Zita Chitimba....... "It happens!!"

This is my new favourite Malawian saying. And let me tell you.. “it happens A LOT”

You buy a chocolate milk only to find strawberry milk inside, you buy fresh eggs that are hard boiled, you ask for a hot chocolate and you get chocolate cake (I never mind!) You may well choose to pay extra money for a safer bus journey on the “better” bus only to spend many hours on the side of the road with three breakdowns in one journey! If you order a garden salad don’t be suprised if you only get tomatoes. Of the ten items on a menu you can only order one, as all stock has run out of the remaining items. And sure as anything that one item is the tomato salad.

In your office the photocopier, fax machine, phone line and computer will all be out of order, they are finally fixed and then the power goes out. Your fridge will break, and be replaced by a broken fridge which is then replaced by a broken fridge (and there is no happy ending to this one just yet…. Its nearly three months I have been without a functioning fridge!!)


And the winner this month… total collapse of malawi’s communication systems!!

We have two main phone providers here in Malawi… celltell and telkom, so our entire
Communications is dependant upon these two!! And with celltell being the founding company, the large majority of the countries technological infrastructure is dependant upon their services…As you can imagine, no internet, no phone lines, no banks, it seriously affected a lot of stuff. And of course the panic was rather big, so everyone on celltell tried to connect with telekom, which of course then overloaded that system drastically reducing its effectiveness… But how this disaster in communications came about, and how it managed to affect the entire countries phone lines is rather amusing!

So…. there was a fire in the celltell head office down in Blantyre, our commercial capital of Malawi. The fire started on the fourth floor, amazingly the fire brigade did actually arrive, often they don’t cos they don’t have transport, but they did, only to discover they couldn’t actually reach the fourth floor as the ladders didn’t reach that high… zita chitimba! ...... so… they proceeded to put the fire out from the level of the third floor. Then to discover that the water had run out…. Oops!..... oh and they had forgotted to bring the hoses to connect to the water supply of the building. So the four storey building burnt to the ground.

Hmm….