MALAWI JOURNAL PART ONE
It wasn’t really part of the picture in my head of what it would be like to come to Africa: grey skies, frequent rain, sometimes torrential, sometimes just a soft, intermittent drizzle. Shivering beside a one-bar electric heater, wearing two jumpers. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that we’re not in a holiday bungalow in Kerry, or on a washed-out camping holiday in Brittany. Or I just look out the door, at the rust-red earth.
That was the first thing, first impression of Malawi. Red. We flew into a low sun and a wide flat landscape, all red dust and shadows, one stark outcrop of mountain looming behind Blantyre’s tiny airport. Getting out of the plane on the single airstrip, we were hit by the hot, dry African air, and walked with the straggling crowd over to the wood and pre-fab airport. One section of it had a balcony, on which a crowd waited as if to greet a triumphant sports team on their return. They didn’t cheer for us, just kept waiting. A couple of men roared and laughed and hugged each other greetings, even before we reached the immigration queues. They seemed to be congratulating each other on getting home. We waited there, clutching our passports and the forms we had filled in on the plane. As we got towards the front of the left-hand queue, I realised that this one had a sign affixed to the table at its head. VIPs. The sign on the right-hand one said OTHERS. I looked at the other people in the line with me, and decided that they were ignoring it too. The French man in a suit who we had noticed in Johannesburg was there ahead of me. I shrugged to myself and decided to be a VIP. There was, however, a moment of paranoid fantasy when I thought of what I’d put on my immigration form. Under “Occupation”, I hesitated, then wrote “Writer”. I thought since I had quit my job in the bookshop, and would not be, strictly speaking, employed while we were in Malawi, it could be argued that what I was doing, what I was occupied with, was being a writer. Research and that. I did it a little self-consciously, but it was better than “Unemployed”, and, I hoped, more accurate than “Recently ex-Bookseller”. But then I pictured the stern faced official in short sleeves, sweat-stained, hard-eyed, looking from my form up to me, and back down.
“A writer, eh? You come to make trouble for our government here? You write lies about our country, muzungu?”
And then I would be dragged away to be interrogated in a windowless room, maybe thrown in a cell with only a bucket and days scratched off the wall in fives for decoration.
Of course not. Nothing of the sort. Malawi’s not that kind of country. At least, not anymore. The puppet ruler installed by the British after Malawi gained independence in the sixties, Hastings Banda, went on to become Supreme Dictator For Life, his own minister for foreign affairs, education, the interior, his picture on every school-room wall, every shop counter. Under his regime, writers, teachers, thinkers, and other sorts of trouble-makers were often thrown in prison for no particular reason. And women were forbidden by law to wear trousers, or skirts above the knee, men to have long hair. He was only finally ousted in 1994, and, shortly thereafter, died. Even then, thinking that anyone would be remotely interested in a scruffy young Irish girl who thinks she’s a writer is probably more delusions of grandeur than paranoia. But we’re lucky that way. We’ve come to a country that is not war-torn, or in the throes of a military coup. Their problems here are mere extreme poverty, misuse of resources, AIDS, and good old-fashioned corruption. Perhaps the democracy is still struggling to find its feet after Banda, and then another ten years of one-man government with fascist overtones (Banda’s successor, Muluzi, claimed he was taking over from a man who fostered a cult of personality. And then went on to put his own face on every single bank note and coin that’s worth a damn. It’s still there, though he is no longer in power).
Our first experience of Malawian bureaucracy, however, was pretty positive. A mess with our itinerary had stranded us in Johannesburg, after a fairly unpleasant 11 hour flight (immense woman beside me, overflowing her seat, guy in front of me who slammed his seat back as far as it would go the minute he could. And he had no ears, so what could I do?). The Air Malawi desk opened, casually, late. There were a few Malawians around who immediately began enquiring about our business, friendly and nosy. You missed your South African Airlines flight to Lilongwe? Oh yes, we might be able to fit you in on a flight to Blantyre. There is another one from there to Lilongwe. Small plane. Maybe it’s full, maybe not. Can’t really say. We decided we’d chance it. Might as well get into the country on schedule, even if we had to spend a night in Blantyre (the major city in the south, named after the birthplace in Scotland of David Livingstone, one of the earliest European explorers of the region). We had heard bad things about Johannesburg, and even the airport was all vaguely unpleasant. Hard to say why. I think it felt like no particular country. There were people around of all colours and nationalities, though the majority of the travellers looked European, and the porters, of course, were all black. The most pleasant part of it was the Johannesburg International Smokers’ Lounge, where I spent a tranquil few minutes in luxurious couches with chilled-out electronic music and relaxed looking travellers sipping cocktails and puffing luxuriously on their fags or cigars. Damn. Quite a contrast to Ireland these days. I felt like I had walked into a secret private club of exquisite decadence, while outside in the dingy canteen area, Patrick and Frérérique chewed polystyrene fast food and talked listlessly over a drone of generic pop music. I knew being a smoker was cool. I suppose the South Africans agree with me.
As we stood in the immigration queue in Blantyre then, our immediate future somewhat muddy, a radiantly smiling young woman in an Air Malawi uniform floated down the queue, calmly asking who was flying on to Lilongwe. We explained our situation anxiously, and she just carried on smiling. Oh, there should be no problem. And, as it happened, there wasn’t. We went through immigration to the check-in area, where we waited a few minutes, and then the same young woman waved us forward to put through our luggage. No problem. After a few minutes standing around in a departure lounge that bore a striking resemblance to the bar of a local GAA hall in the west of Ireland, we were asked to come out to where they were loading the luggage and point our stuff out. So they put it on. It was endearingly daft.
The little propeller plane was maybe a 30 seater, maybe even smaller. The inside looked like it was wall-papered, and smelled of sweating people. Outside my window, the propeller started up, and night fell fast over the red landscape. It was six o’clock. By the time we were in the air, there was total darkness. Blantyre was just a scattering of lights. I drank a Carlsberg Special Brew (made in Malawi!), and tried not to listen to the two Americans across the aisle, a loud young woman who’d come here with the Peace Corps and ended up staying, trying to set up a business exporting “local crafts, made by women”. Hmm. And some guy doing some other thing. Landed in Lilongwe in total darkness, in a small, clean, empty airport that could have been anywhere. On the door, a half torn-off sticker proclaimed this a corruption free zone.
