I will never ever get used to, or enjoy, waking up at quarter past five in the morning: which is what I have unfortunately been doing for the past few days. However, despite having to actually  fight with a mosquito net just to get out of bed I still find myself very awake and excited for the day ahead. Today specifically I was excited to have a more relaxed and less taxing day than yesterday. Little did I know that on our way to Mzuzu (the main city area) we almost died about 100 times in the most uncomfortable van/bus(?) ever. One moment i’m looking out the window admiring the Malawian views and I turn away for one second to talk to Trinity and Keira beside me and all of a sudden the vehicle speeds up rapidly out of nowhere and I look out the window to see that we were trying to over-take a massive lorry while another truck is hammering down the road directly towards us and iIm not even joking my life flashed before my eyes, but we were completely fine and arrived at the hospital safe and sound. 

Before we actually went into the hospital we met with some priests right next to it. They were very kind and gave us juice and bananas. My favorite part of this specific moment though is that there were two tiny kittens in there too, they were very cute and I decided to completely disregard my peers comments saying that their names were rabies and I wasn’t supposed to pet them and do it anyways which was worth it but it made me miss my cat at home. After saying goodbye to the cats we headed over to the hospital to give the new mothers gifts like blankets, hats and cardigans to keep their babies warm from the cold weather (they find it cold but it’s actually mostly very warm to us). Doing this though was really quite sad – as I had anticipated. This is  because the head nurse had informed us that they didn’t have that much to support their patients and that our gifts and donations meant so much to them. They were so kind in expressing their gratitude but I’m still sad we couldn’t do more for them. As much as this was upsetting, I was eternally grateful for the opportunity to even help them at all, even if it wasn’t as much as I wanted to, it still meant something and for that I’m glad. It has also assured me that I want to continue to do things like this in my future, knowing that I’m helping people makes me happy. 

We didn’t have that long to recover from visiting the hospital before the day took another turn when we went to the markets and It was definitely an…experience. At some point we were walking through a section that only sold fish and it smelt vile. I saw at least three people who I will not name in our group who looked like they wanted to throw up, which was really funny but the smell was actually horrible and I was the same way so I can’t say anything. Just after this we approached a ‘stall’ that had like 50 chickens in cages and we got the opportunity to hold one, this was actually something i was looking forward to but after the amount of chickens being our dinner jokes i’ve heard i felt too bad for the chickens to hold one, but Trinity and Ava did and they made really funny faces whilst holding them to which I laughed at them for. 

The rest of the day was pretty calm, we went to a very aesthetic looking restaurant that served western food like burgers and pizzas. I got a burger and it was actually very nice and I was enjoying it until I looked beside me to find that Trinity had found what she thought was a bone in her burger. I laughed because I didn’t believe her but I think it actually was. However this this not deter me and i finished everything on my plate because it was tasty. After this we stopped briefly by a massive supermarket that sold american and uk sweets, i didn’t get anything here as I was saving my money to get something nice to take home for my family, or at least this was my plan until I got basically peer pressured by a very persistent random man into buying a bracelet that everyone was convincing me was £10 in uk money so i was panicking after I bought it but I found out that it was only £2.50 so i was fine and i’m very content with my purchase and shall treasure it forever, anyways that’s all that happened today, oh and the sunset was very pretty and there was a power cut at dinner but that’s it. I’ll most likely end this lovely day by saying goodnight to Sandy (the gargantuan fat tarantula that lives next to our toilet and hasn’t moved since we got here) after brushing my teeth. 

The end 🙂