it's mango season

And a goal is to incorporate mangoes into as many meals as possible. Just bought village mangoes on the way back from Malawi - 10 for a dollar. Yesssss.

So far, good purposes of mangoes:

• Mango-ginger chicken and rice lettuce wraps
• Mangoes in salad
• Mango crumble
• Forcing you to floss

Also, just got back from a week holiday in Malawi. Got scuba certified and it was the perfect time to forget about work. Something about CHAI ties you to email like it's life support, and it was great to remember that it's nicer to open a book than a laptop. Also, scuba is exhausting and I ended up going to bed before 9pm almost every night.

That said, being totally disconnected - I barely got the results for both the Zambian and U.S. elections while in Nkhata Bay. Obama made front-page headlines in the Malawi Daily Mail. The Zambian results were a little trickier to discern:

When we crossed the border, Sata was up and there were only 13 rural constituencies left to count. By the time Elliott and I returned to Zambia, Banda had been announced president - through acknowledgment of probable vote-rigging. Sata said he wouldn't accept it until it was validated by the High Court, but all Zambians accepted that the election happened, the official announcement was made... so that was that.

And as much as I think Sata is nuts (met him at a filling station once and he told Chiku and I that the Lebanese would have put a bomb in our engine unless we were vigilant when we were getting our brake fluid re-filled), there's something vaguely depressing about the resignation to vote rigging and a corrupt status quo among Zambians. Good that they're peaceful - but the line between peaceful and passive to the point of allowing themselves to be exploited is pretty blurred.