Archive for the ‘africa’ Category

Monday June 22, Mabuya, Lilongwe (early evening)

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

To the Immigration Office today to extend our Visas. The Office, settling in comfortable on my list, right next to bus-depots and prisons made out of fire and acid, as my least favorite places to be in Malawi. I should not speak ill of their impermeable disinterest however, as it came to the service of one of the team members who, forgetting all warnings, let it slip that she was working as a volunteer down in Mulanje. This could have easily put all of us in jeopardy as we are all here under the pretense of tourist Visas and the government has been on an arresting/ deporting spree, busting people here working without the proper documents. Anyway, I will be here legally through my departure on the 30th. Picked out some fabrics from my family at the markets, and grabbed some gifts for Christine, who took of today, to take back to hers. Falk also took off back to Frankfurt. I have spent most of the day tired, and plan to ride that out into the early night, at which point I will go to bed and “X” off another day in Malawi.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Sunday June 21, Mabuya, Lilongwe (afternoon)

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

I have been reading back over my earlier notes, transcribing them for my blog, and it is remarkable the way your perceptions of things can shift. I read an entry from my first time returning to Liliongwe from the Lake, how dispiriting it felt then, how unhappy I was to be back, and how uncomfortable I felt to be here. Every subsequent return has felt like a homecoming. It is, of course, the same city. The life of it no longer offends me though. It is a familiar place, comfortable. I have learned how to be here, and this place was my first teacher. Harsh perhaps, but not without compassion. Re-writing these earlier apprehensions now, what is to become the public record of my time here, is startling – embarrassing even. “They will think that I am miserable. That this place is horrible.” Forgetting that this is a narrative, and that they wont know what I know now for some time still. In the narrative it is only just June. I am at the Lake, peaceful and serene, reading a different book than the one I am reading now, and just beginning to discover this country. I am not learned now, no expert, but journeyed. The traveler is transformed. “I is not Me.” -Rimbaud. I is someone else entirely. Back again where I started, but never the same. The travel narrative is familiar and over-explained, over-celebrated, and over-written. I am back in the same place where I was once miserable and happy for it. Any place, no matter how exotic, how alien, if we go there is only ever ours. My Malawi has changed much in a month, but this change arises from its developing familiarity. I ever I have done a poor job describing anything, I apologize. Who’s trip has it been after all?

PICASA PHOTOS

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Saturday June 20, Zomba, Mini-Bus (afternoon)

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Sitting on the (supposed) mini-bus to Lilongwe. Will depart in something like 4 hours, so there is some time to be murdered. How about a parade of the goofy and amazing names so far encountered in Malawi: Trouble, Kilometer, Wonderful, Coconut, Banana… Bus depots are my least favorite places in this country. Zomba is the best so far, but still full of the same hasslers, hustlers, hucksters. Thinking does not happen in these places… Not for anyone.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Friday June 19, Zomba, Masuku Lodge (night)

Monday, August 10th, 2009

:::AFTER A LONG DELAY WE ARE ENTERING THE LAST LEG OF THE JOURNEY:::

Had a jovial dinner with the sisters at Providence last night. Ben slept through the affair, which was unfortunate for him because Sister January makes some of the best fried dough in Malawi. They all complimented me on my Chichewa and informed me that I “am a Malawian now”. Achemwene Andrew, Brother Andrew. Chicken, nsima, goat, chinese greens, and salad. Pineapple and fried dough for dessert. Today we traveled with Falk to Zomba and met with the scholars here. 9 girls. They seem to be in a very different situation, socially, emotionally, and academically than the girls at Providence. Mulunguzi is a government run school, good, but over-populated- 730 students in a school for 400. By Malawian standards, not so bad. One advantage they do have here, besides the city of Zomba itself and all it resources and beauty that lacks in 90% of the rest of the country, is an English teacher and mentor named Matilda. She is a delightful and impressive woman, exceptionally progressive, educated at Providence, teaching full-time while getting her Masters in education at Chancellor’s College. She works with all of the AGE scholars here in Zomba, and is undoubtedly their single greatest resource. She invited Falk, Katie, Ben, and myself over for tea at her house after our meeting with the scholars. Even her modest home, part of the staff housing at Mulunguzi, was a marked departure from the Malawi I have come to know in my travels. Cute and tidy, structurally on par with public housing in the United States, which is a classless appraisal of form rather than the emotional statement it could be read as. By far the nicest, homiest home I’ve set foot in so far. Met up with the entire team again after tea at the Masuku Lodge, shared dinner, drinks, and stories of the previous week. Ben told us about an accusation of witchcraft that has been made against a teacher at Providence who is alleged to have transformed 12 children into snakes and lizards so they could sneak out of their homes in the middle of the night, take them to the top of Mt. Mulanje where they would then fly an invisible airplane to Mozambique where they would spend the night playing football with someone’s head, have an early breakfast of corpses, and fly back home before school then next morning. This literal and fantastic fear is held by educated adults at one of the best schools in Malawi in 2009. A figure that snapped this supposed education into a grim new perspective for me I got the other day. We had met with the Dean of a nursing college nearby Providence the other day. He informed us that they had been having lots of trouble (mavuto) finding candidates with high enough marks to meet the criteria for admittance, and had actually had to appeal to the government to allow them to lower their standards. He said that they used to require scores of 6 or lower in both science and math, but had recently lowered it to require a 6 in one and a 7 in the other. At the time he was saying all of this I was unfamiliar with the scoring system in Malawi, so I merely nodded my understanding. Ben later broke the scores down for me like this: 1,2: Exceptional / 3,4,5,6: Credit / 7,8: Pass / 9, 10: Fail. Which doesn’t mean terribly much until you find out that a score of 6 is 55% correct! This nursing school, that appears to have excellent facilities, is struggling to find applicants far below failing by an American grading scale. I also learned that there are only about 2,000 – 3,000 University slots open a year in the entire country! These are selected out of a pool of 12,000 to 15,000 applicants. Futures appear to be tough to come by here.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Wednesday June 17, Providence, Mulanje (night)

