Rainbow Valley

Rainbow Valley
Malawi

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Malawi Parents Worry About Their Kids

I looked up from the page at the clucking brown speckled mother hen, as she jumped up and away from her seven chicks. Counting heads, I thought, while she stood on the two-by-four that David had put there yesterday, after stacking five rows of bricks to make a temporary home for the young family. Just seven of the original nine chicks chirped today; the board had fallen onto two as he built the wall around them to protect them from the dangers lurking in the grass and overhead.

A ripe mango or an avocado pear could fall from a tree and crush a feathery warm body.

A guard dog, each of his ribs countable, could quickly snatch a curious chick before its watching mother could squawk and flap her angry wings in warning at the fluffy yellow innocent vanishing into the pink hungry snapping jaws.

‘Skus’ (crow-sized, magpie coloured scavengers) could lurk in the straight, thirty-foot tall, blue gum tree, eyes trained on the yellow and black chicks before fluttering down to the grass beckoning an invitation to the baby birds to come have a game of tag. There would be high-pitched chirps of excitement as the chicks ran to chase the tantalizing tail feathers of their new black and white playmates, not realizing they had been lured into a circle of hen-sized enemies. The skus would peck at the black shiny eyes and the short wrinkled legs of the chicks, with beaks no longer teasing but urgent, the scent of raw flesh, spiced with fear, and bits of salty blood feeding their lust to kill.

Downy feathers would float like soft light butterflies on the breeze past the prickly, white, scented rose blossoms, the first fresh blooms of the season, bobbing heavily, nodding wisely, and agreeing with Darwin’s theory.

As David stacked the red clay bricks into a wall, then laid the two-by- four piece of wood along the top layer of bricks, he clucked at the two motionless chicks with the broken necks, quiet now.

David’s workload was increased these days. John, the night-watchman, had taken most of the week off to be with his wife and family as they buried their six-month-old baby back home in their village. The young girl was dead of malaria after a short stay in hospital. Neighbours and family gathered with offerings of food, bits of money, sympathy, wailing. John’s employers had gone to the home, with their donation, and stayed four hours with the family. As many as were available travelled by mini-bus to the village for the ceremony and the burial, with the baby, its small weight wrapped in a blanket.

David and John both worried, as all parents must, if their children would survive the dangers lurking throughout Malawi. Now, one more was dead by the tiny insects who carry death in their bite.

The water grows parasites, and during the rainy season, the streams, rivers, and ditches where the women and children wash laundry, turn into muddy brown roiling torrents. Last week two adults had been swept away, drowned while crossing a river. Luckily neither had carried a baby tied in a chitenje around their back or there’d have been a third or even a fourth casualty.

If a child grows to school age there’s be the concern of affording an education. Primary schools to form eight are government funded and these are legally available to all children, though some stay home to look after disabled relatives, and some villages are too isolated for kids to attend school. For some, the raging river waters make the trip to school too dangerous and it is safer they be kept at home where there is always a floor to be swept with a branch, goats to be herded, peanuts or potatoes to be sold at the roadside in season.

Forms nine and higher are privately-paid and so less well-attended although almost everyone agrees that the only way to improve oneself and one’s family is through education.

David and John discussed these things often as they cooked their nsima over the charcoal grill provided by their employer in the workers’ quarters. They work six 12-hour shifts every week tending the gardens, and the lawns, guarding the gate, washing cars, and carrying. Manual work is the destiny of those who didn’t receive an education and if they are fortunate they’ll find a full-time job rather than begging on the streets for piecework or for food.

David kicked away the guard dog sniffing at his bare foot. He missed the nightly discussions with John.

pics - 2000 wordsworth!


Monday, March 22, 2010

Ant Hill - those are trees on the left

Moving Day ....

Packed all our stuff yesterday. How did we accumulate so much more than we came with less than one month ago? In the grand move to simplify and to be content with less, we now own a coffee maker, two cell phones, pillows, a back pack that carries two laptops, and a new dress. (Yes, it is finished and we’ll have another attempt to put a picture here for those who’ve been asking.)

