MALAWI
I promised my family I would write about Malawi so they would have some idea where I was going. Putting my web page online took a while, though, so I don't have much time. Just a brief word. Malawi is a small country in east Africa, but with about 10 million people. On the east side of it is a huge lake called Lake Malawi. Malawi is more highland than some of the countries around it. It's very poor but it's supposed to be one of the most "laid-back" destinations in Africa. (Of course, in general Africa is a bit more on the dangerous side than the rest of the world.) It borders on Zambia, Mozambique and some others. But this was Anglophone Africa, Livingstone's country. Biologically I think it's a bit calmer than Botswana or Zaire, because of being more highland. There are some beaches which seem to be major tourist destinations (like Cape Maclean; I'm getting all of this from the Lonely Planet.) Malawi was under the dictatorial rule of Kenneth Banda for a few decades after independence; now they've shifted to democracy, a welcome development.

It's not easy for me to imagine what Africa is really like. By now I guess I've read a fair amount about it one way or another, from development rather than from history and literature (which is more how I learned about Russia before going). But it all remains abstract and unreal in my head.

And what will I be doing there? I'll be technical assistant to a public expenditure tracking study (PETS). PETS follows public funds through the various tiers of the (in this case, education) hierarchy to see where they leak, how they are targeted, whether they are efficient and correlated with improved outcomes, and so on. I've just finished writing a monograph on PETS, which I wrote based on reading a lot of other studies, but this will be my first time being really involved in one. And my first time in Africa. Plane tickets are not yet purchased, but I think my departure date will be sometime around March 7.