Goodbye to Blantyre Street

Having returned to Australia about six months ago, we have said goodbye to Malawi.

It was an interesting five and a half years but it is a delight to be out of Africa and back in a First World country. One remains deeply appreciative for such good fortune.

The Wet brings wealth and woes...

We left after lunch for the drive north to Mzuzu and wondered if the recent early break to the Wet for Lilongwe would remain as we headed for Kayelekera. It did.

There is a sigh of relief, almost palpable in Malawi when the Wet Season arrives because without it there is no maize crop and no money made and people go hungry unless the Government buys grain from elsewhere and just at present, the Government does not have much money. Well, it does for trips around the world for those in power but they are seen as needs-based, as in more necessary than repairing roads and feeding people, and so money follows power.

You do shake your head when you hear the President is spending a week or more in the US with an entourage of sixty and they are all staying at the Ritz, or was it the Waldorf Astoria,  in New York, where the Presidential Suite is $17,000 a night for the leader of the poorest country in the world.

But the President becomes a supreme being on election, the chief of all chiefs and the chief system is entrenched in this society like aristocrats and monarchies of old. No doubt the ordinary people do not mind if traditions are being honoured. One just wishes that those with power minded for them.

Having said that, with the new Government in place there are some signs of money being spent on ordinary people with some repair work to roads and new drains being built to carry away safely the huge amounts of water nature dumps on the country in the wet.

It was raining as we drove out of town but eased an hour or so on the road, only to break through in determined fashion as we drove up higher into the mountains outside Mzuzu,  some four and a half hours north of Lilongwe.  It is a logging area, the pines planted decades ago, and not well managed, but remaining still.

There was low cloud and mist along with rain as we made our way along largely empty roads. The price of diesel has risen dramatically in recent times and is close to what is paid in Australia, which, when compared to the amount people earn here, is an absolute, impossible, fortune.



So there were less private cars, less mini-buses, lots of bicycles and a few trucks and semi-trailers. Sadly, of the latter, more than six in recent days had not completed their journeys and lay overturned, some consumed by fire, on the side of the road. How many dead it was hard to say but it would be a few in that most semis would have a driver, his girlfriend and a mate and perhaps a hitchhiker, and a few crushed cabins made it clear that no-one got out alive and may well have been still entombed as we passed.

They drive too fast and the roads are not too bad, but far from good with the edges eaten away by rains in every Wet. You never know what is around the corner but, the local warning is to place tree branches from some distance on either side so you know the road will be blocked. There were a few stalled semis and trucks as we climbed through the mountains, no doubt because of poor servicing and all of the other problems which breed in Third World countries like Malawi.

The rains meant also less people on the side of the roads which makes the drive easier. Avoiding cyclists and pedestrian being perhaps more of a challenge than careering cars or trucks. There is nothing more off-putting than a woman on a bicycle in front, a baby strapped to her back, as she gets the wobbles, as they often do, and starts to weave around trying to remain upright.

The locals must have known the Wet would be early this year because the fields had been prepared for planting maize. In that 'needs must' way of Africa, the fields often run willy nilly, with trees and stumps left where they stand and the furrows dug around them. Why put all that effort into moving something when you can go around it? On the bright side, although it remains to be seen how effective it can be on the corruption continent, Malawi has brought in a ban on plastic bags.

What I do not understand though is why the plastic bags are not removed as they work! Surely that peep of blue plastic might, could, will interfere with the growth of precious maize. But the plastic weed of Africa is endemic and perhaps the corn has learned to grow around it or through it in that way of things in this part of the world.

It's can't be much fun for the locals in the wet. Some houses have iron rooves but most have grass and it must leak. The dry, red earth turns to mud because the rains are torrential. Even more, the talc-like consistency of the soil means much of it is just washed away into drains, onto roads, and where it should not be.

People sit around a lot in Malawi. It seems common in Africa. The men more than the women for needs must as a philosophy means people need to eat, clothes need to be washed, water needs to be fetched and children and men need to be looked after. But beyond what must be done, there is a lot of sitting around and talking. No doubt in such places people could, in ways they could not, in more severe climates where sitting around and talking all the time would have you dead in winter.

And so there is a lack of industry in the culture, a lack of effort expended without necessary gain. You see it even in the offices where people go to work, but not as they go to work in Western cultures - they go to work to do the minimum which is required, sadly not much and not enough, and then they sit around drinking tea or coffee, talking. They seem surprised at the industry of Westerners. Why would they not be? It is alien to their culture.

It also explains why so many African countries are basket cases. It explains why so many homes are barely maintained, why fields roam around trees and obstacles because the effort required to clear areas properly, would be considered exceptional to that which was needed. It would be considered unnecessary and a waste of time and effort.

And the ubiquitous donor aid industry has turned it into a mendicant culture where now if there is sit-down time, it happens with a hand held out for the international community to provide funds.