Being without wheels ourselves, our hosts’ took us grocery shopping before our move into the new flat. There is a small market area for fresh produce and meat and also a store where we’re told we can buy some staples, within walking distance of the university grounds, but we stocked up on soap of all kinds, vanilla-scented candles, a broom, can opener, beer, water, a chicken … the necessities of life because our new flat is quite far out of town. There are buses which we will of course try, but tiny baby steps are my MO.

Everything is new or rather, different. At the shops, you check in any bags, umbrellas, or bikes, after waiting just a few minutes in line. After shopping, you get run through the till, pay the bill, receive a receipt, gather up your stuff, receipt in hand, and shuffle over to the next line-up where you have your receipt stamped. You must also remember to retrieve any checked-in items. One of the great things about grocery stores is they carry beer, wine, and liquor as well as food, at a very good price. Everyone is aware, of course, that alcohol and bottled water are the only safe drinks, right?

After the shopping we ate – huge meal, thank goodness – loaded the truck with everything: groceries, four adults, one smallish boy in the back of the truck with his hoe to harvest a crop of ground nuts near the university after we were dropped off, a large tub intended to hold water for flushing, a new clay flower pot intended to hold a tomato plant and some herbs (they tell me I’m dreaming), and off we sped* down the highway toward Catholic University In Malawi (CUNIMA) and the new flat.

* sped – figure of speech – the rainy season has wreaked havoc on any roads off the main highway, which are now pot-holed, rutted, heaved, red clay

Five bridges, two rivers, two cities, two villages, one monastery, one convent, a plethora of pedalling peddlers pitching their products, four schools (one for blind, one for the deaf/blind, one for the deaf, and a village school,) and 45 minutes later, we arrived at the university (a former seminary) where our host is the founding Vice-Chancellor at the request of the bishops of Malawi.

We are in! The painting easel is set up in the living room which has two opposing doorways (sunset and sunrise – mountain and garden respectively – OMG!)
The beds are made; a red steel water drum has been delivered by two young men – temporary until the outdoor tank is installed this week. The flat is all newly renovated. Peach and cream ceramic tiles (there is potential to make Sudokus on the 3x3 design), fresh paint, brand new appliances including a clothes washer, blue ceramic tile in the 3 piece / 3 room toilet, shower, sink and laundry room. Our groceries are fitted in the custom built cupboards, clothes hung in the closet, beds made, fridge is filled with our recent purchases, chicken is in the freezer – we are set! And hungry.

We arrived at the flat about 2 PM; the power came on about 9 PM; our candlelit supper consisted of chips and peanuts and beer. We know if the power is on or off by the generator that comes on at the on-site ATM machine (??) during a power outage. Said generator kicked in just after the whining of mosquitoes became insistent enough to warrant turning on the light to search for the DEET – Deep Woods Off works. The mosquito nets are coming this week. (They seem more urgently necessary than running water right now.)

By this morning (Sunday), the generator was still running so we dined on Peanut Butter and bread and juice, took a walk to the store (closed on Sunday), bought bananas and delicious oranges (they are green outside, orange inside) at the market, and returned covered in sweat from our half hour walk. The power came on about 10:30 and went off again about 11:00 AM giving us just enough time to restock our caffeine deficiency and turn on the new stove. Chicken for dinner tonight. When the generator went off at 12:30, meaning the power was ON!! we were ready with the chicken in the roasting pan (brand new) and now it is 2:55 PM and I smell an almost done bird. A triumph.

All this and most of Canada is still abed; it is not yet 9 o’clock there. Enjoy your hot shower, electric razor, microwave, mosquito-less early spring …. It’s all good.

