I remember before I left, I was trying to get an idea of what an average day would look like during the internship; looking back, my expectation was way off. So, for all the future interns who are curious about the average day in the life of a Poly intern or for anyone else who is wondering, here is a brief summary.
Monday-Friday
Mornings here are exactly what you’d expect—we wake up, get ready for the day, and eat breakfast. The lodge we live at provides tea and toast in the mornings, so we’ll walk down the dusty road in the mornings over to the main building. At breakfast, we are spoiled with a beautiful view of the hills in Blantyre, which rise up in the distance through the fog; in addition to the toast and tea, we’ll bring down our own coffee from a nearby plantation, fresh bananas or apples, peanut butter (made in Malawi!), jams, and fresh honey from the villages around Blantyre. One thing I didn’t know to expect is just how gorgeous Malawi is. We are here during the winter, but we experience daily temperatures in the mid-70s, and the sun is almost always shining. There are flowers blooming all around, and mountains surround us in the distance (Blantyre is circled by mountains).
The lodge we live at is located about an hour walk away from the Polytechnic, but luckily there is a bus (driven by the lodge owner) that travels from the lodge to the hospital every day at 7:30am. There are many expatriate doctors who live at our lodge, so we all load up into our bus every day to take the 15 minute drive to Queens. The roads are busy in the mornings, filled with both cars and people walking to work. There’s always plenty to view out the windows of our bus on the way to work, as so many people here walk to their destinations, women sell fresh mandasi on the side of the road, men roam the sidewalks with stacks of the day’s newspapers, people set up their airtime stands to settle in for the day, children scurry to school with their backpacks tightened over their shoulders, and the market stalls are opened and carefully set up to display their goods; the streets here are alive with people.
From there, Emily, Catherine, and I walk up the street to the Polytechnic, which takes about 10 minutes (record time is 6 minutes, which is done about once a week when we’re running late). We pass more vendors laying out their goods (fruits, candies, shoes, jackets) in the small market besides Queens, push through the line of minibus drivers shouting their rates to those passing, and join the throngs of people heading to work. We meet Christina, Francis, Andrew, and Charles outside the Poly, bask in the sun for a moment or two, then all head upstairs to our room to work.
We’ve been stationed in the same room our entire internship. It’s used as a classroom during the school year, though we’ve transformed it into a prototyping room over the past nine weeks. We keep all of our supplies and projects in there, and have stocked up tools like soldering irons, small saws, and hammers to work with. Our activities during the day vary greatly depending on what project we’re focusing on. Sometimes we all sit around the white board to brainstorm design ideas; other times half of us crowd around a circuit board while the others fit together wood pieces; one or two people may be at their computers, completing documentation or working on orientation week lectures. If we need internet, we head over to the library or outside on the porch, where there’s a mystery hotspot with some quality wifi.
For lunch, we head downstairs to the school cafeteria, where we’ve made good friends with all the cooks. If we’re lucky, the air smells faintly of fresh mandasi (freshly fried sweet dough) in addition to the expected smell of beans, meats, and veggies that they cook in the back room. I’ve about memorized everyone’s standard meal, and while ordering we function as a well-oiled machine (unlike the first few weeks of our internship, when ordering lunch for 7 caused a lot of confusion and misunderstood Chichewa).
During the afternoons, we continue to make progress on our projects. About once a week we’ll need to go out and buy some materials, which requires an enjoyable trip to the shops downtown or to Blantyre market. Blantyre market is filled with people and goods; voices of those negotiating prices, laughter between friends, short shouts between coworkers, and music fill the air. There’s a portion of the market outside, which mostly sells clothes, shoes, and produce, then a labyrinth of tightly packed stalls inside the market.
We’ll stay at the Polytechnic until around 4:45pm, when we head back to Queens to catch our 5:00 ride back home. If we need to do grocery shopping, we’ll head out around 4:00 so we can buy our food and get home before dark. There’s a great grocery store called Chipiku right across the street from the Polytechnic, where we buy pasta, rice, peanut butter (which we consume at a rate of 1kg/5days), jams, juices, etc. If we’re looking for produce, we head back to Blantyre market, where dozens of vendors watch over their ample stacks of fresh fruits, vegetables, spices, and meats.
On the bus ride home, we are always lucky to enjoy a beautiful view of the setting sun. After getting home around 5:30 (and after our routine snack of toast + peanut butter), we spend some time finishing up work for the day and blogging, or reading one of the many books we all brought with us. Around 6:30, all five of us crowd into the kitchen to make dinner. Three of the five of us are vegetarians, so we usually make some tasty dish with our fresh produce and rice. There’s no light in our dining room and it gets dark by 6pm here, so we always enjoy a cozy, candlelit dinner.
Weekends
Weekends vary a lot! Sometimes we simply stay at home to get ahead (or catch up on) work; sometimes we go explore Blantyre’s restaurants, shops, churches and weddings which are excitingly busy on weekend mornings; other times we are lucky to go out and see the beauty of Malawi.