We sped through the dark in two taxis, under a lot more stars than we’re used to. The sides of the road were wooded and dark. We didn’t pass anything that resembled a city at all, let alone a capital city. Then in an area of quiet, walled-in villas, we found our hotel, The Korea Garden. Interesting choice. It cut the culture shock a bit though. As we sat by the pool that evening on a roofed-in open terrace, eating whatever was left in the kitchen (we had ordered a whole range of their African-style Korean dishes, only for the waiter to come back twenty minutes later and tell us that there was none of the things we’d ordered left), with fifties rock’n’roll playing over satellite radio, there was very little clue to what country we were in. The staff were all African, though there was an Indian looking guy working there too, who told me he was Malawian, so it’s not that simple. The setting could have been Turkey, Thailand, or Texas. I suppose that’s what hotels are there for too. To extend the vague non-place of the airport, the motorway; to insulate you from uncomfortably specific sights and sounds. In the rooms, South African cable TV and stale-smelling mosquito nets. One of the channels showed reruns of English Premiership matches from a few months ago. Fred and I sat by the pool and drank more Carlsberg Special Brews. They cost 100 Kwacha. That’s about 60cents. And Hassan, the Indian Malawian (who spoke with a London accent and dressed in baggy sportsgear), told me that was pretty expensive. He’d been studying in England, and was back to set up a computer repair and internet consulting business. He was fat, and chainsmoked, and kept on playing with his mobile phone. Not very typical. Though the majority of Malawi’s exports are tobacco (70%), he wouldn’t go near the cigarettes made here. He thought I was making a joint when he saw me rolling a cigarette. Only old people or extremely poor people roll their own here. Well off city kids like him only smoke imported stuff, Peters (Peter Stuyvesant), Bensons or the like. Chances are they’re made in South Africa from Malawian tobacco. The good quality stuff is exported, only the rougher tobacco kept to make the ubiquitous Embassy Kings.
Next day the blazing sunlight and turkeys strutting and gobbling around the pool as we ate breakfast made things a little stranger. We were practically the only people there, it seemed. We realised afterwards that the other guests, more used to the short African days, just ate breakfast earlier and turned in earlier, so we didn’t see much of them. There was a Dutch looking guy, alone, skulking around like a spy, a few young, yuppie-in-shorts-ish English people having dynamic discussions around sheets of figures, cutting each other off with mobile phonecalls. NGO workers, getting things done, or the vanguard from opportunistic multinationals, getting ready to sell moisturiser and low-fat spreads to the Africans. Breakfast was fried potatoes and sweet potatoes, refried beans, and made to order omlettes or scrambled eggs, with peppers and onions chopped into them. So I felt a bit like I was eating Mexican, except that it was served by these slender, silent Africans who stood to attention all around. They were solemn and shy, and would say “Hello ma’am” if I said hi to them. I felt embarassed to ask for anything.
This would be a recurrent discomfort. Every time you ask for a drink, or say hello to the guy at the gate as you pass, part of you wants to apologise, to say no, sorry, I didn’t mean to oppress you or anything. Excuse me, was the way I ordered a beer just there a little imperialist? Was I patronising and racist when I asked you to repeat your name three times because I couldn’t understand your accent? And his name turns out to be Christopher, or Francis, or Wilson (that particular guy’s father fought in WWII and he was named after an English fellow soldier). But then you stamp on that stupid part of yourself, the ridiculous politically correct wimp that anyone with any kind of education in the West gets implanted in them in early childhood. You end up strangling that as much as you can, and keep saying to yourself, with relief, that it’s not as if we’re English. Or American. Or French, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian, German, Dutch…… we never conquered anyone, never oppressed anyone. No! We’re like you! Dirt poor rural country, conquered by the English, made to speak their language….. it’s a stretch, but it’s funny how often I find myself telling people in Malawi about Ireland in terms of the things the two countries (or at least Ireland several decades ago and the Malawi of now) have in common, rather than the differences.
The gate rolled open, and we walked out into the hot, bright, dusty day. Down this suburban looking street, all walled gardens, dry grass verges, deep ditches. There were people walking around, wheeling bikes, carrying tools. They were all black, and all looked like they were the people who did the gardening in this part of town, or delivered the groceries. People stared at us with frank curiosity. When we reached the main road, there were people everywhere. The road was in good condition, but there were no footpaths, just red dust and deep channels for run-off water. There weren’t exactly crowds, but on either side of the road, people walking, carrying things in their hands or on their heads, on bikes, sitting in the shade under trees, chewing at the splintered end of a long stick of sugar cane, burning little piles of the cane, sending off sweet woody drifts of smoke. The men were dressed in Western clothes, sometimes suits, more often shirts and trousers, rarely enough t-shirts, almost never shorts. Though the clothes always looked a bit second-hand, we were surprised by how smartly people were dressed in general, in intention if not exactly in effect. The women were usually dressed more traditionally, in brightly coloured wrap-around skirts, headscarves, sometimes with a baby in a sling on their backs. And enormous sacks on their heads. There were covered stalls here and there, selling fruit (but only one fruit, like piles and piles of bananas, or rows of bright melons), clothes, tools. The traffic on the road was made up almost entirely of rickety mini-van taxis, jammed to the doors, often with messages like “Jesus Saves!” painted on the sides. There weren’t really any buildings by the road, just dry grass, then grey-green scrubby trees. Some of them had posters stuck to them, advertising gospel choir concerts, or religious meetings. Sometimes, signboards nailed to the trees bore nothing but the chapter and verse of a bible quote. “JOHN 3:16”, and that lot.
At an intersection, we headed left towards what we thought must be Lilongwe Old Town. Along this road, there was more activity, more stalls, more people, more modern buildings. The Department of Agriculture, just a group of long, one-story buildings set back from the road. The main post office. At the side of the road, things were getting crowded. And we stuck out so much. Six tall white people, the only ones visible. There were food stalls, things sizzling in oil on metal drums, billowing smoke. Hand-painted signs advertised internet cafés and mobile-phone shops. A guy in a Jesus t-shirt started chatting to Fred, introducing a couple of others, asking if he was interested in coming to see the stuff that the guy made, and buying some. He was pleasant enough, but we still politely declined, and ducked into a supermarket out of the bustle and the heat. And then suddenly you’re just anywhere again. Under the flourescent lights, in the wide clean aisles of another non-place. To remind ourselves where we were, we bought Sobo Ginger Ale, and checked out the prices of the Malawian gin, which is apparently famous. Outside again, some guy gives us a thumbs up. Yeah, ginger ale! It’s good stuff, it’s special! But wouldn’t they rather drink Coca Cola? Fanta’s pretty popular too. Funny that, I only ever associated it with Irish corner shops and Nazi Germany.
By the time we got back to the hotel, we were exhausted. From what? Strolling a little, buying a drink, popping into an internet café? The heat? The strangeness? I think it was a bit of everything, and also the fact that the day before we had travelled for over twenty four hours. There wasn’t really a time difference, but it felt like there was. Night fell like a curtain at six o’clock. The hotel bar by the pool was closing by half nine, and the staff were hanging around waiting to go home. So we hurried to bed. I hope some day I’m staying in a place expensive enough, in a style to which I am sufficiently accustomed, that I can unashamedly order room-service. One day. Fred and I had planned to go out exploring again before nightfall, but a power nap turned into a serious siesta, and then a full-blown snooze. When we got up, there was nothing to do but go sit by the pool in the cool evening air, drink beers, and listen to old rock’n’roll.
