Malawi

July 22, 2007: Canvas of Chaos

I know, I know. I’ve been AWOL for forever. And there’s no good excuse I can think of. It’s not because there’s nothing to share. It’s certainly not because I’ve got nothing to say – after all, when have I ever run short of words? It’s not even really because I have no time to write, because I know for sure that I can always find time for things that seem important.

It’s more just that every time I sit down to write, I look at the blank page and feel this sense of despair. Once again, not because there is nothing to say. The blankness just seems both so looming, and inadequate, all at the same time.

Of course, this is no real excuse either. Having pretended to be a writer for quite some time – since 3rd grade, in fact, when Meredith Meadows and I wrote “The Family of 1842” and sold $.25 copies to the sympathetic parents of our classmates – I have felt this sensation a million times. Probably anyone who has ever written a term paper or a diary entry has experienced it too. And you, like me, know that there is really no answer, no way to get past it, except to start putting words on paper.

So. If life itself is like a blank piece of paper, or maybe a little bigger – a giant canvas, perhaps – the last few months look to me like a crazy splash of colors and strokes, all chaotically thrown up on top of each other but somehow forming something that looks like it was envisioned from the beginning.

After we moved to Lilongwe in April, life seemed to accelerate. In May, we headed to the US for a coast-to-coast whirlwind tour, visiting family and friends in Washington DC, Austin, and Oakland, California. We went to two friends’ weddings, enjoyed nightly happy hours, ate at about 2,000 amazing restaurants, visited 1,300 coffee shops. I ran nearly every day for 3 weeks in any place I could – on concrete trails through cities, on gravel paths around lakes, through the California redwoods, on a sweaty treadmill in Jimmy’s brother’s attic, past houses perched high on urban Bay-Area streets.  

My impressions of the United States this go-around? The roads are smoother than ice, the stores have shiny stuff you constantly want to touch, and very few goats with suicidal thoughts are poised on the edges of the highway to impede traffic. I am also struck by how easily I swung back into the mindset of America: walking fast even if there’s nowhere, really, to go; ranting at the car in front of me that just took my parking spot; inviting 30-minute “let’s catch up” coffees; seeing how fast I can photocopy maps in Kinkos; actually expecting the internet to work.

It all sounds cliché, I know, but it’s how I experienced it. And, actually, I am not complaining. For me, the whole dissonance wasn’t altogether unpleasant: In a way, I miss the rhythms of the US, mainly because I understand them, they make sense to me. As much as I crave being abroad, the American tempo, I guess, is my tempo too.

But, of course, if I’m honest, what I really crave when I am away from home is people. My friends, my family – those who understand me, who look at me and don’t see a wealthy westerner, an oppressor, a saint, or a pale-faced ghost. People who look at me and just see regular, boring Janie. Because in Malawi, I guess, I get tired of explaining myself, of being so damn noticeable. Why am I here, what am I doing, where I am going and why. I get asked these questions quite literally on a daily basis: Madam, where are you going? Can you give me money? Can I have your car? Do you have a job for me? Where are you from? Why are you here?    

It’s not so much that I think people don’t have a right to know these things; after all, I am an outsider and thus a likely subject of interest or suspicion. The tiring thing is that, half the time, I don’t know the real answers myself. And constantly being forced to revert to a stump speech or a halfway answer (“I’m going over there,” pointing vaguely, which is both true and not true) creates a constant reminder that, really, I haven’t figured out what the hell I am doing at all.

Which is just to say that I miss being around people who could care less. Who accept me back into the normal rhythms of their lives as if I were there yesterday. Who are equally happy when I am around to sit in silence, to watch break dancing videos on U-tube, to go for a run, or to talk about the complexities and heartbreak of AIDS in Africa.                 

At the beginning of June, my two worlds collided in a delightful way when Jimmy and I traveled back to Malawi from the US with a crew of friends in tow. We spent a 10-day whirlwind adventure around Malawi – crimson sunsets at the lake, a marathon of safari in Liwonde national park, a grueling 3-day hike in the Mulanje mountains. We visited tiny villages and 2 major cities. We attended a ceremony with chiefs and village headmen at an orphanage in Chinseu village. We ate mice on a stick and nsima with our hands. We laughed a lot, drank Carlsberg beer, and went running through cornfields. We talked about how our worlds in Malawi and the US are different, and how they are the same. For me, I saw Malawi through the eyes of my friends, and it helped me to see more clearly where I am.

At the end of June, most of our friends had left – tired, sunburned, but generally intact – but my brother Danny stuck around for a couple more weeks. He and Jimmy and I headed up to Nthalire, a very remote area of northern Malawi, where the Clinton Foundation is helping to develop a rural growth center.

I had worked with Jimmy to help develop a community hygiene education program (Jimmy’s daily battle cry, I tell you with chagrin, has become, “No Defecation Without Education!”) and we headed up with the four Malawian Community Educators who were going to be implementing an education campaign in schools. The plan was that the Community Educators would train both teachers and government extension workers in basic hygiene information and practices: hand washing, proper latrine use, how diseases are spread, drinking water purification, and proper food storage. They would use an interactive curriculum and entertainment-based education – theatre, role plays and music combined with daily practice.

To get to Nthalire, you drive up the main paved highway from Lilongwe for about 5 hours. Then you veer off onto a dirt road that climbs quickly up towards the Nyika Plateau, a high grassland that is one of the least populated places in Malawi. Nearing the top of Nyika, the road deteriorates, with giant potholes and crevasses that require a four-wheel drive and a very careful driver. Once across the plateau, the road plunges down the other side, eventually snaking into Nthalire area.

