A Message From Christina:
"Malawians say that if you swim in the Lake once, you will always return.. They are right, but it took me 20 years to do it. I had arrived in this beautiful African country hardly more than a girl, and during the ten years I spent there, Malawi and her people taught me the lessons which were to shape my perception of life, more than any academia could do. Early years in the Bush meant lighting the woodstove daily in the middle of the rains, if we were to eat hot food. I could never do it easily. Malawians did it all the time, and they would laugh at me! I would watch them repairing their houses and rethatching their roofs after violent storms – could we do it? You’re joking. We were all thrown into a panic when the generator failed! When marauding elephants would trample the maize, we would feel as pained as if we were owners of the gardens, yet Malawians gathered what they could, they reorganised., they replanted, they never complained, and they carried their babies at the same time. And they sang! In those deep resonant and instinctive harmonies so typical of Africa. When they had food, they shared with any passing visitors. It is the height of rudeness to Malawians not to share their food, however little, if a stranger arrives during their meal

"And everywhere I went, people smiled, the children smiled, their parents smiled, and the old people smiled. When going back to Malawi, just recently, we smiled at each other all over again, and just as before despite the poverty, despite a very real need for help in so many many areas, the spell took hold as I knew it would. I was reminded yet again, that whatever I could do for them, it would never ever match the value of what they had given to me."