We were picked up the next morning by a mini-bus sent from the university. The driver, Joshua, was silent and serious, a bloom of blackened scarring on one side of his face. The road out of Lilongwe was strewn on both sides with shacks and shops and smoky cane-fires. Crammed mini-buses, pickups with people sitting or standing all around the edges on the back. The shacks and huts that clustered along the road were often grass-roofed, or topped with corrugated iron, and made of orange bricks. Often we passed half-built houses, or half fallen down, and it was hard to tell which were which. There were piles of the bricks, great square blocks of them, pits full of them. Scaffolding of uneven branches creaked around large buildings under construction, weirdly modern-looking to be emerging from such rough chrysalises. All along the road, there were people walking, people on bikes, sitting under trees. Carrying, walking, walking. All the everyday things you have to do, going to the shops, to work, to school, to buy or sell a thing you have to carry, and all of it miles along this road. Some of them would have walked miles just to get to the road. The one good road, running North-South along the spine of the country. Almost every other road is rutted, twisted, narrow red dirt. You barely see them as you pass on the main road. Down those roads, far from powerlines and thundering cargo trucks. That’s where people live. You wouldn’t know it though. We didn’t know it yet.
Tiny boxy shops on either side in the areas preceded by the warning signs: SLOW DOWN, MAJOR TRADING AREA AHEAD. Coffin makers, who do a sideline in furniture. You get the impression that there’s more call for boxes to be buried in than things to sit on. There’s always the red dust for that. Sit on it, end up in it. Tuck shops and battery chargers, business colleges that look like sheds, churches that look like business colleges. Lots of churches. Beyond the trading centres, the land was flat and wide, and all burnt gold grass and red earth. Twisted trees, hump-backed skinny cattle grazing, goats and chickens in between the ranshackle huts in clusters by the roadside. Bars and bottleshops. Anyone’s Shop Number 4. Billboards with glossy coffee coloured people with European features and straight hair, advertising condoms and vasectomies, and soap and mobile phones, telling people to “Be. Free.”. On the sides of tiny huts, painted flaking murals advertising Coca-Cola, or Malawi Tea. How did they convince people to give up the side of their house to advertising? Did they pay them? How much is a Coke ad worth?
We passed through check-point manned by police, and soldiers with machine guns, but they always waved us through, sometimes even smiled. Sometimes the checkpoints had signs beside them indicating their corporate sponsors. There was a big one in Jenda, a strip of road jammed on either side with market stalls, shops, mechanics, buses arriving and departing. It looked like a refugee camp. We got out there to stretch our legs and buy some fried potatoes from a guy who sizzled them in oil gathered in a dip in the big metal dish over a fire that made up his stand. We had to get some from the guy beside him too, to be fair. They gave them to us in plastic bags, crusted with salt. Joshua had some too, “with salad for me” he muttered as I bought them. He had stopped earlier to buy two skewers from a guy who held them up on the roadside, each one with five or six tiny plucked and roasted birds on them. He ate them whole, crunching the bones and licking his fingers. We watched him from the back, queasily fascinated. Fred and I both, we agreed later, had kind of fancied trying one.
As we started to get further into the Northern Region, the landscape changed, from the flat and dry savannah plains to rolling hills and forest, great rocky outcrops protruding out of the landscape, isolated island-mountains, sometimes with a line of wide-topped trees silhouetted along the sides. A scampering group of animals burst out of the trees onto the road ahead. At first I thought they were deer, or antelope, but realised the scale and the gait was wrong: five or six monkeys, gone as soon as seen. As we got higher on the plateau, the air got a little cooler, the roadsides lusher, greygreen, forest. Sometimes planted rows and rows of pines, sometimes older, gnarled and twisted trees, plunging into valleys where rivers twinkled between the curves of the land. There were people pushing bikes up and down steep hills, loaded with square towers of chopped wood six feet high and more, balanced and tied on the crossbars.
Then we were in Mzuzu. Glimpses of a sprawling market of close-packed, semi-covered stalls, a tiny airstrip, and then we turned off the road (the sole, solitary road) into a walled, secluded compound. Mzuzu University, where Patrick’s going to be working, teaching a Master’s seminar in Theology and Philosophy. Inside feels completely different from the sprawling ramshackle dirt-track grass-hut life outside. Granted, once you go beyond the cluster of low buildings with covered walkways between them that make up the university itself, the roads are red dust once again, and yes there are black hens and roosters strutting around through all the staff and faculty houses, clucking and crowing from dawn to dusk, but the students are dressed more or less like students anywhere, playing pool in the bar, hanging out on the library steps, checking the notice boards for exam time-tables and club meetings. They glanced at us as we passed, interested, but not too much. At our large, concrete floored bungalow, in the shade of tall eucalyptus trees, our cook Agnes had tea ready when we arrived.
MALAWI JOURNAL PART TWO
The weather here in the northern region of Malawi is as chilly and changeable as an Irish summer. Grey skies and mist, suddenly clearing to bright sunlight, then quickly darkening as persistent drizzle sets in. Sometimes for a whole morning rain hisses endlessly down, a sheet of it across the front porch of the house. It’s pleasant to sit out there for a few minutes, drinking coffee, but this is no tropical rainstorm. It’s cold. We’re in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere winter, which here is supposed to be the dry season. Not this year, it seems. The Malawians don’t like the cold, and the rain, to add insult to injury, is completely useless. The harvest is long over, and now all it does it wet the firewood, the maize stores, wash the soil into ruts and mud on the dirt roads. The red soil is sandy and dry though, so the rain often just leaches through or runs off it. There isn’t much mud. To be honest, it was a relief to me. Paris before I left had been almost intolerably hot, and my threshold for “intolerable” is pretty low. Anything over thirty and I just want to lie down with the curtains pulled. Here, even the starkest midday sun in harsh, and can burn, but there’s still a coolness in the air, in the shadows, that seeps quickly back out from them as soon as the sun goes down. The days seem so short. By four o’clock, the sun is slanting low, and then there’s a brief blaze of sunset just before six. By six o’clock the sun is gone, and darkness thickens in the chilly air. There was no moon when we arrived, and there are no streetlights anywhere, not even on the university campus. You walk slowly, taking your best guess at the dusty roads, dragging your feet, wary of the deep ditches that could break your leg. When you pass someone on the backroads away from the lighted buildings, you only hear them, feet hushing along in the gravel and dust, passing you like a shadow. Looking down, you see that your own white skin and pale coloured clothes have a slight ghostly shimmer to them, glowing in the very last few drops of light. A few days later, a horned moon rose over the treetops, and now it’s nearly full, and the roads are faintly silvered, moonshadows of the trees lurking at the edges, blurring into midnight ditches and undergrowth.
People here get up at about 5am, but we haven’t quite managed that. I’ve adjusted my schedule a bit to suit the daylight, and even find myself often going to bed before midnight, which I haven’t done since I was about eleven. From daybreak on, the crowing of roosters rises from all corners of the campus. Great glossy black cockerels and hens, some also black, some dappled brown and white, strut and peck and squawk between the red brick bungalows, the spiky bushes, the pines and the pungent, musky eucalyptus. We’re up on the backroad, behind us the perimeter wall of the campus. Some of the trees have redbrown bark that seems a direct outgrowth of the red earth, just as the redbrick of the houses does. Between, the goldgreen grass and the greygreen leaves. Agnes, our cook, tells us that the hens and roosters wander everywhere during the day, but at evening all return to the right owners, who can tell them all apart, and know if their own are not in by nighttime.
