Malawi

April 11, 2006: Entry

Underneath my mosquito net at night, I'm having the dream. You know it, probably: the one where you're in college, it's the end of the semester, and you realize that your final is tomorrow and you haven't been to class in months. In my standard version, I have to hunt down the professor and beg him (always a "him") to teach me the whole semester's worth of material in one night.

In the Malawi variation, there are not one, but 3, classes that I have skipped. One of them is Bible class -- I'm not sure where that's coming from, since I haven't taken a Bible class since high school. I don't know what the others are, though one of them has something to do with science. I am at my old high school, which was a building in the shape of a circle, and I am running and running -- always ending up back at the same place.

I have had this dream 3 nights in a row -- when I can sleep, that is. Jimmy and I have been in Malawi for a week now, and we both have jet lag. So we lay awake at night, waiting anxiusly for the day, when all the good stuff happens.

Dawn arrives with Blessing's daily car washing. The guards who work at the houses do 12-hour shifts, usually 6am-6pm. Other than patrolling the premises once an hour, they sit around all night, often with only the light of the moon. Joke and Arjen's guard is named Blessings. As soon as the sun lights the sky, he washes any car in sight -- including our rental car. Who can blame him?

Joke and Arjen are a Dutch couple we are staying with until we find our own place. They live in a airy white house at the top of Kabula Hill just outside of downtown Blantyre, the commercial city center in Malawi. Joke is the Program Director for the Story Workshop, where I will start work in 2 weeks. Her partner (who is technically her husband, though they only got married a few years ago because they were traveling to Pakistan) is a photographer who specializes in music and social activism photography.

Joke and Arjen have been here for 7 months and fortunately are avid beer drinkers. On our first night, they introduce us to Kuche Kuche, the locally brewed beer that comes in large dark bottles. We sit in the large garden on plastic chairs and watch the sky turn colors at suset. Kids laugh and play in the township below.

The next day, Jimmy and I walk to the map survey office. It seems we are both hoping that, somehow, getting our hands on some maps will tell us where the hell we have landed, because we are both a little unsteady now. At 9am, the city has already been awake for hours. Vendors on the sidewalks hawk vegetables -- tomatoes, onions, guavas, avocados and pumpkin -- and curios -- wood-carved chairs and baskets, embroidered wall hangings and tie-dyed tapestries that remind me of dorm life in college.

Banks, clothing shops, travel agencies and food markets line the streets of Victoria Avenue as we navigate the crowded streets. A sea of black faces and regal postures swirls towards us, past us, and around us. We are so white; I feel out of place and uncomfortably conspicuous. Young boys follow us, trying to sell us cell phones and pencils. Beggars with children on their backs hold out their hands and say to me, "Maamaaa. Maaamaaa." Men in ties and women in high heels pass us, heading to work in offices.

Our first days are spent with the newspaper classifieds and various estate agents. We spend many hours and cell phone "units" following up on ads; eventually we see nearly every housing area in Blantyre -- both muzungu (foreigner) and "mixed" neighborhoods, with names like Nyambadwe, Namiwawa, Naperi, Mpingwe, Mount Pleasant and Sunnyside. Blantyre is a combination of neighborhoods and inter-city townships. The majority of the city population lives in townships, with scant access to electricity, running water or homes as we know them. The neighborhoods -- both Malawian and muzungu -- are mostly built up into the hills around the compact downtown area; narrow dirt paths lead from those neighborhoods downhill to the townships at the bases of the hills surrounding town.

Unfortunately, it is all but impossible for us to get a feel for the neighborhoods from the road. Nearly all the houses around the city that Story Workshop has deemed acceptable in terms of security for us have high fences surrounding them, often with concertina or barbed wire on top. Security guards stand watch behind gates, and to enter a property, you must pull up to the house in a car and give a set of honks to gain entrance.

We see several houses we like, but most of them are expensive -- rents of nearly $1,000 per month or even more. Even the empty houses we see, though, have occupants in the form of house staff who are caring for the premises. Usually they are being hired by the house's owner; when a new tentant moves in, they can decide whether to take over the hiring of the current staff or bring their own. This, of course, would leave the current staff jobless, and often homeless, as most homes have staff "quarters," simple (sometimes unacceptable) accommodations that nevertheless put a roof, if a leaky one, over peoples' head.

In an economy like Malawi, no doubt the prospect of a new tenant must strike fear into the hearts of many house staff. At several of the houses we visit, the occupants bend over backwards to be helpful, a few of them overtly asking to be kept on if we move in. It doesn't take long to realize that we are not only assessing houses, but participating in a series of impromptu job interviews as well.

We try to avoid the dubious proposition of hiring house staff altogether by renting a flat or a townhouse, but they prove few and far between, and often too expensive. By the end of the first week, we are exhausted and frustrated.

Luckily, there are diversions.When our heads start spinning from the house search, Jimmy and I head down the rocky dirt roads out of town to explore Michiru Mountain; on the way, we see monkeys and wild dogs and some kind of hedgehog, which I hope is a thick-tailed bush baby but turns out not to be.

On a rainy Friday morning in our first week, we go to the Blantyre Sports Club and run around the golf course. The sky is dreary, but it feels good to move again. Afterwards, we eat a lunch of pumpkin soup and chicken sandwiches. The food is good, but the mustard has us laughing harder than we have in a week.

On the front is an illustration of kabobs with wings and halos flying in the air. Underneath is the caption, "Take Your Tastebuds to Mustard Heaven!" The text on the back reads: "Hey! Good choice! Shake, pop open the cap and send that hamburger, hot dog or sosatsie to mustard heaven! Now yell, 'This food is history!' as you blow your tastebuds into the next dimension!"

One of the advantages of spending too much time with the classifieds, I find, is the treasures buried deep between used cars, refrigerators and houses. For example, one day I see an advertisement for "Phatzole weight gain syrup." The text promises, "Add as much weight as desired. (Slimming syrup also available)." At the time, I am both perplexed and amused (add weight?), but later, I am sitting with Story Workshop's driver Davies at at the airport customs office and talking about exercise. At one point, Davies pats his belly appreciatively. He tells me that in Malawi, you don't want to be too skinny. If you are, people will suspect you have AIDS.

The first week and a half, I expend a lot of energy looking for opportunities to laugh. A low-grade anxiety that sits just below my rib cage during the day, and is still with me when I wake up from my college dream at nights. I swing, in minutes, between wide-eyed excitement at the newness of everything and clawing desperation for something that feels familiar. Malawi? What is this place, and how do I belong?

Where am I? I still have no idea.