We Are Moving To Malawi

We are moving to Malawi 🇲🇼

This Friday

We have two kids, a cat, and 200+ kgs of luggage

My wife got a teaching position

I’m going to continue doing engineering projects, remote. Part of my work was remote already so that’s no big difference.

We fly to Addis, then layover, then another flight. Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, has no intercontinental flights. They have around 5 flights a day, one to each of the 5 surrounding capitals.

That’s good. Thailand, where we lived before, had too many international flights.

Malawi

Malawi is a small country compared to surrounding African countries. 22 million people, 4 times bigger than Belgium, 3 times the Netherlands.

It has a beautiful lake, Lake Malawi, and is overall quite elevated, Lilongwe is on average 1000 meters above sea level. Good for my workouts.

The main economic activity is agriculture, tea, tobacco and sugarcane

Criminality is a question mark

(I’m writing this partly so I can look back in five years and fill in the gaps)

200+ Kgs Of Luggage

Back to logistics today

Malawi is landlocked, and we got a couple of offers on sending shipping containers there but most of them were 5000+ euros and could potentially take months

What’s worse, because of this difficult shipping situation, it’s difficult to import anything into the country

When I explained this to my cousin he said “that’s why you see people flying to Africa and taking microwaves on the plane and you wonder: don’t they have microwaves there”

Apparently they don’t.

Decision

Professionally it didn’t look like the best time. I was getting good traction in the Netherlands, now I have to partly start from scratch

But personally, I prefer my life to have been a glorious adventure when I look back when I’m 100 years old

Malawi, is definitely going to be an adventure