What leads a person who is about 30 years
older than the typical student to the shores of Lake Malawi, doing an
internship? Well, it is my late discovered passion for the underwater world and
its fauna which caused me to get down to Marine Science studies two years ago
and to realise a personal dream.
My name is Alexandra and I live in Munich
in landlocked Germany. In order to collect more practical field work experience
in the course of my studies, I searched for opportunities in an interesting
part of the world and applied for a three months internship with The Maru
Research Center located in Kande Beach. So
here I am, landed in a true paradise, trying to put the impressions and
experiences of my first three weeks in words.
One of the first surprises was – and still
is every time I go in the water – that I’m living at a lake and not an ocean.
The endless water surface, the waves, the wind and the sandy beach feel so much
like living at the sea, and even after these three weeks I still expect to
taste salt water when I go swimming or diving.
There are so many things that I learned to
love here and already start to miss today. Let me name the top three: Going out
to my daily walks to carry out survey tasks in the fisher village and at the
two rivers we are monitoring means getting a taste of the local life and chatting
with amazingly friendly Malawians in my unfortunately very limited Chitonga
knowledge or in English. The second highlight is diving and doing surveys near
Kande Island, which is situated around 1 km from the beach and is the habitat
for these incredibly diverse, colourful cichlids, the main reason why I came
here. This is my first fresh water diving experience and it is decisively my
first experience to go diving using a canoe! Last but not least, my
participation in the establishment and monitoring of an artificial reef, a
brushpark, which aims to create a new habitat for breeding, shelter or
harvesting purposes.
Of course, no paradise is perfect in every
respect and some of the downsides are the strong winds that turn the interior
of my lovely hut into a beach, or the lake flies that are regularly blown in
large clouds across the lake that enter every little gap and leave a black
carpet behind. But all these little inconveniences can’t spoil the pleasure to
be here – it’s Africa!