She’s been a mine of information about more or less everything. When we first arrived, she had tea and cakes waiting for us. Then, the next morning, she was waiting to cook us our breakfast from 7am. We quickly figured out that it would be better if we sorted ourselves out for breakfast and lunch, as we’re all eating at different times anyway, and she just came to make dinner. She’s Malawian, but grew up and went to school in Zambia, and speaks very good English with a gentle, singsong accent unlike that of other people here. She’s in her late thirties, and lives with her children just across the campus. There’s a sort of refined air about her, which makes it odd to see her in her cook’s uniform; she’s tall and good looking, with a wry smile and frequent laugh. At first it was very odd, both with her and Zamiwe, the girl who comes every morning to make the beds, mop the smooth concrete floors, generally see if anything needs doing. I say “the girl”, but though she looks young, and is very shy with us, it turns out she’s actually older than me and has two kids. In the beginning, we weren’t sure how to act with her at all, and Patrick, making some tea, asked her if she wanted some. She seemed taken aback, and not quite sure how to react to that. Apparently, we were told later, it would be very odd to do such a thing, not only because she was working for us, but also because they’re very traditional about that sort of thing here: the men don’t tend to do anything whatsoever around the house, and for a man to be washing dishes, or clothes, or cooking seems very bizarre to them. I’m not great at the washing clothes bit (by hand, in the back garden), but it’s a fairly common sight to see one or other of the two men in our household doing one or other of those things. But we’re European, and I’m sure no eccentricity is beyond us, as far as they’re concerned.
For me, at least, there’s still an aura of embarassment around the whole situation of, what, having servants, I suppose, evidenced by my very reluctance to write the phrase. What would you say though? Call them “the help”? The cleaner and the cook? I suppose, but when you come down to it, they’re servants. And black servants, to boot. We joke about it, and make light of it, but there’s a whole lot of uncomfortable baggage about it that we can’t help having. But for them it’s just a good job to have. Fr John, who’s been living here for twenty five years, says he still can’t get used to having other people do all these little things for him, but that some people take to it much better, and will call the cook to make them a cup of tea or to get something for them, and no one thinks anything of it. That’s the way the men act in their homes, towards the women, never lifting a finger. So if you can afford to actually pay someone to do it, of course you should, and if you can get a job as a cook or gardener or nightwatchman or something, you’re doing pretty well. Best just to go with it and not be oversensitive. After all, they’re not, so isn’t it just another type of spoiled Westerner attitude, to agonise and wonder whether you should feel guilty because someone else is cooking your dinner and making your bed? Besides, we get on really well with Agnes, and she even comes to the market to help us do shopping sometimes, showing us where the best meat and vegetables are, makes sure we’re not getting ripped off. She and I text each other now, to organise what to buy for dinner and that sort of thing. I must say, I feel under pressure to make sure there’s actually something to cook every day. Because I’m the woman, I suppose. The two lads seem unbothered about it. I would feel I’d really accomplished something if one day I come back having been shopping and Agnes agrees that I managed to get a bargain.
I think you could get used to it. And other funny little things that make you feel important, like the way the security guards at the gate all salute smartly as we pass through. The oldest one, at least, does it in a sort of humorous way, shouts “Thankyou!” as he snaps off the salute. I think he can tell we find it funny too. One day when the doorhandle on one of the bathrooms here was broken, I had just finished having a shower when somebody tried the door. I shouted “Just a minute!” and came out to see Zamiwe standing there with the repairman and two of the uniformed guards. I guess if the guy is a contractor from outside, he has to be escorted on the campus or something. So she jumped and said “Oh sorry!”, and I just waved them on as I went past, sort of “No, no, not at all. Carry on.”, and went quickly (but unhurriedly) into the bedroom, making sure my towel was wrapped well around me. When I was dressed, I set myself up at the table in the living room with my laptop and a cup of coffee, to get down to some work, and a few minutes later, they all filed out past me, and the two guards saluted! Now that’s quite a thing, to be saluted as you sit drinking your morning coffee. Made me feel like a dictator or something. Not altogether unpleasant, actually.
As you pass people on the road here, it seems normal to say hello, or wave. Often, people we’ve never met will smile as we pass, say “Hello how are you?”, or answer “I’m fine and you?” to our “Howarya?”. Even when driving, more often than not, we’ll give people we pass a wave, or they’ll wave at us, particularly little children, who seem delighted by the novelty. They wave and shout, even run along the road beside us, roaring and laughing, saying “Byebye! Byebye! Byebye!” or “Howareyou howareyou?” or, less frequently, “Muzungu! Muzungu!”, which means “white person!”. Of course we attract a lot of attention; there aren’t a whole lot of white people here. We’ve been down some dirt tracks, to villages far off the roads, where, in all likelihood, no Europeans have ever been.
Sometimes, people will fall in with us as we walk, just start talking to us. “Where are you going?” “Back up the hill to the university.” “Ok. Let’s go.” And then they’ll ask all about us. What are you doing here? Where are you from? What do you think of Malawi? There’s a genuine interest in our business, but you get the feeling that people here are curious and unabashedly nosy with each other too. It’s not just our novelty value. From time to time, especially nearer the town, the guys who start chatting to you do happen to have something to sell, bracelets, little carved animals, the paintings and postcards that their cousin makes, portable versions of a popular local boardgame, whittled in dark wood and varnished. They’ll ask you if they can bring you to show you the stuff they sell, and if you say no thanks, not today, they’ll ask you when, or if they should come to your house to show you their wares. It’s not too hard to say no, if you want to. It’s harder if later, just hanging around with them and talking, they mention how many people their cottage industry supports. I have to wonder though: how can people possibly survive on selling things to tourists? Where are all the tourists? We’ve seen very few. So we’ve bought occasional bracelets, or pictures, or little carved things. Nicer to get them from one of these friendly boys who comes over and has a laugh and a joke with you, and chats about football, rather than looking in some tourist boutique for presents to take back home. This way we’ll remember where we got it. People just begging though, is actually much less common than it is in Europe. Maybe once or twice in the whole time we’ve been here: a snottynosed kid stands by the window of the parked car, staring, just moaning “Money. . . Give me money. . .”. And you just drive away.
That’s more likely to happen down in the town. People we run into on the road up here, or around the university, are usually just very interested. They’ll ask all about what we’re up to, and often, very quickly, the conversation goes onto very serious topics: politics, religion, poverty, AIDS. There isn’t much small talk; at least, in English there isn’t. You hear people chatting and bantering with each other in the local language, and it sounds like they’re talking the usual kind of bullshit, but when they talk to us, they quickly bring the conversation onto topics that would be very rare to run into first time you meet someone at home. New acquaintances will often ask what church you belong to, what your job is, whether you’re married. The religion one is hard to get used to. We’ve met almost no one who doesn’t go to church, and they look at Fred and me, baffled, when we say we don’t. But why? It’s harder than I would have thought to explain it. Patrick, on the other hand, seems to relish the question. He tells them he’s preparing for the priesthood, and they audibly gasp : some want to shake his hand, or offer their child to be blessed. Some stand back and look him up and down, measuring him for a soutane, assessing his holiness. Or otherwise.
