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Long delayed finale..
Lots happened since I wrote this piece for VSO 3months ago..
So much that a finale redux might be in order...
Till then this is it!

Home is where the heart is they say. My heart is my home however. And my heart finds it challenging to suddenly let go of a place it fell in love with. Especially after a 2 year divorce with its former partner, going back to it can feel somewhat counter-current… a necessary sacrifice. It only takes a day to realise the causes of that divorce.
Coming back to the UK has been no honeymoon. The way in which it had to be done also did nothing to ease things. I had to bring forward my flight from the booked date to accommodate 2 interview dates. Both fell in the week just preceding it and I only found out about this some 10days earlier! The opportunity to get straight back into a training job in the UK after 2 years abroad felt incredible. I chased documents and references frantically in my last few days in Malawi. I wrote reports and worked on new things to add to my CV constantly, essentially consolidating my 2years in Malawi in the space of a week. Janet and I had to vacate the house and send whatever savings we had back to the UK. We held a massive house clearance sale, essentially giving away or selling every last bit of stuff we had less our packed suitcases. It was truly like a boxing day sale at Next! Of course, we also had to say our farewells to all our friends. We had to get a police report at short notice on a rainy bank holiday. We had to plan ahead of where we’d be staying in England and how I’d get to the interviews. It was one finely tuned machine of a life in operation that needed all the components to work optimally. With our experience of the unpredictability of things in Malawi and the excessive bureaucracy that normally accompanies all official matters, we thought that nothing short of a miracle would be required. I look back and realise what a miracle it was that got me and Janet here in one piece and ready for that interview. A miracle and a hell of a sleep deficit.
Thankfully the first interview went well and I got offered the job before my second interview was due. What that meant was a massive sigh of relief and a chance to organise our lives again before the job start date. I had 3 weeks to get back to some sort of normality here and thought I’d use it to relax and travel a bit. Once I started sorting things out, I realised that even 3 months rather than weeks wouldn’t be enough to get ALL of it done. The list seemed to get longer everytime I got back to it to assess the progress. The first priority was to find a place to live. With Janet working in Oldham and me in Chester, we had to find a place as close to the midway position as possible to allow both of us to commute within reasonable distance and time. Affordable furnished places to rent were so limited that we had to hold our breaths till a few days before our work start date and only managed to move in the night before! With a broken down boiler! But all it took to steel ourselves to the challenge was to recall how luxurious even this situation would have been in a Malawian context. In that time, we also had to sort out things like getting our car back on the road, our bank accounts working again, a new phone, computer and internet connection to name a few. All these things you normally don’t see as a big chore in your day to day routine. But that’s because you normally take your time to do them and you don’t need them done all at once and asap! On top of that, that bad old friend called British paperwork made its reappearance in force to us with all the pre-work checks that had to be done. I never thought I would say that but I missed the Malawian style, albeit much less efficient, of shortcuts. But there I was, getting used to being back in the UK. The saving grace was that I had been mentally prepared for it. So I simply got on with it.
All this was to be merely a taster of what it really takes to settle into a surgical job back in the UK. Since starting work in Chester, I have effectively gone off the volunteer link radar, with so many things taking priority suddenly over it. Once in a training job, a whole new string of responsibilities come with it and pretty much every day and evening, there’s something to read, write or research. Of course, that will ease out with time, but with the extra prerogative of relearning the job and catching up with latest developments I’ve been cut off from for 2 years, I cannot say I didn’t expect to have to bury myself in books for at least 6months.
But the whole experience is really rewarding. I view it as part of the whole volunteering experience. To say 2 years in Malawi is an understatement. I’ve already been doing this for 3, if you count the year of intense preparation that I went through before flying out and expect at least another till I can feel reintegrated properly in the UK. And then of course, I have built up a working link with Malawi as well now which I very much intend to revisit as much as my work and life will allow me to in the future.
And now to conclude, just generally on ‘life’… Life in the UK. That can mean both an exam that foreigners need to take to get British Citizenship or in my case, a life test that British Citizens have to take to get back to their normal lives after living in a developing country for 2years. It’s certainly not the most positive experience of all. It involves a serious infatuation with the colour grey and a suppression of certain human behaviours that attract the wrong sort of attention… like saying hello, how are you and how is your day going to people! I miss that about Malawi very much. Alright there were loads of challenges in human interaction and indeed so many aspects of it are, in my opinion, better here like women’s rights, gay rights, accountability etc. But at the very basic level of communication, the common denominator for mankind, which is greetings, the warmth and naturalness of Malawian interaction is something I would really like to see imported here. I miss the blue skies, the fact that a rainy day doesn’t mean a freezing day on top, the fresh fruits and vegetables, the joie de vivre, the “craig” of Malawi. But I’ve done my time there. I’ve lived it to the full. I’ve achieved what I went there to achieve. And it’s time for me to move on. Good memories it has left me with and I will cherish them forever. Wherever it is I end up, I will keep these memories and invoke them when I need a bit of heart warming.
Tionana Malawi. Ndidzakusowa! (Till we meet again Malawi. I shall miss you.)