Claire


Joint submission on a Sunday afternoon by Claire and Lloyd, while he reads page 812 (over and over), of World Without End, an ‘obsequious-laden’ novel by Ken Follett, set in 14th century England, at the time of the Black Plague (la moria grande). (And looks for the wasp head of recently swatted giant well-fed flying insect and intermittently checks chicken cooking in brand new stove. THE POWER HAS BEEN ON FOR ALMOST THREE CONSECUTIVE HOURS!) Because the chef disagrees with the adage that man can live on Peanut Butter and banana sandwiches, he has recalled the conversion formula of Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Life Happens Along the Road


We are four middle-aged boomers driving home under the stars after a day trip.
Above us the Milky Way in the black night sky twinkles with stars as plentiful as the garbage on the paths into the villages.
Stars as white as the teeth of the sixteen-year old girl we transported in the back of our white, Toyota, four-door pick-up, down the mountain after our feast at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, where warning signs are posted not to feed the baboons; they can be aggressive at this season. One baboon watches us eat through the window;
he pees on the patio.
The young girl clambers into the truck box, book bag slipped from her back, bundle of firewood removed carefully from her head; she is a student on her way back to school having spent the weekend with her family in the village.
‘Stay in school,’ our driver says, as he tucks a 500 Kwacha note into her hand;
she shines her starry smile on us.
More stars sparkle through the truck’s back window against the night sky blacker than the faces of the three … no four … no five … children selling buckets of potatoes along the road, on our journey up the mountain.
For 300 Kwacha each, we could buy their produce.
On our way down we bargained with the same children – a long, laughter-filled, tough, negotiation ending with the purchase of two buckets-full of white potatoes
At 150 Kwacha each – that’s about $2.00 for ten lbs.
Thank you, thank you; they waved and shouted and smiled
until we were gone around the bend.


We sing ‘Baby, You’re the Best’ along with Carly Simon and warble with Susan Boyle’s ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and ‘Ave Maria’ by Paul Potts.
Universal songs in our cozy vehicle, volume lowered each time we’re stopped for the five police checks on a seven-hour drive. Their machine guns are big and black and visible.

In the daylight, we waved at children bathing in mudflats, watched laundry being washed in streams of brown and dried on the grass or on bushes.
Females of all ages, wearing wrap-around skirts in every rainbow colour, carried just-washed dishes and pots and pans, striding beside us on the paths as we drove past,
along the road.
In bamboo market stalls along the road, we admired soft, red tomatoes piled five high into picturesque pyramids.
Beside them banana peels, blue plastic bags, corn cobs and candy wrappers are tossed along the paths, anywhere, unsorted.


Life happens along the road.
We gave a lift to a thin man teetering under his bundle of firewood on his way down to the village to sell, his gleaming smile a thank you for the ride.
“I have time to go back up and carry down another load before sunset. Thank you.”
Now in the night we sing, dodge potholes, and answer police queries
under the Milky Way.
There are car lights, bus lights, and starlights brighter than the candles in the village homes dotted along the road lit by sparse light bulbs; one or none in most houses.
Has the power gone out?
Or is there no money to buy electricity?

An all you can eat buffet
Camel rides on the beach
School children, child vendors, wood for sale, paths of litter,
Life happens along the road

Under the Milky White starlight against a dark black
Night sky as we travel home from Mangochi on Lake Malawi to Blantyre.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

It was errand day today in Blantyre, our host city of 1.5 million. We travel Chipembere road, the main thoroughfare to get anywhere, so at least twice any trip. Four of us arranged ourselves in the car, one short person and one tall in the front seat and one tall person and one short person in the back, seats moved to accommodate those with long legs (not me). Windows wide open we set off for Africa Art, a shop carrying carvings of animals, candle holders made from bottle caps, canvas paintings, tablecloths, hair pins, note cards, journals, leather bags, fabrics and more. Maybe there should be a contest to see if you can correctly guess which items were purchased today. (And which we’ll be going back for in the near future.)

Then to the tailor shop. Discussions are carried on in Chichewa, with the non-Malawians in total ignorance of what is being said. I imagine the tailor asking …. Does she have any money? …. I don’t know how to sew for blondes … Will she be difficult to deal with? My host comes back with the price which seems reasonable to me and so we stand waiting. Why are we waiting you may well ask? Much more Chichewa talk ensues, then we stand outside the shop while the tailor goes inside.