In the north, where the missionaries settled, set up their schools and hospitals, their charitable works, most people are Christian now, CCAP (Church of Central African Presbyterians) or Catholic, with a scattering of newer, smaller churches, Pentecostal, Evangelical, that sort of thing. In the south, there are still a lot of Muslims as well. The first foreigners to arrive in Central Africa were Arabs, who set up trading posts along the lake shore, where the slave caravans would stop. Thousands of Bantu tribespeople, shackled together, marched across the wilderness, those too weak to continue left at the mercy of hunger, the animals, the elements. Then they’d pack them six deep in the holds of their dhows that sailed up the east coast, those who died left wedged among the living until they arrived at their destination. There is still a strong Arabic influence in some parts of the south, and there were many converts to Islam near the trading posts. But the spread of Islam in Malawi happened more by a sort of gradual osmosis, whereas the Christians were out here to win converts, to save them from their pagan, animist beliefs, to win them over with food, medicine, reading. It seems they won a resounding victory. The Malawi that we’ve seen is overwhelming Christian. Whenever someone talks to us about traditional beliefs, they are swift to dismiss them as “backward”, or say “people used to believe”, place it firmly in the past. It’s still there in the background though, not as far away as people try to make out.
The first evening we were here, there was a party at Father John O’Rourke’s house, to welcome us, and to say goodbye to Eimear, who had been teaching for a month at the university. John is the reason we’re here, when it comes down to it. He’s a missionary priest, of the Kiltegan order, also called the order of St Patrick, who’s lived here for twenty five years. He studied philsophy at UCC in the seventies, before he came, and has since lived and worked in several places in the north of Malawi. A few years ago, he completed a PhD, in the same cohort as Patrick, working by correspondence, and during his trips back to Ireland. Last year, he proposed that Patrick come out here to teach a course at the University of Mzuzu, where he is now a lecturer in the Philsophy department, with Eimear, another student from the same PhD group, teaching for a month before him, and Katie, again, a former PhD student of their supervisor, teaching the month after him. So Patrick decided immediately to come, and then offered me and Fred the chance to come with them. We very quickly said yes. We’ve not been able to help with much of the organisation that has gone on, as we’ve been in Paris the whole time, but Patrick would keep us updated in emails and phonecalls, and whenever I came back to visit. The idea was that if we were going to come, there’d be no point just coming as tourists. We’d heard enough from John about how things were here to know that it was not a place to come on holiday, not for six weeks. We would take the opportunity to work, to help in whatever way we could. It’s not something I think I ever would have decided to do on my own, but, given the opportunity, it was impossible to pass up. It would have been difficult to tell people that my brother had headed off to do voluntary work in Africa, while I opted to just spend yet another sweltering Summer in Paris, selling The Da Vinci Code to tourists and drinking cheap wine by the river. Though there are times when that sounds like a pretty pleasant option. I couldn’t get that long off work in the bookshop, so I just decided to quit, there and then. It made for an uncomfortable interview with Mme Chevalier, Fred’s mother, but it was soon over, and I get the feeling she is as glad to see the back of me as an employee as she is vexed that Fred and I are serious enough that he would contemplate coming with me. He’s still doing the MBA, and managed to persuade her that a Summer of aid-work in Africa would look better on his CV than yet another year manning the sales tables in the family bookshop, no matter how they dressed it up to make it look like he was basically running the place.
John was the one who organised in advance what we’d actually be doing here. I was a little wary; were people going to think we were some kind of Catholic missionaries? We’re not working for the Church here, are we? Please tell me we’re not! Once we arrived, I realised that it’s a bit more complicated than that. A lot of the aid work that goes on is organised through NGOs, and there’s a strong impression that they spend a lot of their money on seminars and conferences in big hotels, workshops and big white all-terrain vehicles: that the money is not getting directly to the people who need it. At a local community level, people who are organising themselves to combat poverty, sickness and ignorance are almost always doing it through one church or another. The Churches provide the structures and the mobilisation for community based action. They seem to do so in a very non-discriminatory fashion too; they’re not checking your affiliation or attendance record before giving you the help you need. They also seem not to be averse to working together. And even if an organisation is not overtly religious, or not specific to one denomination, it is an unavoidable part of life. Meetings start and end with prayers, God is thanked and praised regularly. Those of us for whom that is not a habit keep our mouths shut and our heads down. We’re not here to challenge people’s faith. There’s a part of me that would like to, though. Despite the obvious good work that the Churches do, in a very practical, concrete fashion, despite the deep, all-pervading belief of the people, I can’t help but feel that there’s an anaesthetic element to it, that suits those in power very well, that works to preserve the status quo. These are the poorest people, the ones with the strongest faith. But there’s an aspect of fatalism to it, this religion, of trusting so much in God that they won’t do anything themselves, of channelling so much energy into worship that could be spent in other, more practical ways. Is their faith their freedom, or is it a subtle set of chains? I can’t answer these questions, but I know they will trouble me for a long time to come.
Of course, it’s also worth remembering that Dr Banda, the President for Life, was finally ousted after an Irish Catholic priest spoke out from the pulpit against the last, most blatant of his excesses, and that the Catholic bishops mobilised the population into bringing about his removal from power and ushering in Malawi’s first multi-party elections. Religion often seems heroic when in opposition, when leading the fight against tyranny. After the balance of power has shifted though, does religion become a tyranny of its own?
It’s been a constant, for me, since we got here: the uneasiness provoked by the omnipresence of religion. But it’s humbling to work with someone like Father John, a tall man with short white hair, and a shy, slow way of speaking. His English falters, and seems to desert him a little at times. Very different from the fluent and confident way he speaks Tumbuka, the local vernacular. It would be impossible not to admire his dedication to helping others, his self-effacing modesty, his quiet wisdom. So if it’s to be through a priest that the work we do here is organised, I’m glad it’s through him. At his house that first night, we met members of the university staff, including a few Americans, Arthur and Christina Floyd, a couple in their late fifties or sixties, and Tom Conahey, from New York. There was Fairbanks Mdisi, the head of the philsophy department, some other department staff. Steven and Stella, two of John’s neighbours, a brother and sister of twenty and eighteen. We since discovered that they are two of six, all orphans, and that John basically supports them, even paying their school fees. He promised their mother before she died that he would take care of them. He doesn’t make much of it, just makes it seem a natural thing to do. There were several students from the university as well, ones that John knows through the Catholic society. We managed to sit down and start talking to them, and pretty soon the initial basic information was exchanged, names, ages, what we do (takes longer than you’d think though: the accent here makes it very difficult to catch people’s names sometimes, particularly if they’re Tumbuka names rather than English). Then they started in on religion, politics, and AIDS. Like I said, not much small talk. I encountered, early on, a pitfall that has proven frequent; in Malawi, like in much of Africa, apparently, ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds are pretty much interchangeable. So I was baffled to have Steven ask me what I thought about ‘poetics’. Bloody hell! I hummed and hawed for a minute, until he said he was particularly interested in my opinion on the Iraq war. ‘Politics’! I got it, and mumbled something fairly equivocal, about it having gone ahead despite strong opposition in the West, though few people would claim that it was a bad thing Saddam Hussein was gone. He said I wasn’t answering the question, what did I think about it? Soon after, a girl on the other side, Angela, started talking about AIDS with me, which surprised me too. Was there no reluctance to mention it? I’ve since realised that the problem is so serious as to make it unavoidable, in conversation.
