Farewell Ripple - hello Butterfly

Butterfly Lodge is run by AJ (Alice-Jane) from Bristol, her Malawian partner Kumbu, their two year old daughter Ezmeekie and their three dogs Yuka, Baggie and Moyzie, although its not clear who is actually in charge!
Life at Butterfly is different in many respects from Ripple. The chalets are not as plush, but they do have electricity (when ESCOM manage to supply it). We don't get our food and and laundry done for us, but there is a bar. We can't use the kitchen for cooking but there is a little m'baula (charcoal stove), a big barbeque for special occasions, or we can buy the lodge food which is pretty good and not too expensive. Best of all there is no volunteer charge, and volunteers pay half price accommodation, which for a chalet is MK800 (about UKP3) a night.
The lodge also provides a Community Resource Centre, which offers four laptop computers with internet access (when it works - as I write the whole of Malawi has been without internet access for three days, no one is quite sure why), a selection of leaflets on various health and education topics, a youth club and a playground, and also provides teachers to the local nursery school and organises netball and football. It was apparently set up by a previous English volunteer called Craig (if you're reading this, good job Craig) as a prototype for the Community Centre that Yotam and his team are planning to build. The internet cafe offers cheap email access and free internet to locals who are working on bona fide research of some sort. The youth club now has its own building (as of about three weeks ago) and offers pool, bowling and a variety of organised activities three times a week.
My real job here is intended to be to help organise and run the computer centre, following on from the work done by a previous volunteer, Simon, who has done a pretty good job. However, I had no sooner arrived than I was recruited by the incumbent volunteers, Dan, Tim and Axel, to help run the afternoon youth club, which involved some origami followed by a somewhat chaotic game of dodgeball, and on the wednesday they asked me to come and give a hand at the Gulugufe Nursery School (gulugufe is butterfly in chitonga), which has around 30 kids in two classes. There is currently only one local teacher, and Dan, who is a trained nursery teacher from America, has done a lot of work, providing teaching materials and an organised programme of activities, as a result of which attendance has grown significantly. However this does mean that they need two teachers at the very least, and ideally four. After Kapanda Form 2 the nursery school is a huge relief. The kids are sweet and I really enjoy doing it. The trouble is that after I've got up at six, taught  nursery from 7:30 until 10:30, done any necessary laundry and shopping (food storage is limited so it is necessary to shop at least every two days) and had lunch there is not a lot of time or energy left for working in the computer centre. After two weeks I am still trying, reluctantly, to wriggle out of nursery school and spend more time with the laptops.
At the weekend it transpired that Tim had befriended a local musician called Foster Banda who has actually made a CD single of his song "M'Mbali Mwanyanja" ("The people who live by the lake"). He was having trouble getting his song played in the local bars because he didn't have a video, so Tim undertook to make a video using his Lumix still camera which takes good HD video, and AJ's video editing software. As a result we spent the whole of Sunday at various locations around Nkhata Bay filming Foster and his team of three out-of-step dancers (I got used as choreographer, which shows how desperate they were). It was great fun and we got about 40 mins of footage, which Tim now has the unenviable task of editing into a 4'30'' video. (Update November 2010 - Foster's video is now on YouTube, and can be viewed at the bottom of the page).
For the first couple of days of this week the power was out, and Axel was away on a kayaking trip, so I ended up back at the nursery school. I also have a queue of locals eager for elementary lessons on Word and Excel.
All in all I am enjoying Butterfly (except for the moment when I put on my swimming trunks, felt something moving, peered in and found a huge spider rummaging about in my pubic hair).. Nkhata Bay is a good sized town and although it's a 20 minute walk into town, at least there is a decent shopping centre with a supermarket, restaurants and bars. I'm glad to get away from secondary school teaching (although my summary of Romeo and Juliet is available in the Resource Centre and getting an increasing trickle of requests, so it my only be a matter of time before someone asks for my services) and it's also good to have some male company.
As I write everyone is suffering from severe hangovers following a heavy night in the Mayoka bar on Friday and a big birthday party at Butterfly last night which went on until 5:30. I managed the Friday do but bottled out at 10:00 last night.
Several of the guys here are qualified divers, so I've decided to fork out for a PADI refresher course and join them on a dive tomorrow.
Gaynor the director of PAW is flying out next week for the grand opening of the lodge at the Mwabvi Game Reserve (see the PAW website for details) so I am taking a couple of weeks off from Butterfly to join in the celebrations.
After that I'm going to fork out even more for a four day safari in South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, so watch out for the next exciting episode.