The Journey of Azzedine Downes - Peace Corps Online

Longing For Lake Malawi
Mary Landers, PCV/Malawi
Think back to training. To what one
place did every trainee yeam to be sent? In
the small southern African nation of
Malawi, that place is Lake Malawi Na-
tional Park.
A golden sandy beach stretches out to
a rocky outcropping at the tip of the
peninsula where the park is located.
Wooded hills cup the park against the
lake; uninhabited green islands dot the
blue water. Tourists flock here and so do
vacationing PCVs, even those from
neighboring countries.
Lake Malawi National Parkis the world's
first freshwater underwater park. Estab-
lished in 1980 onabout 90square kilome-
ters of land and water, it is also Malawi's
newest and smallest national park. This
tiny presetve holds a wealth of species;
Lake Malawi irself boasts more species of
fish than any other lake in the world.
The park's environmental education
center is also unique; it wascreated through
an agreement between Malawi's
Deparrmenr of National Parks and Wildlife
and the United States' World Wildlife
Fund. A series of eight PCVs have helped
to plan, build, and staff the center. My
husband Stewart Dohman and 1 sewed
thereas third yearextendees. Aseducation
ofTicer, 1 planned activities for and hosted
hundredsofovemight\isitors, mostlyhigh
schoolsrudenrs. Stewart, an engineer, drew
plans lor a proposed redevelopment of the
tourist portion of the park, andsupervised
the final stages of staff housing
construction. Together we expanded the
aquarium's displays to include a twenty
foot tank for the turtles and sand-dwell-
ing fish.
Studenn whovisit thecenter are awed.
Though thelake dominates thegeography
of Malawi, a show of hands from any
visitinggroup revealed that only a few had
everseenit. Thenoveltyand excitement of
a nip to the lake were emphasized when
five young neighbors from our first
assignment in Blanryre came to visit. The cages that allowed our turtles to live more
youngest girl, ten-year-old Hannah, naturally, and taught our visitors more
recoiled when she first saw the lake; she about their biology and habits. The
had never seen so much water in one 'terrapinarium', as we came to call it,
place. She soon got over it, and enjoyed a turned into a 7 meter long, 1000 gallon
weekofswimmingandexploringwith her addition to the aquarium building. It
siblings. The two boys, housesnotonly twospecies of turtle
Dick and Innocent, native to Malawi, but also
cried when it was time to several species of sand-
go home. dwelling fish-some of
The earnestness of their which are familiar to
tears was revealed a week later Malawiansonly in the
when the two teenagers donned context of their
six tshirts apiece, and told their
mother they were going out to
play. Instead, theystartedwallang of the open-top
the 200 km back to the lake. terrapinarium is
After 20 km, night fell, and they decorated with
decided to hitch hike.Luckily an
army officer who knew theirdad
picked them up and dropped
them safely back home, still
longing for the lake.
Anothergroup ofprimary
schoolstudentsshowedme sulln.: ~~~~~d
hi^ IP~O what you can see when NGS ~ n ~ t "irvion ~ ~ . ~ h ~
you look through naive
eyes. On the second
moming of their visit, a
little boy greeted me
with, "Miss Mary, we saw
two hippos right where we
were swimming yesterday." 1 as-
sured him that there weren't any
hippos in this part of the park. Later
that day, our elderly night watchman
excitedly told me how he had seen two
mwu (the vernacular for hippos) that
moming, and that they were now wading
in the water down by his village. I apolo-
gized to my original spotter and let him
know he'd been right; 1 also looked long
and hard at the water before those lads
went swimming again.
This group of primary school srudenrs
raised money for the environmental cen-
ter. We decided to use it for new display