Malawi

June 7, 2006: Bolero

I am sitting on a grass mat on the ground in Bolero with 19 Malawian villager while we eat boiled corn from a bowl. The Chairman has just arrived, wearing golf shoes, a cable-knit sweater and huge men's sunglasses from the 1970s. He takes one of the two chairs, next to my colleague Faith. Some of the other men are delaye because they are around the side of the house pressing tobacco leaves into bales. The hand-crank takes three men to turn.

This is the village of Bolero in northern Malawi. I am here with my Malawian colleagues Joyce and Faith to visit one of Story Workshop’s radio listening clubs. Radio listening clubs are groups of villagers that have been organized to listen to Story Workshop radio programs, provide feedback on what they are learning from the programs, and offer stories from their own lives as fodder for upcoming shows. We will spend a day talking with them, asking them questions about their health, families and food situation -- the most important factor influencing their lives.

To begin, the Chairman gives a speech of what I assume (because I only understand the clapping) is of rousing interest. Then the oldest woman stands up and, as we all bow our heads, gives a prayer.

The men perch on rocks or benches; the women and girls sit gathered around the feet of Faith and the Chairman. I, like the other women, am wearing a chitenje, a colorful wrap around skirt. I am thankful that Faith and Joyce saved me from my own dress code this morning when they discovered, in horror, that I was planning to wear pants. I am even grateful that they marched me to the market and instructed meto buy safety pins to pin my trousers up underneath my skirt. I’m all for bucking the system, but simply looking stupid is not my idea of an admirable rebel.

The women around me range from about 2 years to 60. They all have thick working, weathered hands and bare feet (I am strangely satisfied, though, to note that, thanks to my dim-witted habit of not wearing socks in triathlons, my calluses are tougher than theirs).  One of the women wears a San Francisco knit wool cap over long braids that run down her back. She has a gap between her two front teeth that, instead of being unattractive, gives her a charming, gangster look when she smiles. One of the women breastfeeds her 2 year old and another 

A 5 year old named Lozi in a dirty calico dress, decorated with teddy bears and trimmed with fake pearls now hanging by threads, sneaks up to touch my white skin and then runs off laughing. When we bring out the bread and coca colas, one of the younger women disappears with her ration, and my colleague Joyce whispers to me that the Chairman is her father-in-law. If he sees her eating, it would be showing disrespect.         

Around us stretch miles of brown corn and tobacco fields. The hills behind were once forest but have been razed for charcoal. Now only a small tree stands here or there. Young girls with buckets gather around a hand pump across the track, laughing and splashing as they fill their buckets. Then they balance them on their heads and begin the walk home.

The conversation winds, and Joyce translates for me. First, there is a report on the afforestation activities of the group – also elegantly called the Village Natural Resource Management Committee. It occurs to me later, when I find out that most of the households in this village don’t have enough food to last them until the next harvest, that this is an oddly long-term initiative. Few of these people will live to see any of these eucalyptus or sycamore grow. I wonder to myself whether, if I were hungry, I would have the gumption to plant trees?

Then the conversation turns to health. Joyce and Faith are doing a baseline survey on awareness of fistula, a childbirth injury that leaves women incontinent, ashamed and often excluded from their community. When Faith explains the condition, the women exclaim,

“We know of this. We thought it was from witchcraft!”

“We thought it was a curse,” one says

Another says, “I thought you got it when a man proposes to you and you refuse. Then he curses you.”

When Faith says, “Now that you know: How could you convince someone to go to the hospital for this?” one of them men pipes up. “Promise her a Coca Cola,” he says, and everyone laughs.
 
The woman sitting next to me is the ad hoc leader of the group. I can tell that she speaks with authority; when she talks, she squints her eyes, waves her hands, and everyone listens.  Her nickname is Nyabudget.

In Tumbuka, the language of northern Malawi, the word for woman is “nya.”“Budget” refers to the fact that she is known for rationing her food so carefully that you cannot show up to her house uninvited and expect to be fed. In return, she will not go to a neighbors’ house uninvited. Prioritizing frugality over the Malawian value of generosity is unusual, I gather, but seems to be respected, at least in Nyabudget’s case.  