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

The amount of Coca-Cola you end up drinking here is really perverse. The lesser of the two reasons for this is that it is cheaper than bottled water. The greater of the reasons for compulsive Coke intake is that it is A) one of the few things that you will ever find refrigerated, and B) lacking in other nutrition, it’s sugary calories have all the effect of a well-rounded multi-vitamin. To describe the amount of sugar in the average diet out here would give me diabetes for sure. Lollipops are the hot new fix, peddled at markets and mini-bus parks across the country, creating, overnight, a nation of grown men with colored plastic stick protruding from their syrupy pink and purple rimmed mouths. The intake is primarily of the crystallized, carbonated, or candied varieties since baking, and by extension pastries have not really caught on here. There is no complexity to the cuisine here at all. Ingredients are either chopped or eaten whole by themselves, at most heated and put on or near nsima or rice. It is not that Malawi lacks ingredients, there are whole worlds of possibility with the locally grown items available, what they lack is food consciousness. The makings of a solid burrito (minus, and admittedly a big minus, the Malawian equivalent of a flat-bread or tortilla) are cheaply at hand in every market in the country. They don’t do sandwiches. They don’t do cornbread in spite of the abundance of corn. They don’t do cheese in spite of the abundance of goats. In rural areas meat is only eaten on special occasion. Most of what is grown: avocado, garlic, eggplant, pineapple, papaya, tangerines, are never eaten by their growers or vendors, or utilized in cooking. Why eat well any day of the week when they can just eat nsima with pigeon peas and survive? So much possibility is so close at hand but never reached for. Not the case with the hundreds of outstretched hands asking the uzungu for money. Learn how to feed yourselves a well rounded meal first.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Wednesday June 17, Providence, Mulanje (afternoon)

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

We visited a CDSS (Community Day Secondary School), the optional leg of the Malawian education, it costs almost nothing, and is beyond the scope of what most families can afford. As with the village yesterday, there is a lot of sugar-coating and starry-eyes, comments bordering on patronization. We marvel at the absolute lowest levels of operation and champion the success, forgetting that if this minimal amount of operation was not present, there would only be dysfunction and non-life. The social biologies are not completely below praise, within them you find optimistic and happy people, people that are alive basically. For Westerners, I think, we come here and see all this life so close to the line and think that these people are somehow more connected to life because, to us, they appear to live some much closer to death, oblivious to the life that we ourselves must necessarily posses. Being death-rich does not make you life-rich. For us I feel it is just a television show with a cast of suffering and smiling people, miraculously making a go of it despite the absence of pizza and bus-schedules. These people are not more special, more precious, than us or anyone else. They are not less intelligent, not more focused, harder working, not tougher, or more sensitive, just a different system in a different set of circumstances. Different but living also. Living without much. After the CDSS we went up to the Mulanje Mission Hospital, one of the most maintained facilities I’ve seen so far in Malawi. They have a large HIV/AIDS clinic because of the exceptionally high prevalence in Malawi, specifically here in the southern region. We were greeted by the administrator and shown a PowerPoint presentation about their finances and facilities. I do not yet miss things back home (aside from friends) per se, but I do miss access to the following things should I want them: real hot showers, a tall latte, fresh muffins, good toast, red peppers, a soft bed, cheese, and burritos, oh and the most serious of all; milkshakes! I could really go for a milkshake …chocolate is hard to come by here. Yeesh, maybe this has gotten more serious than I thought…

PICASA PHOTOS

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Tuesday June 16, Providence, Mulanje (night)