John told us about the busy schedule he had set up for the following few days, our initial meetings with the groups we would be working with. One was a large Home Based Care project, run by St Augustine’s Parish, which takes care of the poor, the sick and the needy in the area, and runs an orphanage. Our main contribution to them would be some funds, and I was maybe interested in helping out at the orphanage. There was also a small Home Based Care group, in the villages far from Parish Halls and committee offices, and an AIDS support group, of openly HIV positive people, involved in mutual care and assistance, and outreach and education programmes in the wider community, an extremely rare thing. With both these groups, we would be meeting their committees, being brought to the villages to see at first hand the situation of the people that they dealt with, and gathering information with them to try and help them put together aid proposals for the NAC (National AIDS Commission). Every so often, John would say, “Oh yes, and another thing. On Saturday, you’ve got a meeting with….”. Everything was sprung on us gradually. Fred and I, it seemed, were to be teaching courses in English and Drama as well, and there were already lists of people signed up. Suddenly, we were up against it. Here you are. You’re actually going to be doing something. I’d just have to swallow my diffidence and get on with it. There was no going back now.
Later in the evening, things got a little more relaxed as the group of younger people we were talking to started to teach us a little Tumbuka, and laugh at our attempts to pronounce it. It lightened the mood considerably. There was singing, as cakes were brought in, one with WELCOME iced on it, the other with GOODBYE. I went out to the porch to smoke a cigarette, saw the watchman sitting by the gate, and the sky strewn with strange stars. I started to wonder what the hell we were doing. That feeling hasn’t gone away either.
MALAWI JOURNAL PART THREE
Across the road outside the gates of the university, minibuses pull in, waiting to fill up, the driver shouting to people to hurry along, the conductor hanging out the sliding door, pushing people in, holding the rickety door closed with one arm as they roar off, rattling and shuddering, packed to bursting. Some of them have advertisements painted on them, for mobile phone services or banks, others names or slogans; a couple with “WHY GOD WHY” across the front. Around the bus stop, there are people loitering and wandering, with bags of shopping or children in their arms, or a long sugarcane that they tear at with their teeth, spitting the splinters and pulp when the juice is sucked out of them. To the right, down the hill, you pass Luwinga, with its small market and collection of ramshackle bottleshops, bars, and even one called “Booze Place”, the turnoff to the central hospital, at the bottom of the hill, a bridge where cyclists and pedestrians take their lives in their hands on the narrow road as trucks and minibuses thunder past, horns blaring. After that, the long flat stretch of road with the airstrip on the left, where one day Fred and I saw a crowd of thousands gather, a rank of bright uniforms standing to attention, all awaiting the arrival of the plane bearing the body of the speaker of the Malawian house of parliament. He died of a heart attack in mid-session the week we arrived, as the politicians blustered and quibbled and refused to pass the budget. All state employees, teachers, civil servants, risk not being paid next year. Malawi did not qualify for debt relief. It won’t until the government gets its act together. When the road rises again, it reaches the market: hundreds of winding alleys of stalls, many of them covered, semi-permanent, bath-houses (“clean shower – male/female”), corridors of hanging clothes permeated by the slight stale smell of second-hand shops, the ghost of the sweat of people who may be dead by now. In the narrow backways of the market, tiny one-room restaurants send out smoky, sizzling smells, water slops fly out of dark doorways onto the muddy, woodenstepped lane. It’s easy to get lost in there, to get turned around so you don’t know which way is out. Stalls sell piles of tomatoes or potatoes by the heap, rather than by weight. Enormous overflowing bags of nuts, with three small sacks above, the price of each stuck to it. Thirty Kwacha this one, fifty this one. Towards the back, where there are no more wooden stalls, it opens up to what looks like an enormous carpark, and here the fruit looks more battered and dusty, the people too, sitting on the ground among their wares. At the far end, there are rows and rows of tables of greybrown dried fish, reeking, flybothered, shrivelled like the mummified pets of pharaohs. Beyond these tables, there is a main street with buildings: hardware shops, dry goods merchants, places that look like emporiums and outfitters, and provisioners and suppliers. They wouldn’t look out of place in a Wild West one-horse one-street town. Most of them have Indian names above the doors. On every footpath, at every corner, little stalls selling knick-knacks and rubbish, radios, sunglasses, arrays of machetes and axes. A meeting on the roadside: an old woman with an enormous sack balanced on her head, umbrellas across the top of it, carrying a rough newcarved handle with a billhook blade on the end, an old man in a suit with a curved back axehead set in a wornsmooth handle. They greet each other, hanging hand onto hand, examine each other’s blades approvingly, then pass on, with a laugh and murmured goodbye.
On the other side of the main road from the sprawling market, down a sharp dip, minibus after minibus turns, pulls in, pulls out, waits in line. Further along there’s a T-junction. BP station on one side, on the other side the road to Nkhata Bay, that passes the post office, some government buildings, a couple more garages, a Shoprite. At a roundabout there’s a clocktower, dainty like a minigolf hole ornament, then a couple of banks. If you turn left at the roundabout there are a few more streets of low, grubby buildings, a cash and carry, tailors and hair salons, mobile phone shops and internet “cafés”, stationers, the anti-corruption bureau, a couple of bookshops with depressingly sparse stock, most of it school books and religious texts. There’s an Indian restaurant, the Maharajah, a few bars and restaurants, one serving Swahili soup, as it’s Tanzanian. Two more things we’ve learned: the name of language that people speak, for the most part, is also the name of their tribe, and of things that come from that place; so, Swahili soup. Most of the people round here are Tumbuka by tribe, and speak Tumbuka (or ChiTumbuka). In the central region, they’re Chewa, and speak ChiChewa, which is also a national common language that everyone learns in school. Near the lake, they’re Tonga. In the south, they’re Yao. There are also some people left in this area who are Ngoni, remnants of a Zulu tribe that came from South Africa during great migrations a long time ago. Their language isn’t spoken anymore, though it remains in place names like Ekwendeni, in surnames like Ndhlovu. And the other thing: we all pronounce Tanzania wrong. People from there, and here, in their neighbouring country, say TanZAnia, rather than TanzanIa.
Most of the time though, at the gates of the university, out past the smartly saluting guards (“Good afternoon, ma’am!” . . . Ah, I’ll never tire of it), we don’t turn right down towards the town, but left, to the north. Up and down hills, along a section of road where the land falls away on either side down to terraced fields, a twinkling river, earth-drills, and greenleafed plants in rows, hoed by women with babies on their backs. In the distance, rocky outcrops and mountains fade in successive layers from green to blue to grey. The ground rises again and wraps around the road, high embankments of red earth on either side, topped off with pine woods. At one point, on the left, on a giant wooden sawhorse, a log braced across the top, two shirtless men, one above and one below, wield the twelve foot saw that rasps up and down, halfway along the log. Occasionally there are little rows of log-shack shops, some shuttered, some open. Barbers and grocers, a butcher chopping cuts of bloody meat from the hanging carcass on the porch of his little wooden box of a shop. At the bottom of another long hill, past another cluster of little stalls and shut up shops, there’s the police checkpoint. Two long boom gates with stop signs on them meet in the middle, manned by police in flourescent uniforms with traffic cones, and a soldier or two in camouflage with machine guns. The first day we passed through the barrier, it was with the three of us and Father John in his car. After going back and forth through it three times, they pulled us over and a tall policeman with a condescending tone fined John for having one too many people in the car, according to the insurance disc. He said it was the first time he’d been fined in twenty five years of living here. Since then, we’ve been renting a rattling deathtrap of a minivan, with a legal capacity of ten, which we’ve sometimes approached. They’ve become so used to the sight of us going back and forth through the checkpoint that now they wave us on ahead of whatever suspect truck or overcrowded minibus they’re examining, and give us a smile and a wave on our way past.