The roads, unfortunately for us, are not meant for cars. On the way up to Nyika, the clutch on our rental vehicle –a giant white 4WD with 8 people and luggage piled high on the roof rack – burned out. This was disturbing, but not as much so as the sharp smell of brake pads melting as soon as we began to descend into the valley. Every 15 minutes or so, our driver would pull the car over so that the brakes could cool off. At some points going down the hill around a sharp, rocky bend, the engine would cut off completely and the driver would spend a few anxious, silent seconds wrestling the steering wheel to turn the car and thus avoid plunging off a cliff.

As we descended, a breathtaking landscape rolled by outside the windows: hundred-meter waterfalls rushing down rocks, tree-lined hills rolling out like carpets, and the still, blue African sky. As we finally pulled into Nthalire near sunset, relieved and dusty, there was not much more to disturb the air than a few chickens squawking, women singing, and kids laughing as they kicked around a ball made from plastic bags. A few thatched huts dotted the area, and as our car kicked up dirt through “town,” we could see a couple of vendors, selling cooking oil and salt, lighting their kerosene lamps in the hopes of an evening sale.   

That night, the sunset was spectacular, throwing red and yellow fire across the plateau from which we had just descended. And as I sat on the front step of the house where we were staying, I thought about how little, and at the same time how much, the world gives to her inhabitants. And about how much, and at the same time how little, as people we can do to make any difference.

We spent 5 days in Nthalire, visiting schools and talking to headmasters and students, teachers and parents. It’s amazing how resilient people can be, even in the face of an appalling lack of basic human needs like water; it’s also amazing how confined they are without those fundamental things. Their worlds are kept small, because everything depends upon a source of water. People can’t take baths, they can’t wash their clothes. They can’t clean the pit latrine or their babies’ bottoms. Water, whatever its quality, is a precious commodity – to be planned for, waited for, fought for, and worked for.

And then it must be rationed out to drink – in small, sporadic amounts. Children skip school to fetch it. Sick mothers lug heavy buckets on their heads and babies on their backs to get it. Headmasters shrug their shoulders at low school attendance, pupils itching at scabies, and students clutching their stomachs from diarrhea. “What can we do,” they asked us, “without water?”    

But still, people laugh. One of my favorite moments of that trip on one early morning during a visit at Therere Primary School. Walked back to the car after meeting the headmaster and the village chief, we accumulated an entourage of about 200 kids, all of whom wanted to look at us, to touch us, to wave, and to practice their few English phrases. “Momma!” they would call. I’d turn around, and the whole crowd would shriek with laughter. “Dadda!” they would call, and when we would turn around, the same reaction again.

Finally, after thanking our hosts, we got into the car and began to wave goodbye to the kids. All at once, they began to wave frantically: “Good night!” they screamed, jumping up and down. “Good night!” as we drove out onto the road into the early morning air. “Good night! Good night!”

Back in Lilongwe, things are more familiar. I am working with the Government of Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau to help them to develop a communications strategy. The ACB is a necessary institution: Transparency International, one of the world’s largest corruption watchdogs, estimates that Malawi loses one third of its annual revenue through waste, fraud, bribery and corruption. In 2002, Malawi was ranked fifth of the nine most corrupt African countries. Most of the systemic corruption occurs at high government levels, but of course those culprits are not the ones who suffer. It is Malawians like the ones in Nthalire, who live as a consequence without clean water, school blocks, or medicine when they get sick.

I have also started running again – real running, like with a schedule and an idea behind the process (an early 2008 Texas marathon is the plan). It feels good, and I am actually beginning to remember what it feels like to have my legs turn over without too much effort, to find that “sweet spot” in a run where it is actually really, really fun, to get antsy on days when I don’t get to run. One thing about running I have realized is that context affects everything; you can run anywhere, but depending on where you are, your experiences will vary wildly. I am thinking about starting a separate blog to chronicle these thoughts, mostly so as not to completely alienate my non-running readers (yeah, you two, you know who you are). But I am not sure yet.    

On more interesting news: Bill Clinton was in Malawi this past Friday. Jimmy went to work in his best suit (ok, his only suit – the one he wore in our wedding 7 years ago – but still). Clinton’s “advance team” of protocol agents and secret service officials had been here for a week and had made elaborate plans, including giving assignments to all the Clinton Foundation staff. Jimmy had been dispensed, in what he considered a stroke of luck, to meet the president at the airport and than hang out with his aides and two board members on the private plane all day as it sat on the runway. While Clinton took a helicopter to Neno District, Jimmy would be lounging in first-class and curled up with the in-flight magazine, I guess.

Unfortunately, Clinton’s plane had mechanical problems in Johannesburg, and when he finally was able to charter another plane, time was short and he ended up flying to Blantyre, where he was able to get more easily to Neno District to see a hospital, an agricultural project, and some other Clinton Foundation work. So Jimmy spent a regular Friday in the office – but looked really good doing it.

In other celebrity Malawi news: Apparently Ewan McGregor was in Malawi this week, though we didn’t get to rub shoulders with him either. And this month, some Malawi government officials are headed off to London to "observe" Madonna's parenting skills and assess whether she is fit to adopt David Banda. They are apparently authorized to observe her and Guy Ritchie for up to five hours a day; they can then make recommendations based on their assessment of the quality of Madonna and Guy’s relationship, David’s well-being, and Madonna’s parenting skills.

Have you noticed? These days, Malawi is so – dare I say it? – en Vogue.