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Today Falk, Katie, and I ventured into Idah’s village with Ezaius and Vitema to meet Idah’s family and get footage for the CBS piece. The turn-off for her village is only a short mini-bus ride away from school, but a 20 minute ride along dirt roads from there, accessible only by bike taxi or foot. Far in is Idah’s family compound, a small collection of hut houses where she lives with her Mother, two sisters, two brothers, an aunt, her grandfather, grandmother, two babies, two cows, some goats, and some chickens. Everything is utilitarian. There is no flourish or decoration to anything. Plastic basins, blank walls, empty rooms, tin plates. There is only family and labor. We were fed a meal of nsima and pigeon peas. We had brought in some eggs and vegetables, but had to leave before it got dark so were unable to partake in them for dinner. Idah apparently makes a special dish with onions, tomatoes, and peas. After lunch Idah took us up the street to introduce us to her mentor from primary school. Language was a significant barrier in a place this rural. We were almost completely to communicate with Idah’s family without her as a translator. We ended up playing some pickup football with a bunch of kids from the village. Falk walloped some poor kid square in the face with a mighty kick. I am out of process power. I know there is much more to report, but I am overloaded from the day. Until I have half a brain back, it was incredible to be afforded the opportunity to experience a life so different from any that I have lived. Katie and Falk viewed it all with stars in their eyes, for me it was not as uplifting. It was not a depressing experience wither however. What I saw today was simply a slice of a life much different from mine. The light shining through was the fundamental humanity at the base of all human communities, beautiful in it’s simplicity.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Sunday June 15, Providence, Mulanje (night)

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Met up with the camera guy, Ezaius, the fixer CBS hired here in Malawi for the piece on Idah. We caught a ride down to Mulanje with him and his partner Vitema in a rented car. It felt like another return home, and I realized suddenly that this place has become my whole reality, no longer just a place I simply am. Riding down in a private car, three whites, driven by two blacks, we had our first experience being hassled by the corrupt police. They feel like the whites must A) have money and B) be more than willing to spend it than waste time being hassled. They find some bullshit to hold us up, say we cannot possibly continue on unless… Ezaius was very mad, and I take it not a guy used to bending over or being pushed around. He’s a Rastafarian, and was fired from the national paper in Malawi for insubordination. He told the traffic police what for, but still ended up having to cough up 6000mk because the rental company had different colored tags than the police wanted to see on our vehicle that day. Ezaius is a ver y interesting cat, and a great travel guide. After being fired from the paper he formed a journalist collective with some other friends in Liliongwe. In addition to the hired work, he shoots his own stories and documentaries. The first kindred spirit I feel I’ve met on this trip. He was brimming with facts and history about Malawi, the landscape, the culture, the government, very astute, a humanist, and all around stand up guy. It was just very refreshing to be able to talk to someone, a Malawian, only sharing information and laughs. He joined us for dinner under the church (Vitema felt he required meat, Ezaius is a vegan) and the two of us stepped outside and spoke about our mutual mistrust and disrespect of organized religions. He is also a musician, so we chatted about music. I copied some Thomas Mapfumo, and Dillinger onto a flash drive for he and Vitema to play in the car on their drive back. All the girls at Providence giggled and waved hello to see me back. A couple approached me and said that I was in trouble for not telling them that I was leaving last time. I told them I was sorry, but that I’d soon be leaving again. They said that was fine since they were going on break anyway and wouldn’t be around. Today was their last day for a week.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Sunday June 14, Kiboko Hotel, Lilongwe (night)

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Back in Lilongwe again. Hitched a ride from Sanga in the back of a pickup. Talked with two brothers headed to Lilongwe themselves. Just the two of them in their family, the smallest family I’ve heard of here. Talked to another guy two today who was “from a small family. Only five.” Everyone laughs at me when I tell them I am an only child. They laugh and say it’s bad. Everyone always asks how many are in your family though. It’s generally one of the first questions. Picked up Falk, a long time donor and supporter of AGE from Germany. Seems like a nice chap. This is his first travel to Africa. For me, he’s an opportunity to see this place through fresh eyes. I really enjoyed riding in the truck today. The sun warming and the wind cooling my face. It’s the same joy I get driving cross country with the windows down back home in the States, just exciting with different scenery and smells. It was a very third world experience riding in the back of a truck, packed in along with big bags of maize and rice. I patched a hole in one of the brother’s bags with some duct tape I had been carrying around. My slight contribution to the goodwill of the world.

PICASA PHOTOS

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Saturday June 13, Wheel House, Sanga Bay (afternoon)

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Yesterday was the first day off from writing since this whole ordeal began. Today much the same: sun, shade, and books, Some spirited games of cards to pass the time, lunches, dinners, amazing sunsets, great to experience, not much to talk about. We chatted with the proprietor yesterday about the tragi-comic parade of dysfunction that peppers the day to day activities of so much of Malawi: a German project to get locals to raise guinea fowl (which would be more expensive than the chickens which they already can’t afford) failed irrigation projects, misguided aide, poorly planned expenditures, failures to do the most basic research, laziness, numbskullery, boobishness, and flast out wastes of money and resources. Idiocy is rampant here, and more and more is pumped in everyday to counteract the horrible effects of this epidemic.

PICASA PHOTOS

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