At one point, Nyabudget announces that she is HIV positive. She asks, “Can I have a baby who is negative?” As Faith explains the possibilities and dangers, everyone listens intently. My mind wandes to Googling, and how I take for granted the fact that if I want to know something, I can look it up and find out immediately. Here, only a few miles off the main road, there is no internet, no Google, and few channels but the radio for learning.   

As the discussion turns to food, it also turns to stories. Many of the villagers have been experimenting with new farming techniques, like irrigation and applying manure. But they have problems, including the fact that the village chief’s goats are eating their corn.

“They are spoiling everything,” declares one of the men, “One night I came home from the field to find that a goat had eaten my nsima (the Malawian version of “grits”) and was sleeping in my bed! I kept the goat to see if its owner would come, but it was the chief’s goat and someone reported me to him. A few days later, I was detained for attempting to steal the chief’s goat.”

There is a roar of astonished laughter, and when Faith declares that the story should be featured on an upcoming episode of  Zimachitika, the Story Workshop’s radio soap opera, the whole group breaks out into a cheer.
 
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The next morning at 7am, I board a bus to begin the long trip back to Blantyre.

I didn’t sleep well last night. We stayed in a rest house in Rhumpi, a small town in northern Malawi at the base of the Nyika Plateau. The Nyika Plateau is a one of the highest points in Malawi, and filled with animals, waterfalls and green hills, decidedly one of the most beautiful.

My room in the Country Lodge Annex (“annex” as the operative word), however, was decidedly unbeautiful, though it was green. In the theme of country living, I guess, the concrete walls were painted a weirdly florescent lime. A bulb hung over my bed, which was next to a sink, which was next to a toilet missing its top. The window opened onto a bar filled with men who watched a preacher on the television at full blast until near midnight.

I read a an article , froma liberal Catholic opinion magazine called Conscience, about poverty, in which different world leaders give their opinions about what poverty means. The magazine was glossy and has an address in Washington DC. Washington DC had seemed, last night, very far away.  

The bus leaves, full of people, at 930am. It breaks down at 11. The brakes are smoking. Men put rocks under the tires and everyone gets off.

All the passengers take the opportunity to pee on the side of the road, including the rowdy group of teenagers who are drinking beer. They introduce themselves and want to know what music I am listening to. One of them, who has half of her hair in plaits and half in an afro rimming her head, says she has been to Missouri. Mu-zooo-ree. They are students at Mzuzu Polytechnic, studying marketing and business. These are the people, I think, who represent Malawi’s tiny middle class. I ask one of the girls what music she likes, and she says, “I like R&B, hip hop and pop. In that order.” She is wearing a bra with see-through plastic straps and a sexy blue shirt that wraps around her neck.

Back on the bus, we stop. And stop. And stop again. We let people off. We stop to buy French fries and sodas. We stop so the bus driver can run an errand.

All the stops give me good time to categorize the names of some of the many places on the way. They include:

• God Bless Investments
• Easy Come Easy Go Investments
• Groly to God Restaurant
• No Farming No Life Shop

But it's only funny for a while. A trip that had taken 3 ½ hours in a car is now taking 8 hours. I am afraid I will miss my connecting bus as we approach the capital, Lilongwe. I decide to get off and try to flag a taxi to my bus.

Just as I am about to disembark, I get a call from a prospective funder. I don’t want to let her off the line, as I have been waiting anxiously for her call. But the bus has stopped and my bag is stuck in the overhead bin. As I try desperately to yank it out, stepping on people’s hands and bags and over their heads, I try to respond with authority (and ludly, over the bus' motor) to her questions about “best practices” and “learning objectives.” When she asked me how much money we will need for the project and I find myself doing mental calculations while straddling the head of a man sitting in the aisle, I decide even I have dignity to uphold and tell her I will call her back.

I stumble down the stairs, and somehow there is a taxi waiting for me. I climb in, and as we sputter down the road, I laugh to myself at the absurdity that is my new life in Malawi.