Best... Place... Ever!

1/11/10
So right now from where we are staying up on a hill we can hear all the people celebrating the Malawian football team’s win (3-0) in the Africa’s Cup. Horns are honking, people are cheering, and it’s pretty cool. What else is pretty cool is the place we are staying, the Hostellerie de France (http://www.hostellerie-de-france.com/index.php) Wow, for what we paid last night we are staying in the nicest place I have ever stayed in Africa. We don’t talk about last night. That hotel sucked. But this place, wow. This is certainly recommended for anyone travelling here.
So last night we arrived in Blantyre with our UNICEF driver, oh I should also mention that we had met up with Issac and lucky from FrontlineSMS and Tim from The Clinton Global Health Initiative. They are super cool , I already miss them. It’s great to meet people, hang out for a day or two and feel like you have known them for months. We were talking about maybe trying to head back out to Liwonde National Park on Friday evening and staying at the park Friday and Saturday before heading back to Lilongwe on Sunday.
So, we took off from the Clinton Offices in Liwonde on Sunday afternoon and arrived on Sunday night. The place that had been recommended other than this one was all booked up for the next two weeks and we didn’t have internet to find contact info for this place (though it ended up being right next door to the first place we saw) we checked out many other hotels in the area and they were either total crap for the price or more than $100 per night, oh and one place had totally closed. Not exactly within our budget. So we eventually went back to some terrible place and paid too much for one night, looked up the phone numbers for this place in the phone book and were happy in the morning to see that crappy hotel in our rear view mirror. We went to Chikwawa district and met with the District Health Officer at the hospital who gave us the go ahead as well as well as his district PMTCT officer. Then we all crammed into the UNICEF car and headed off to a health center a ways out.
When we arrived we spent a small amount of time with the clinician, explained what we were there to do and let him get back to his patients (of which there were many). We met with a Health Surveillance Assistant, his name escapes me but I have it written down, and the clinic head for PMCTC, got a good overview of the program there, and then Annalies and Michael followed one expecting couple who had just come in for the first time through their entire first visit and then I went off to interview our HAS who also happened to be the HIV/AIDS counselor for the clinic. He gave us a lot of good information and we are headed out to his village tomorrow afternoon to see how things go in the villages. There is a village Health Council and I think he is also setting up a meeting with them. All in all it was a very good visit and I feel very good about where we are in the project. Afterwards we came back to town, I got into contact with this place and we were pretty darn sure that we wanted the two bedroom apartment room with the kitchen, so the UNICEF people Elsie and I can’t remember the driver’s name, took us to the People’s Supermarket and we stocked up on some food to fix. I am making an avocado salad tonight and pasta with an eggplant sauce. So, we arrived here and wow, this place is phenomenal, this may be the all around nicest place I have ever stayed. When we checked in, Charlie (the man who seems to be somewhat in charge here) told us that they had another visitor from the US and pointed out his card, he is from the business school at Columbia. It’s a small world, no? We then met the proprietor who bought us a round of beers and I got to practice my French. I went for a swim, and now I’m updating my blog as the sun is setting and will shortly head off to prepare dinner. So I hope all is well back home and I’ll write more tomorrow.