Back again in Lilongwe after being away for two months. It is the wet season and all is green and lush and washed.
Surprisingly there have been no water cuts for the past week and only one brief power cut. It is unsettling!
The avocado tree is groaning under the weight of fruit and so too is the lemon tree, which, I originally thought was a lime and picked them as they grew large, only to find, that if left, they grew even larger, in that Malawi way and turned yellow and were lemons, not limes.
I have not written much about Malawi in recent months. One runs out of puff because it is so depressing. Just before we left we had another reminder of how rotten things can be in this part of the world.
The people who work in the houses in the compound have staff quarters for which we pay.
There are about a dozen houses and families in the compound. A couple of them started planting vegetables in what was bare, red dirt and I and others bought seeds for them. The garden was absolutely fabulous, with dozens of different things growing, and given how much costs have gone up in Malawi, invaluable in terms of a better diet for them and their families. So what happens?
The letting agents Knight Frank come along and tell them it is not a village and they cannot grow vegetables and so all of it gets torn up and returned to dry, barren red dirt.
No wonder this continent is doomed.
What is happening in Malawi? Well there is Cashgate where some $250million has disappeared - money provided by donor nations who are seriously displeased as one would expect. It got as ludicrous as people being stopped driving out of Government buildings with their boots full of loot.
The big donor nations like the United Kingdom and the United States have made their disapproval abundantly clear and turned the 'tap' on funds to some degree. No doubt, as in the way of Africa, it will be turned back on again before too long with little or nothing changed.
The President, Joyce Banda spends a great deal of time flying around Africa and the world, in a plane which a newspaper in Joburg said last week had been sold to a South African arms dealer and which was then provided for her use. She said she would sell the plane when she came to power and she did.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/malawi/10588417/Joyce-Banda-an-African-arms-firm-and-the-free-use-of-the-jet-she-sold.html
The truth, as is the way in Africa will be out there somewhere for someone sometime to find, or not. There is an election coming up and every chance the Government will be returned but there is little doubt that those in opposition will dig up whatever they can find to challenge that if they can. There are four months until the election and probably a good chance that power and water supplies will be reliable and diesel will be easily obtained during that time. What happens after will remain to be seen.
For the ordinary people, life goes on much as it did. Food prices are high and still creeping up but the wet season has been good and the maize crop is tipped to be excellent. Andrew's wife went to the village at the end of December, for a month, to oversee the maize crop. It is the life-blood of Malawi for most, as it is in many parts of Africa and the Third World.
The fact that seed suppliers, fertilizer suppliers and in-country systems control food supplies, including maize, is, in the scheme of things, incidental, until there is a crop failure. This year looks like being an exception and given Malawi's tragic history of famine, one can only be happy for the people.
Beyond torrential rains, interspersed with thundering, raging storms and days of steady drizzle, life muddles on. Funerals are sadly still common for many and that is unlikely to change in the short term given the impact of HIV/Aids combined with poor nutrition and malaria. But people do survive and in ways that those living in the developed world might find hard to believe.
We were chasing up raincoats for the security guards this week. They had not been issued with them. How on earth can you expect to walk around and do what needs to be done in torrential rain without coats? Well, the fact is, in places like this no-one cares and I think the owners of the company are Indian anyway and they traditionally treat the workers and lower castes and classes with contempt and Africans worse than Indians.
However, an official complaint from the 'white' Muzungus, supposedly has the aforesaid raincoats on their way in a way that requests from the guards themselves could not achieve. I really hate the way that places like this work. Life is just so often so bloody unfair and means-pirited.
I know that people in the developed world are forever 'lashing' themselves for their racism and intolerance but honestly, when you live in these places, and I have been doing it for many years, you realise that when it comes to intolerance and racism the First World does it the least and has in place systems which actually reduce it. Not so in the Africa's and India's of the world. People get treated like shit and because they are poor and powerless and those who are rich and powerful don't care and see them as inferior, nothing gets done about it.
I do wonder why it is I have spent so much of my life in India and Africa.... no doubt lessons to learn. Perhaps patience, pragmatism, acceptance? But of course, I observe this world, I don't really live it. As a white, as a muzungu, I am separated from the sorts of situations and experiences which ordinary people here take as a given.
There is a fatalism to life in the Third World. There has to be. How else could or would you survive. In truth, the way of life is no different to that lived by most of our ancestors barely a century ago. Times have changed in the past two hundred years and no more so than in what we call the First World. Times have also changed in Africa, although sadly, not as much for the better as one would wish.
The fact remains that after $3trillion dollars poured into the continent in the past 50 years, the average African is worse off than they were 30 years ago. Aid simply does not work because it disempowers people and discourages them from becoming independent and most of the money is syphoned off by those in power and never gets where it is meant to go.
The NGO's beaver away, as often as not driven by God and religion and distracted by that focus, achieving little things at times but not really making much of a difference. Given how long they have been at it, some two hundred years, the do-gooders have clearly had little impact. Except in terms of conversions which was probably always the most important factor for them. Most Malawians are Christian, sadly of the American nutter, evangelical kind, which makes a toxic mix with the underlying belief in withcraft - a natural 'fit' in ways the Christians would perhaps never recognise and if they did, would never admit.
We are heading toward four years in Malawi and probably the only thing which has changed since I arrived, after many years spent in other Third World countries, is that I hold less hope for change than I did before. You can only look around and see the corruption, the slow decay, the impossibility of improving the lot of ordinary people in concrete, lasting terms and think what is the point?
If I had my way I would end aid tomorrow, beyond emergency for crisis situations. But that will never happen and so aid funds will continue to pour in and suck the lifeblood out of the people and the country even as it fattens the pockets of those in power.
Life sucks often, but it sucks bigtime and all of the time, for ordinary people in Africa.