Another factor in Africa is that as the local saying goes, if one lobster tries to climb out of the pot, he or she will be pulled back down. You are not meant to be different. So planting more trees around your home or putting in a garden or establishing ordered fields would make you different and you would be pulled into line. A chief can be different. A chief can paint his house, order his fields, establish a garden .... but not ordinary people. And so nothing changes, not even for the better.

For the lack of industry is not because Africans cannot work hard. They can and they do, particularly the women who walk miles with huge containers of water, bundles of wood, sacks of maize or whatever else is needed, on their heads. Often with a baby on their back. And the men cycle up hills with passengers on the back, goats strapped to a frame, huge piles of timber, metal pipes, bags of coal and teetering piles of wood.  But all those things are required and they work hard for what they need to do and then they sit around.

But they can sit around because nature allows them to do it, generally.  The soil here is so rich that food is easily grown. Most of the farming is subsistence because there are now too many people, some 15million, in the small sliver of land which is Malawi. And the chiefs are still gods and hold sway. There is no way of organising farming because there is little spare land and the chiefs don't want things to change and the ordinary people cannot bring about change and so, nothing changes.

It is probably more depressing for outsiders looking on than it is for people living such lives who have never known anything different. HIV/Aids is rife here and cutting down Malawians of all ages, all of the time. A 25 year old Australian is likely to have never been to a funeral while a Malawian of the same age, will have been to many. One 25 year old Malawian I know has been to five in the past twelve months. I won't say it was all, or even any HIV/Aids but it might be. From the ages of eight to about fifty or so, and all relatively close family.

But the people look healthy. They can haul huge loads on their heads and backs and bikes for kilometres and they look robust and fit. Although perhaps there would be more on the roadsides if there were not so many lying ill at home. It is a life of sleep, food, sitting,  some working and sex. There is a lot of sex. Men and women alike seem to be promiscuous .... it is just the way things happen here.

Perhaps with so much death, illness, poverty and corrupt government, people are more inclined to have fun as and when they can. It is perhaps more of a pity that such fun is, for so many, so often deadly if not life-destroying even at higher levels as jobs are lost, careers founder - with Western employers who pay the highest wages - and those who have achieved something, come crashing down.

But then success is considered to be a sign of evil in this part of Africa and good fortune means, not that you are clever or work hard, but that you are in league with witches or the devil, or both. And so perhaps there is an unconscious self-destruct button, a hidden saboteur who will demonstrate that evil forces are not at work, by creating a situation where failure is guaranteed and success impossible.

And people shake their heads, shrug their shoulders and sigh - because it is never ever their fault.

Places between worlds

     

I don't often wake in the night and when I do, I wonder if it is something I am picking up from my grown-up children, both so very far away and in different time-zones.

In that place between worlds which broods in the depths of darkness, and that way of walking between worlds as we have in sleep, I have no doubt we connect with those we love more often and more easily. And they with us.

I remember many years ago living in Bombay, India, dreaming that my son, then about eighteen, was dying and somehow I was willing him to live and 'holding' him in life. Some hours later I phoned him and learned that at the time of my dream, he was surfing off the Australian coast and was dumped by a wave and was drowning until he managed to push himself to the surface.

Or do we float within the parts of ourselves in that dark cocoon of possibility and silence where fear and joy can appear, disappear and drift through shadows? Then again it might have been a dream.

The days are growing warmer in Malawi as the first damp breaths of humidity begin to creep around, sighing that the crawl toward the Wet Season has begun. Cicadas sing in echoed click and the birds seem more joyful than ever. They know the rains are coming. The time of washing clean the dust and grime of the dry days and more so after the burning season has been, when dry grass is burned black because they say, it brings fresh green shoots for stock to eat. But they do it in Africa, even in cities and where there is no animal grazing. Habits are hard to break.

This time of waiting for the rains is also one of those places between worlds where expectation sighs alongside and the heat increases until one begins to crave in desperation for the salvation of the healing rains. It is the way of the tropics and the sub-tropics and while I have never come to love such climates, I do know them intimately and appreciate them for what they are. I am at heart a dry climate person and perhaps that is because, as a Virgo, I need my boundaries defined in seasons as well as in other ways.

We are all different and in a way we live in worlds of our own making and worlds which have made us and we connect in the places in between, if we can. Living in different cultures allow practice for this but how much we master this living in the spaces between worlds depends, I believe, on our inherent natures.

The more fixed our boundaries the less we move and our moved by our environments. But then living in a different culture ensures that however fixed our boundaries may be as part of our nature, they must learn to bend and move and flex if we are to not just survive, but to thrive.

I have noticed here in Malawi that people often seem to enjoy the misfortune of others, particularly where the person has done some 'wrong' or possibly done some 'wrong.' It is as if there is great satisfaction in seeing them 'brought low' and perhaps there is, because in much of Africa, including here, there is a belief that good fortune means one is in league with the devil or evil forces, which suggests that ill fortune must be seen as positive.