Eventually, I realize the half hour wait was because there was a customer ahead of us. Ah, of course. Once in the back room, we examine pictures on the wall of blouses, skirts, dresses, with varying sleeves, collars, hem lengths, waists – the pattern choices – and make decisions, change our minds, sweat, ask opinions. I’ve brought 3 pieces of fabric; my host has brought one. Between us we’d like a skirt, a dress and a two-piece outfit. The choices are too many and I decide to go for just one dress at this time to test the tailor’s skills. My host orders a skirt made. Come back Friday our tailor says.

We have been in the shop only ninety minutes including the wait time and realize we are almost late to deliver our passenger to her college to register for her Accountancy Exam to be written over the next two days. She is a fellow guest in the home where we stay (one of many) and has travelled overnight, so will spend 6 days to write 2 exams over 2 days with two days travel time and two days to get signed up for the exams. We race to the school and three of us sit in the car waiting the ten minutes it will take to drop off her ID card. She comes out thirty minutes later saying the registrar has taken her card and disappeared, so she must wait. Ah, … yeah… of course. We agree to go on ahead shopping for a coffee pot and pick her up on our return trip down Chipembere Road.

To the store. To the coffee pot department. We made our choice last week so now we’d like to pick up the boxed item, pay for it and be on our way. Waiting, waiting, waiting ….
No box, no manual, we choose the $30.00 coffee maker over the $150.00 one. It has a permanent filter, fortunately, because the store does not carry coffee filters. We pay; we go, boxless, after retrieving our groceries at the mandatory parcel check and speed off down C. Road to pick up Angelina who has called to report that she is registered and waiting on the side of the road.

Straight home we go as it’s now 1:30; we’ve been on the road since 9:30, and the professor in our group has a class to teach at 2:30.

Time for a nap in the blessed quiet … there are caws and crows and bird songs, a cow in the backyard moos, a boy scythes the grass,. Do you hear what is missing? Lawn mowers, chainsaws, traffic, air conditioners, furnaces, snowplows, garbage trucks, street cleaners. It feels wrong to even write those noisy words onto this page. Every so often there is a car horn to signal a worker to open the gate at one of the local homes. There are no vacuums, no dishwashers, and no laundry appliances.

I do hear corn being tossed in the air and landing in a basket to remove the chaff. I imagine I can hear the Singer Treadle Sewing Machine making my dress, but I’ll just wait until Friday to know more about that.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

