Team WILF!

How and why did I allow myself to be dragged into the Wildlife Centre’s volleyball team I’m not sure, though I am convinced there were beers involved.

Certainly there were beers involved on the night, when we all trooped down to The Shack, played four games of volleyball and LOST every single game. In seriously drastic fashion.

I thought I could hit a volleyball. Turns out I can’t. I was never convinced I could serve. Turns out I was right. But I was positive that I could lead a cheerleader chat for team Wildlife – give me a W, give me an I etc. Turns out I can’t and we’re now known as the WILFS. Which has a much more original ring to it, I think anyway.

As for the team uniform, we’re considering getting some caps from the local supermarket called Shoprite and scribbling out a few of the middle letters so it just spells SH…ITE.

After throwing myself around the court and doing a not so impressive lunge for the ball, the ‘sand’ (i.e. jagged rocks of death) has gouged out a chunk of leg and my shin is slowly turning a shade of midnight blue, to match the awesome bruises from my waterskiing on Lake Malawi over the weekend (thanks again to the lovely Tracey, Richard, Kate and Johnny for a wicked weekend of boats, waterskiing, interesting brownie recipes and the most gorgeous little cottage you’ve ever seen in your life).

However, the pit falls of socialising can be deep when you have to clean out dog kennels after a 3am finish the night before.  The good news is that we now have someone else to do this – hurrah – so I’m off right now to enjoy a few greens (Carlsberg) at Mabuya Camp. My mum warned me not to get dehydrated in Africa…

X

I have a car!

A check list of the many challenges of negotiating Lilongwe’s roads:

Lethal mini buses wrapped regularly around trees – CHECK

3km of road between residential housing and the town centre, fraught with danger from angry drivers, brakeless cars and zebra crossings that faded in 1910? CHECK

Push bike taxis with poor old dudes who make you get off and (quite right too) walk up the hills? CHECK

Massive hyenas roaming the streets at night waiting for a tasty two-legged morsel to pass by for a midnight snack? CHECK

An ancient law dating back to British rule that forbids anyone to walk around past 10pm - originally introduced to keep the ‘local’ population from organising rebellions against the Brits but now ironically used to pump cash out of hapless white peeps? CHECK

And so my friends, the time had come to buy a car. I am now the proud owner of a super hot, 1996, 3 door, white Pajero. OK, so it has various hoses under the bonnet missing (so what?), a non working fan/AC (that’s what windows are for) and bald-as- my-granddaddy’s-head-was tyres.

But you know what? Who cares?! Who cares when the COF test here, the UK’s equiv to the MOT or Australia’s version of the rego check, is a cursory glance at the car, an extra couple of thousand kwacha (£8), a nod of the head and a quick signature? Done!

And Oh The Freedom! Hello Again Independence! I’m now gal about town, zooming around in my little 4x4 looking like a proper Mzungo. The only issue now are the very frequent police road blocks (a stash of cash can come in handy I hear) and convincing everyone who gets in my car to wear a seatbelt, which is clearly not the fashion in Lilongwe.

Be good, stay safe and give way to white Pajeros my friends.

Megs x

PS: Any suggestions for names gratefully considered…

My rabies-tastic week

Some of you may have seen my Facebook post from last week and I’m sorry if any of you thought I’d had my arm chewed off by a maniacal mutt. What actually happened was that one of the puppies had been acting weirdly in quarantine kennel 4. It had bitten 3 people in two days, then started chewing the wire of the cage, biting bricks and snapping at imaginary flies...and then it went off its food and water, which is when we started to panic because it was generally pretty greedy!

So, although we were really hoping, praying, delivering offerings to the gods that it was just a bit bored and in need of some TLC from a loving new family, we couldn’t really take the risk that it may have had rabies since it had chomped into the legs of three people already. Plus the rest of the staff, including me had also been exposed because we had been feeding and playing with it, and so had been licked.

I’ve learnt a lot about rabies in the past week. The virus is carried in the saliva of an infected animal and can be transmitted through a bite or a lick, which would deposit the virus into the bloodstream either through the bite wound or possibly through an open cut or graze.

It can take up to 7 years (WTF?) for the symptoms to show in a humans and once it’s in your system, it’s usually fatal with NO CURE. Only one recorded case exists of a human surviving rabies without treatment, though I have been told of others here in Malawi and I’m sure that there are some lucky (unrecorded) people across Africa who have faced down rabies and lived to tell the tale. Others have survived with treatment but only very rarely.

Unfortunately, the more we read about it, the more we realised that the puppy was a massive risk to everyone who had been in contact with her and so we asked our stand in vet, Rob (with a 35% kill rate) to put her down (RIP little bitch) and then sent her and her brain over to the vet labs for testing.

Jutta got to see the way that the brain was extracted from the puppy but unfortunately I was tied up with other things on Wednesday. But I did see the photos…and while the procedure is full-on gory, it’s amazing to see what they do, which is essentially slice the head open the whole way from the base of the neck to the tip of the nose, and then pull out this tiny little puppy brain, which is popped into a plastic bag and stuck in the fridge.

I was with them on Thursday though to see how they tested the brain. First they create a smear test with parts of the brain stem and gooey bits of grey matter, then they do some other fancy stuff to it, including injecting a special dye into the sample, which reacts with the virus to make it glow if the material is infected.

When we looked into the microscope to see if the test was positive, unfortunately for us, it was like looking at the stars. There was so much rabid activity going on in that little slide that it could have shrivelled up and eaten itself.

Although the first reaction was to leave the lab and chuck up into a quiet dark corner, I think Jutta and I held it together well enough, considering that we had to destroy another puppy, thereby pushing Rob's kill rate up to 40%. We also had to stick some of the others back into quarantine and sort out post-exposure jabs for us and the rest of the staff. Considering what we had just read and heard about rabies it's fair to say that we were bricking it. Seriously....brrrrricking it...

Two weeks on and plenty of beers later and all is OK. I’m actually really glad to have had the experience and to have learnt a bit more about rabies, which is one of those random diseases that you hear about but never really know much about if you're lucky enough to live in a rabies-free country like the UK or Australia. The yanks have it though, racoons are offending animal of choice apparently.

So anyway, despite my arms having more needle holes than a pin cushion, a wee word of warning for the future. Stay away if I start foaming at the mouth and eating bricks between now and 2020.

x