One month down, or possibly up, or sideways.

I left England on the 3^rd of January so it’s now 33 days since I was at home.

Which makes it 33 days since my feet were actually clean for over a minute; 33 days since a day of my life passed without ants featuring heavily; 33 days without seeing a potato, or real milk; and 33 days since I had a proper hug.

Those who know my love (some would say obsession) for Coco Pops and milk will be surprised to learn that the milk thing hasn’t bothered me too much. And actually anyone who knew me before I was 14ish will understand the joy of the news that we’ve found peanut butter in a nearby town! (Which, on inspection, claims to provide 25% of my daily fat intake in one serving. Just how I like it.)

Anyway, most of the time nothing is really getting to me, apart from the hugs thing. Before this trip I maintained a cool-guy stance of never really missing people – I have now thoroughly abandoned this stance. If you’ve ever given me a proper hug, I probably miss you. And in fact, of all the things I thought God might teach me in this time, I never expected that it would be to love and appreciate my grannies more! But sure enough, this he has done.

So anyway, I said last time about God humbling me, and he is still doing that (Including the way that the other Michael is consistently battering me at bananagrams AND ligretto), but he is not in any way being nasty to me. He is being spectacularly kind – so here are a few things that, if you pray, you are welcome to thank God for with me.

1)      The invention of the Kindle and setting me up with a teacher who should really be doing English at Cambridge instead of me!

The Standard 6 teacher who I’m helping, Martha Chakola, was looking through a book I was using in a lesson and asked me if I’d brought any more, so I ended up teaching her to use my Kindle and lending it to her. At first she said she’d give it back when she’d finished all the books on it, ‘so maybe tomorrow or the day after’! But while I explained that was a little bit optimistic, she’s getting through them at a crazy pace – I especially enjoyed getting it back and finding it set to huge font – she explained afterwards she had been trying to read in the dark!

So that’s just awesome, especially because she’s really getting into some of the books about God I’ve got on there, so it’s giving her a chance to explore her faith as well I think.

2)      Food. I have never meant ‘Thank you for this food’ so deeply as I do at the moment. Cooking Malawian beans for 3 hours has really taugh me to appreciate my dinner like never before (this works especially well if you didn’t realise and you started cooking at half 6!). And the other day I went and helped my mate Brian and his family fertilise their ‘garden’. I was imagining a little vegetable patch kind of garden, out the back of the house. In fact, Brian has  little hole next to every maize plant with a stick, and us putting a spoonful of pellets into each one. After the first 100 plants, with 1000 or so to go, this gets – in Brian’s words – ‘tiresome’. In this country, generosity has a real cost, and it really, really matters whether it rains. And yet their kindness and open-handedness, and their trust in God, is genuinely inspirational. And quite challenging.

3)      Creating. We camped at Kasungu National Park last weekend, which used to be amazing apparently, but has been thoroughly poached so that now it’s pretty much just hippo, and some awesome, awesome views. You might have read about the guy who made the six foot valentines card for the girl he liked – and how he thinks waterfalls and sunsets are a bit like God doing the same thing for us. Well, I honestly got out of my tent on Saturday night, looked up at the stars and said, out loud, “I love you too”. I know I’m a bit weird. But God is a bit awesome too.

PS. Here’s something you didn’t know. A perk of having a mud/charcoal floor, is that if – hypothetically of course – you had managed to spill a whole bucket of water into your living room/kitchen the other day, the floor would simply have absorbed the water by now. No sweeping or bailing required. Nice.