Containers, clingwrap and the cry of conscience.

Who would have thought anyone could get so excited about storage containers, cling-wrap and freezer bags?  Then again, I have long known that deprivation breeds appreciation.

Order is restored; we found the aptly named Shoprite yesterday and after a mammoth ‘stock-up’ have pretty much what we need. Except for nuts. The delicious locally prepared peanuts aside, and some South African beer nuts, this seems to be a nut-free zone. There must be a reason but I don’t know what it is. I can only assume that the climate turns oil rancid quickly and nuts, unless refrigerated, do not last long. On the ‘bring in from Oz or South Africa’ list goes: pine-nuts, almonds, walnuts, pecan nuts .... any nuts really.

But it wasn’t the lack of nuts which made me ‘go a little nuts’ yesterday, but the counting of money. To all those who have not counted 113,000 Kwacha in 500K notes, let me tell you it is time-consuming and challenging. I’m surprised I didn’t dream about 500K notes after counting my way through so many. Greg counted first; I counted second and finally the teller counted third.

We counted into lots of twenty and then folded one note around and I put them into a compartment of my bag. Heavier that bag got. I am just glad they were pretty much new notes. I wonder where all the old ones are? And then we handed over wad, after wad, after wad to the teller who counted slowly but surely all over again. The mountain of notes at her side grew and grew. It must have been one of Shoprite’s ‘better’ days.

I could only think of the enormous bags, crates, cartons or whatever they are – required to haul Kwachas through Malawi. Bucketloads of money must be carried around this country every day.

We had to make two extra trips to the bank next door to get more Kwacha as midway through the supermarket, and again, at the till, we realised we would be tens of thousands short. In Oz terms it was an $850 shop but we were stocking a completely empty larder; buying storage jars, plastic containers, some extra china bowls , kitchen equipment and alcohol.

By African supermarket standards Shoprite is very good. Clean, ordered and well stocked with, nuts aside, pretty much anything we could want. We came home with all sorts of unexpected treats: candles for the dining table; a potato masher; a measuring jug (although I had survived my cake, jam and pastry-making by guesswork but better not to push it); some rubber spatulas (invaluable); two strainers, one large and one medium (much better than the colander for draining rice et al) and glass jars for the rest of my strawberry jam, which, is damn fine actually and I do not understand why I did not make it before given that I have always made my own apricot jam and marmalade. Home-made strawberry jam is divine! About a kilo of strawberries with equal amount of sugar, juice of a lemon and half an hour’s cooking gave me four jars of fabulous jam.

A deliquescent (yes, it is not as firm as commercial jam but chunky with strawberries) drop onto my toast this morning and I was in heaven. So was Greg. It reminded me yet again that much if not most commercial jam is bulked with apple puree which is why it simply does not have the flavour of true jam made with the fruit of choice and sugar.

The fresh produce at the supermarket was not bad but is probably better on the streets. The tomatoes I bought the other day tasted wonderful and I have seen good bananas and papaya and of course strawberries.  Potatoes seem to be a bit ‘withered’ here but I suspect that is the humidity. For that matter they were not very good in Perth; always a bit mushy when cooked.   

 ABOVE: A Malawi village - life is still simple for most Malawians.

I thought Limited would help me sort and pack away but it was not to be. The funeral, as I should have realised, was clearly an all day event. But I did not really mind. It was easier to slowly sort and pack away on my own. Mbwe turned up about five, apologised for the ‘funeral’ taking so long ... as if it was his fault ... and then helped wash up the new storage jars and containers. The bowls I had bought were very dirty ... but they were plain white, a lovely shape and on sale.... 150K each! $1 a bowl. Perfect for nuts and olives, although one now stands on the coffee table holding my first pot-pourri.

It’s a process of ‘learning’ on both sides with household staff... I hate the word servants. Each employer, or ‘madam’ and ‘sir’ has their own way of doing things and varying levels of discipline and order. My first experience of this was in India and I was always conscious of the fact that in time we would leave and they would stay and the job was their lifeline and it was so important to work with them in a way which made them readily employable for anyone at anytime in the future.

In our world when you lose your job you don’t end up in the gutter. Well, you might in America but the rest of the developed world has pretty secure safety nets and these simply do not exist in the Third World.

When I first arrived in Bombay, I heard the story of the German woman who treated her two young maids like daughters. She took them out shopping , bought them pretty clothes and took them to tea at the Taj Hotel .... spoiled them rotten as they say. It was all well and good for her and I am sure she got lots of ‘warm fuzzies’ out of it,  but when she left, some two years later, the two young women were not only desolate they were unemployable.  It wasn’t kind to do what she did; it was cruel.

One could argue that the ‘experience’ may have inspired them to strive for more and so set them on the road to a ‘better’ life but that would be rare and unlikely; India, like so many places in the undeveloped world, is generally unforgiving and, for that matter, unchanging.

I was guided very much by the people who had lived in the house before us, Sam and Marianne, who were Turkish/Swedish and who had initially employed Rita and found her to be an excellent worker ... when given a disciplined and ordered environment.  I found it hard to do; to keep the distance and the formality but I followed their advice and probably ranked as a rarity, as they did, in never having any problem with theft, breakages; punctuality or sloppy work.

It was my first time as a ‘madam’ and I was probably a bit strict. I was not unkind, nor lacking in generosity but I was strict and probably severe. Sigh. But I did my best and found I had none of the problems that other expats had.