Beyond the checkpoint, and up the hill, we turn either right or left. The first place we saw down there, that first day, was the Dunduzu school and orphanage: low white buildings on a flat, dusty field, a round hillock with a bell hanging from a wooden frame on top, a squat bell like a saucepan, a peculiarly African silhouette. Across the field we met some people making bricks. They dig the rich red clay, from an ant-hill if there’s one handy, mix it with water, slop the wet red sludge into a wooden frame, two bricks long, slap clean the edges and turn it out on the ground. They make rows and rows of glistening soft bricks, and then either leave them to dry in the sun, covered with grass to stop the outside drying and cracking before the inside is solid, or else they cover them with grass and wood and burn them, to fire them properly and make them hard. The ones that are simply sun dried tend to crumble and melt a little in the rain, and ruins of old houses made of these cruder bricks lose their edges and their lines, fade gradually back into the red earth. We walked around the empty school buildings, peering through glassless windows at the rows of benches, the lessons written on blackboards, the dim interior of a church-house. The women and children sat in a group on the ground, on the other side of the burnt yellow field, under the wide bright sky. Some of them chewed sugarcane. John told us how to say hello to them, how to respond. Monire. Yeyo, which also means thank you. Patrick knelt down, and a tiny girl tottered over to him, and shook his hand. He spoke quietly to her. hiya. how are you? And her small solemn voice in reponse: i’mfine, andyou. The women laughed delightedly when we greeted them, and then the men explained, in halting English, their brickmaking. Here on the field, there would be more buildings for the school. These were the bricks that would make the school. We waved goodbye. Paweme. Goodbye. Paweme. Yeyo. The people we were supposed to meet hadn’t turned up. I was half-relieved. The sun-bleached distance of the huge empty afternoon, all colours faded like an old polaroid, learning hello and goodbye. It was enough.
We went back to the main road, and stopped off at Dunduzu Latrine Demonstration Site. There were a group of white people being shown around, but shortly after we got there, they piled back into a church wagon and trundled off. An old couple began to explain the project in halting English, but then a young man, Twite, bounced in and cut them off, taking over the job. They manufacture and assemble components for a variety of ecological, sanitary, environmentally and economically sound latrines to replace the traditional six or seven metres deep pits used in most villages. Their concrete cover, curved for strength, so it doesn’t need expensive metal reinforcements, is one of their main innovations. Their latrines use only two metre deep pits, into which, after each use, a handful each of ash and earth are thrown. Afterwards, depending on the sophistication of the model, a tree is planted on the nutrient rich soil left where the hole is filled in, or the soil is recovered and used as fertiliser on crops, some of the systems even separating out the urine to spread on crops as well. As far as I could see, the most significant improvement over the traditional system was that you weren’t suspended over a seven metre deep pit of shit, with only a fragile wooden frame between you and a plunge that would result in a broken neck, or a slow, hideous suffocation. Apparently, Twite informed us, it’s also handy in that you no longer tend to lose things out of your pockets down the latrine, loose change and the like. And also, because the hole is only two metres deep, women can dig them! So that’s another thing the men can stop worrying about…. He showed us simple, clever systems for washing hands, conserving water, and other practical, cheap, locally made innovations. We left wishing him luck, and chuckling a little at the fanciful names of the different models: Skyloo, Arborloo, Fossa Alterna. We met a woman then who John seemed to know. They had a brief conversation, and it turned out there’d been some misunderstanding. We’d been at the wrong place. We were supposed to have been meeting the Dunduzu Home Based Care committee, at the church in Msiki village. We were over an hour and a half late, but John just said not to worry. They’d wait. Malawians are used to waiting, and not too exact on the reckoning of time. African time, they say. You learn patience here, they say.
Up another steep and rutted red road, past a little cluster of huts that seem populated only by a mob of curious and flighty children who appear and hover on the edges of the clearing every time we arrive, daring each other to venture closer, there is the church in Msiki. In front of it, this low simple building, this church in the wilderness, are the Committee. Though we know them well enough now, at first they were a jumble of faces, weathered, dark; of rough hands eager to shake ours; of eccentric, smart second-hand suits on the men, of headscarves on the women and bright chitenje wrapped around their waists. We were welcomed, and all sat on the benches set square in the clearing, long vistas of rolling high scrubland around us, dessicated leftovers of maize crops, twisted trees. Two minutes off the road and you’re in the bush. There were speeches, introductions by John, a prayer, a welcome. People stand and sit in turn. When all is silent and no one stands up anymore, your business is over. There is clapping, in acknowledgment, agreement, thanks. The chairman, Mr Ngwira, is tall and impressive, with his corduroy suit, his round, shining forehead, angular cheekbones, his Godfather hoarse voice, his big gesturing hands. He understands English, it seems, but speaks in animated, grave Tumbuka, which is translated for us usually by Chiza Jere, a short, genial man, with bright eyes and a ready grin. He seems young, but his hair has curls of grey in it. With his broad shouldered suit, he wears sandals most of the time. The other spokesman is Cosmas Mhango, soft-voiced and gentle, hardly seeming to fill his suit; his slightly bulging eyes, his shy toothy smile somehow give him the look of a Cohen brothers character.
The Home Based Care group are organised in this area to visit the most disadvantaged, the sick, widows, orphans, people suffering from illness and disability, households where grandparents live with their widowed daughters, their grandchildren, where a middle generation decimated by AIDS has left the weakest to struggle for basic food and shelter, to huddle together in collapsing families. It’s hard to figure out sometimes whose children are whose. A woman who marries goes to live in her husband’s village. If he dies, she returns to her parents’ house, with her children, the children of her dead siblings, often with positive HIV test results of her own, with the youngest children also positive. Over the next couple of weeks, and several visits, they would bring us far off the main roads, down tracks deep-rutted and potholed, through fields with the last dry stalks of maize and tobacco left after the harvest, past flat dusty football pitches, with only leaning wooden goalposts to show their function.
