6 mangos, 6 cucumbers and 5 sticks of sugar cane all for under 3 American dollars! It is sad. We could shop around to get cheaper prices, but really I don't care...I would rather make one lady happy selling me a dozen tomatoes for 30 cents than I would shopping around trying to get a dozen for 20 cents. What is so remarkable to me is that the venders are selling such random things that you would think that they set up their huts to target people that are vacationing in the area, but we are the only "outsiders". This is what they do everyday. They try to get our attention buy shouting random prices at us, but they don't care if we stop by their hut or not. They do this everyday, & they are just trying to make a living. The most random thing that someone tried to sell us was live chickens. A man can up to us holding 4 live chickens by their feet and he waved them in our faces. It was quite funny because Kim was with us and she is a vegan, and I am sure the idea of having a live chicken waved in her face was less than pleasant! Poor Kim!
This afternoon we sat around and talked about what we have found to be the most remarkable parts of the trip we have noticed so far. Kim noted that the beggars are very persistent. A poor begging child followed us for 10 minutes begging for money. It made me sad. I so wanted to give him money, but we had to keep walking because there were so many kids around us that we would have had a crowd of childen begging if we had started giving out money.
I hope I can take lots of photos because this really is a different world!
Terrie is taking us over to the hospital later and then out to dinner. We are going to go play cards now while we wait for her to come home. Terrie works very hard here. Rumor is that she often works from 8 am til 9pm.

Talk to you soon!

Niamh