Rita, our maid, was delighted I know when I left Bombay after four years. I will never forget her broad smile as she said goodbye to me at the door. I actually felt a bit tearful but one look at her face and I realised, with more shock than surprise perhaps, that she was absolutely thrilled to see the back of me. I felt awful but I knew I hadn’t been hard; just firm and disciplined. I still felt awful.

She stayed on in the house and was inherited by the new residents who also worked for the company. I left copious notes.... shouldn’t have bothered ... about the way things were done, more for Rita’s sake than theirs. It was pretty much ignored.  They were really nice, good, kind, christian people who didn’t have the ‘heart’ to enforce discipline.  From the stories I heard Rita was running riot and it could only end in tears .... hers, not theirs.

The boundaries were severely pushed and discipline was minimal and sadly, I heard a couple of years later, after they had left and Rita had been employed by some other expats, that she had transgressed so badly she had been sacked.  The liberties she had been allowed to take by her former employees were generally unacceptable to all expats and totally unacceptable to all Indians and led to her inevitable downfall.  It wasn’t so much by our standards but it was by the standards of the culture and the place; she was found by her employer entertaining her family to tea in the house. Sacked on the spot!

The real tragedy of this was that Rita was the sole provider. Her husband was an alcoholic and she had three young daughters to feed, raise and, if they were lucky, to educate.

I have often wondered what became of her and her children. The youngest was born while she worked for us and she named her after our daughter Morgan. That child would now be twenty. I can only hope that her mother found more work, learned a lesson and that she and her daughters did not end up in the gutter.

A lot of expats don’t establish reasonable and firm guidelines or ‘rules’, often because they feel uncomfortable or guilty and it doesn’t take long for ‘boundaries to be pushed.’ It is so different to Australia where people can come and clean your house or work in your garden and they can become your friends; even close friends. It is not like that here. There are boundaries and borders and traditional courtesies and social systems which have to be respected for the sake of everyone.

Fair but disciplined; kind but firm; ordered but flexible are what makes it all work from what I can see.  My preference is to have no-one, but people here need work. It is as simple as that.  Of course there are positives in terms of not having to clean but then I didn’t do that in Australia anyway. Well, not beyond daily tidying. And we don’t have a dishwasher here so having someone to wash dishes, particularly when I cook, is great.

ABOVE: Lake Malawi is a huge inland sea.

But I am still getting used to having someone moving around the house; the sound of bare feet on the brick floor; a rattle, rustle and sweep of the broom. We are so used to being alone in the developed world; to having our privacy. Communal living has pretty much gone. I am sure that those who still live communally, like Africans and Indians, would be unnerved to find themselves alone. I am unnerved for the opposite reason.  

At this stage Limited and Mbwe have been coming at seven in the morning, leaving for lunch between 12-2 and then coming back until 4-5 and then returning again around 6. From what I gather this last ‘task’ is to turn on lights and close curtains and I can’t see much point in that. There may have been another system at work which made more sense but I have taken on lights and curtains in the evening and am happy for them to finish around 5.  They have also been coming in at weekends but we prefer our own space and place and will not bother with it unless we are entertaining.

Limited and Mbwe live nearby.... just down the road. They are in a complex  of houses specially built for the household workers. As part of our rent we pay for their accommodation, electricity and water so it is, including their salary, by local standards, quite a good package. Mbwe gets 22,000K  ($A146) a month and Limited 20,000K ($A133).  I also provide them with bread, butter, tea, jam, peanut butter and fruit. Plus plenty of ‘left-overs’ because I have never learned to cook for anything less than about eight people.... no doubt a legacy of my life as a child when I cooked for the family because my mother was often sick.

All in all, they are amongst the lucky ones given poverty in Africa. Although I saw the first beggars yesterday in downtown Lilongwe; one a small boy and the other a woman with a baby strapped to her back. They seemed half-hearted about the process though and both appeared well fed and cleanly dressed so I suspect the ‘begging’ was opportunistic and triggered by the sight of foreigners.

India was and is, wall to wall beggars and given the wealth of the country, should not be. Angola was pretty bad but there was a war on and  a lot of them were 'mutilados' ; those who had lost arms or legs. Fom what I have heard things are better. Zambia was relatively ‘light’ on beggars and in South Africa the street corners were awash with people selling all and sundry to make a few Rand.

It’s a relief not to have to process ‘guilt’ on every street corner in Lilongwe. In India we gave food because money would immediately be taken by the pimps who control the begging; in Zambia we did the same although whether the begging was as organised I am not sure. It was mostly small boys hanging around the gates outside the supermarket. We would buy them some food along with our groceries and hand it out as we left.

Begging is like tipping; it is a symptom not a cause. It is a symptom of unemployment or low wages and lack of worker’s rights. The double-edged sword is that when begging works an industry is created and when tipping works the same thing happens and there is no impetus to push for decent wages.  Begging and Tipping are both patronising and humiliating; no matter the ‘spin’ that Americans in particular and people in general like to put on tipping. Tipping, like giving to a beggar, gives the benefactor a ‘warm glow’ of ‘superiority’; both are a hangover from a time when the world was divided into ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ and when class ruled.

It still does in the Third World in the main and the First to some degree in some places, but both begging and tipping are symptoms of injustice. Not that any one of us can save or change the world. End of monologue and pontificating. It is just that living in the Third World makes one think so much more about such things; well, it does me.

The cry of conscience is louder here. The trick is to decide just how much can sensibly be done and to do it. Nor forgetting perhaps, but being prepared, to relinquish the rest.