In a grey morning, threatening rain, against the wall of a hut sat Freedom Moyo, fat and silent, barefoot, scraping porridge from a blackened pot. A little old grandmother huddled beside him. She has two married daughters, and him, the boy still at home. He’s thirty seven or thirty eight. He got sick when he was very young. He’s epileptic, possibly brain-damaged. He doesn’t speak. While we were there, he just looked at us, suspicious, not understanding, spooning porridge over and over into his mouth, until there was nothing left, and his mother took the pot gently from him and overturned it on the ground out of his reach. The Home Based Care committee bought him his trousers, his blanket, built a little shelter where he sleeps. When there are storms, he’s frightened, and his mother sleeps with him, to care for him. The translators told us “when the moon is going down he has fits, but when the moon is in the middle, he’s okay”. They have no income, only a poor crop of maize in poor soil, not even enough to survive. With fertilizer, they could get by, but ideally, the little grandmother would set up a grocery business, sell soap and paraffin and other essentials to neighbours, here where the nearest commerce is hours walk away. She is a tiny woman, in a headscarf and faded shirt, a jacket torn at the shoulder. She’s not sure how old she is, but Mr Ngwira said he knows she’s a little older than him – he’s known her all his life – so she must be in her sixties. We asked permission, and then took photographs of them, on Fred’s digital camera, so we could show them the picture immediately on the screen. The surprised and delighted reaction of people at seeing the “snap” of themselves will never cease to surprise and delight us, all the time we’re here. As we walked away, we briefly spoke to Winess Moyo, and her daughter, living in a bigger house nearby, who are neighbours, relations, in-laws. It’s often not quite clear what the relationship between people is. The villages are more or less extended family groups, sometimes called by the family name.
In Phiri Village, outside her tiny hut, Barbara Phiri, a young woman of haunting sadness and beauty, sat on the ground, drawing in the dust, not meeting our eyes. She’s not even thirty, but divorced with four children, and HIV positive. She said, through Chiza, that they don’t know how they will live from sunrise to sunset. Her sister-in-law approached, shyly, asking if she could speak to the Home Based Care members. They introduced her as Linda Mzilahowa, though her married name is Phiri. She had just been tested, and found to be HIV positive as well. The HBC hadn’t yet identified her as a client, or patient, but seeing us with them, visiting her village, she had decided to make herself known to them, and ask for assistance. Barbara suddenly became more animated, on Linda’s behalf, telling us that as she and her husband got sicker, they had struggled more and more, and now could barely scrape together enough to eat. The needs of these people were the most basic possible. They weren’t thinking about Income Generating Activities, or sustainability. Barbara said they needed food to eat, clothes to wear, to be able to keep clean. We took pictures, again making sure it was okay with them first. Mr Ngwira, in the group photos where he makes sure he features prominently, always poses solemnly with a finger pointing at the client. In another village a few kilometres away, we met Lucia Tembo, a tiny woman with clouded eyes, bent over double, her knees drawn up to her ears as she sat on the ground. She was born “some time before the 1940s”. She has only a few teeth left, huge holes in her distended earlobes, where there were once earrings. She only wants a mattress to sleep on, some sugar for her porridge. She said she hasn’t enough teeth left to eat her favourite foods, even if she could get them. We shook her dry, withered hands, and she laughed and murmured, clutching our hands, unable to see us. Arnold Chunda, who we visited next, sat thin and shivering, hugging himself to ward off the cold. His eyes were screwed up against the light, his teeth jutting from his mouth like fangs. He has AIDS, and is not alright. Stomach troubles, diarrhea, now TB as well. He is divorced, and now taken care of by his sister and her family, though they are also needy people, we’re told. The harvest was poor, and now they only have enough maize left to last a month. His sister used to sell beer and other bottled drinks in a little shop, but, in a story we hear over and over, the poor harvest led to them having to use all the profits of the business for food, and they fell back on bare subsistence farming.
And so it went on. Over the next few weeks, we’d meet the HBC committee at the little church at Msiki, and after all the sitting and greeting, the standing and speaking, praying and thanking, we’d pile into the rickety minivan, with Fred driving, Mr Ngwira up front to give directions, Patrick and me between the back seat and the boot, with Cosmas and Chiza, and sometimes one or two others as well. After a while, the visits begin to blur a little. Off the main road, thumping and shuddering over the slopes and holes and ruts down long dirt tracks, we’d pass little clusters of houses, some mud huts with grass roofs, some brick, occasionally a tiled roof. Arriving at the client’s home, we’d be welcomed, chairs and little stools brought out for us to sit on. Everyone had to be sitting to be properly welcomed, the people we were visiting often sitting on mats on the floor, or just on the ground. Neighbours and extended family wander over and come and shake our hands as well. Children swarm and giggle, or sit solemn and wide eyed. We’d ask about their lives, about how many people lived in their house, how many they’d lost, and how, how many children, and when they were born, how they earned money, how they just don’t have enough. Are they sick? Often this means are they HIV positive. Some of the houses are bigger, but falling into disrepair, with signs of some small prosperity, now fading. People are living in reduced circumstances; many of them used to have a trade, or a prosperous farm, but in the last couple of years have been too sick to work. Most are barely scraping enough maize from their land to survive on nsima, the local staple, that comes in lumps of thick, bland doughy stuff, eaten with a relish of meat or, failing that, of beans and vegetables. Medicine is expensive, even painkillers, which sound very cheap to us, “are expensive if you don’t have anything in the pocket”.
Towera Jere sits coughing on her porch, holding Martha, the youngest of her five children. She cannot breastfeed the child anymore, she has no milk left, no money to grind maize at the mill. Her other children went to school today without eating.
Emerida Nirenda sits in a corner of their house, staring at the ground. Her mother, Esther Chiuma comes in, shakes all our hands, says “amama” and “adada” to us, mother, father. She speaks for her daughter, says see, she always looks like this, she cannot even show she is happy you are here. Her husband is dead. Chiza translates her mother’s words: We can be two on this earth and one can pass away, but we must not stay sad for so long.
Erivas Mzumara comes to their house to talk to us. She tells us the chain of relationship can help one another like a bicycle chain is doing. She has to beg for food from people who have little more than she does. She has no husband now, she only goes hoeing in the garden, to grow a little cassava or sweet potato, and always maize. Maina Moyo enters here as well. Esther speaks for her when her memory fails. Esther is the only one here who went to school. Maina’s husband died many years ago, after going out drinking and falling asleep by the side of the road, too weak to get home. She had her first child in 1966. She laughs at our disbelief, and says if a person has a slim body or is not tall, it takes a long time to look old. She has ten children.
Alex Msiska, one of the local chiefs, tells us the HBC group are only barely better off than the people they are visiting. As a chief, he helps co-ordinate their efforts, trying to take care of the orphans, build solid houses with good thatched roofs, proper latrines. But he is HIV positive too, as is his wife. He can no longer work as a bricklayer. There are seventeen people living in his house. His wife is reduced to going to the police checkpoint to beg.
Grace Luwe comes after school to the meetingplace at Msiki, and we sit on the grass with her to talk. She is 18, and HIV positive. With lowered eyes, she tells us about the isolation she suffers in school, even in her village, the insults and the prejudice. There are no secrets here. One day she would like to be a nurse. If she can continue her education. Later we learn more of her story. Her mother was very sick a couple of years ago, and went to an African doctor for treatment, an important and influential practitioner of traditional medicine and magic. He admired the young girl, and perhaps there was talk of marriage, or simply payment. She ended up sleeping with him and contracting HIV. People think you can get AIDS from touching those who have it. They think you can cure it by sleeping with a virgin. You end up with Grace, who is no longer a virgin, who is untouchable.