PICS













A week in and here's my first update






Well, here we are! An update after one week in Blantyre. We left the Netherlands Monday evening 22nd, Feb. after a short but very nice visit with our Dutch families – the Templemans and Bomans; thank you Diny, Yan, Henrik and Hannah. The flight was uneventful but rather long. We gave up 2 more hours while flying to Nairobi, Kenya. So far we are 8 hours earlier than our friends and families back in Canada; we do gain one hour when we get to Malawi after a 90 minute lay over in Nairobi, then a short flight and 1 hour layover in Lusaka, Zambia before arriving in Lilongwe, Malawi. Not even noon and in less that 16 hours we’ve walked in four countries – hey, tarmac is land! So we will be 7 hours ahead of our Canadian readers for the next three months or so…
The weather has been very warm and OMG, it sure knows how to rain! It has rained everyday; some days just a little and so far, only one day with 12 hours of BIG rain! It rained so hard on the roof that we were yelling in order to be heard. Everything is green and big and alive. Snails are 6 inches long; magpies the size of ravens, beetles the size of hummingbirds and I’m sure I saw a millipede with 10,000 feet!
Guava, mangos, bananas, avocados, passion fruit, grapefruit and oranges are in season. Yesterday, while visiting Mount Mulanje, we bought plantain, pineapple and bananas at a local market where there are no price tags; one has to barter and negotiate.
Our Malawian hosts, our friends, Anacklet and Mary Phiri (pronounced, peeree) are fabulous. Anacklet is a Dr. of Linguistics and is the Vice Chancellor of the Catholic University (CUNIMA) where I am volunteering to help set up a sign language programme (a discipline) and provide instruction for one semester to 20 students in their fourth year of the Social Services/ Special Needs programme. Mary was a primary school teacher until she began her family of five children. They are all out of the house; Anacklet and Mary are Gogo’s - grandparents to five children. They also are raising a niece’s daughter; both of the child’s (Laureen’s) parents died several years ago. They are a passionate and compassionate duo indeed. There is a housekeeper, Christine, a daytime gardener/maintenance man David, and an overnight security guard who keeps an eye on the Estate along with two dogs and a surrounding fence. Yes the fence is topped with some pretty wicked looking barbed-wire.
Anacklet picked us up in Lilongwe around 1:00pm Tuesday afternoon, showed us a few of the highlights of the Capital city of Malawi then drove us for about 5 hours to his home in Blantyre. We made a few stops along the way, to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, get gas and some pop and to meet with his contractor who is building a small getaway in Lilongwe for the Phiri’s. We arrived a little after 7:00, very tired but we rallied for a wonderful meal and some animated discussions. We received instructions on how to put the mosquito net around the bed, where things were in the kitchen – though making anything for ourselves has proved near impossible as the housekeeper/maid/ laundress is always one step ahead of us – and off to bed. It is like 25C + and on our bed is a sheet, blanket and a duvet! We hardly even need the sheet! Mary learned –from the housekeeper – that we took the blanket and the duvet off the bed and she was worried that we would get too cold! I assured her that even the sheet was a little thick. She laughed and was reassured that everything was OK.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

On The Ground ....

On the ground in Malawi …

We find wet, and warmth, and bird calls, and humanity everywhere. We’ve already filled the camera and the video camera once with our initial impressions of Blantyre, Malawi, Africa, a city of 1.5 million. It feels as though we may have seen most of them on the streets and in the malls and restaurants. Why stay indoors when outside is so just right?

Today, escorted by our very accommodating host, I shopped for fabric to have a dress made for myself by her dressmaker. On the street men sewed on treadle Singer Sewing Machines; boys offered handmade mahogany pens; umbrellas, raincoats, bananas, peanuts, guavas, cassava for sale, and empty hands opened before us as we passed. From out of the brilliant sunshine, blue sky, white clouds we entered three different shops to compare prices of cotton prints … elephants, giraffes, turquoise background with gold stars ranging from 1900 kwatchas per 3 meters to 13,000 kwatchas for one meter of golden silk. Overwhelmed as I was yesterday by the 36,600. kwatchas we helped spend for groceries, I reminded myself to divide by 200 to bring the price to my level of understanding. Usually I adjust easily to foreign currencies – the price is what it is – but 36,000 anything takes me aback. I think it won’t take long to stop recalculating, but for now it’s lucky I have ten fingers.

I settled on two, two-metre pieces of turquoise triangled background with a black, gold and white border of flowers and leaves. “How long do you think it will take your dressmaker to have a dress and a jacket made from this,” I ask. “Could it perhaps take two weeks?” My host nods, “Uh-yes, I think so. If it’s for a special occasion. You can ask.”

Visions of self, blending effortlessly into the colourful outfits of the streets of Blantyre override my concerns of the loss of a piece of luggage on our trip from Amsterdam to here. A new dress!

Huge rain drops 1/8th of a cup each (scout’s honour) interrupt the daydream and we crouch under the store overhang, decide to take a taxi home, settle in to wait…. I’m starting to see a pattern of waiting. By the time the taxi comes, the torrential rain has ended. The sun beats on us and the sidewalks, drying sweat and run-off into a steamy scented mess. We climb into a very clean taxi with working windows and defogger and ease into traffic to wait, thinking …. We could have walked faster.

Later, on the way home from retrieving aforementioned piece of way-laid luggage at the local airport, the two lovely daughters of our friend tell me … you know about Malawi time? It will be a beautiful dress … in one year.