Or perhaps when things go wrong for others they feel safe because there is only so much evil doing which can be done at any one time. Witchcraft has a deep hold on Africa and where it is combined, as it so often is, with the fanatical evangelical form of Christianity, there must indeed be much to fear.

Africa holds more places between worlds than perhaps anywhere else.

It's just Africa

There is no doubt that the Africa factor is cumulative. You don't realise how it niggles away underneath until something goes wrong and that happens a lot, it is just a matter of how wrong the something is that goes.

I think you have to be a certain kind of person to live in the Third World as a long-term expatriate. We are coming up for four years in Malawi and as a hardship posting, the norm is two to three years so this is getting to be long.

You do develop a sense of humour and plenty of pragmatism and flexibility, otherwise you would go mad. Maybe that happens anyway and you are so mad you just don't notice anymore. There is a madness to such places but whether it is because it attracts the kind, develops madness in certain people, makes the mad even crazier I don't know. Of course it is not us! We know we are sane. Well as sane as anyone ever is living in a generally insane world.

That may sound harsh but you have to live in such places to know what I mean and if you don't or haven't there is not much point explaining.

And you learn to laugh a lot. To not take things too seriously and to understand that really, compared to the problems people face in such places, those of us fortunate enough to come from and return to and live in the developed world do not have problems, only minor inconveniences in the main.

Sure life can be hard but not as hard as it is in Africa.

Photo: Polished Denza bricks on the floor.

One could argue that people are used to it and that applies sometimes, perhaps a lot of the time, but people are people and they feel and care in the same way if they suffer under injustice, corruption, illness or cruelty. In the Third World it is intensified by the powerlessness with which most live. One could and does only wish it were other. But it isn't and it probably won't be for a very long time.

It is what it is, remains a useful thing to remember generally in life, but never more so than here where often, there really is nothing you can do.

On the bright side the water and power cuts have eased drastically and it is quite a novelty to think: Oh, I might cook such and such, and not have to navigate real or possible power or water cuts.

But the internet continues to be erratic despite having a new service. In the past few weeks they have changed the modem, changed the antennae, re-adjusted the antennae, three times, and still it is erratic, off and on, and needs to be replaced with a more reliable dongle. Having said that, and perhaps I speak too soon, today it has actually been working okay for five hours. We shall see tomorrow if we can run two laptops at the same time as that has not previously been possible.

We have a new gardener, Samson, who seems to hover a lot, perhaps having heard that the old gardener, Fred, got a top-up each month, a situation we inherited from the previous tenants who were kind and compassionate and instituted a payment each month to help.

I am sure such payments help and one certainly does not begrudge the money, but it becomes another job on the long list of Africa. We did not continue the monthly payments when our guard service was changed and we are not going to give Samson a payment either, no matter how expectant he looks.

Photo: The garden.

What we will do is give all of them a very, very generous Christmas bonus since that helps them and works best for us given how often we travel and are not around when monthly payments need to be made and as with all of us, they become dependent on the money and it is spent before it arrives and so when we are late with money it actually makes their lives harder, not easier.

And Samson has reasonable English and has taken on board the maxim: Nothing gets cut without asking. Pruning in Africa takes on a 'vengeance is mine saith the gardener' quality with the general view being that if something needs pruning it should be slashed within an inch of its life, or a bit higher, close to the ground. Roses do not mind this but most other things do. Less is more is not a maxim here when it comes to trimming plants.

And half the time they don't have the right equipment anyway with a machete being the general universal tool and hacking, as a result, being the general universal approach. Twice I have returned from Australia to find the garden decimated by the annual prune. No doubt it will happen again - it is just the way of it.

A friend has established a vegetable garden and has been growing wonderful lettuce, something which is hard to get here, and all sorts of greens and filling bags for us as well. It has been such a treat. However, they discovered a few days ago that one of the gardeners had decided to cut back the greens, supposedly because the cook had requested some, and had cut the plants down to stubs, in essence ending their lives as opposed to regularly removing a few leaves, and so the garden will have to be re-planted.

Now, there is a very good chance that the cook and the gardener looked at all that greenery and heard the sound of Kwacha dropping into their pockets and so, over the weekend, they harvested the lot and sold it! However, if there had been some thought involved they would have realised less was more and taking some, not all, some of the time, and not destroying the plant in the doing, would have brought a regular income which might not have been noticed.

But that would be thinking and it didn't happen and so now, chastised, with a more vigilant watch in place, they are unlikely to be hawking lettuce around the streets of Lilongwe again.

Andrew has been scatter-brained this week so I am not sure what is going on in his life. His grasp of English seems to appear and disappear and I don't think it is my accent since that does not change and he should be used to it. Sometimes his brain seems to switch off and he either does not listen or processes what he is told in very strange ways.

A part of the problem, as it was in India, is that generally people are not allowed to think for themselves and so they cannot think for themselves. They function on rote learning and just keep doing the same things no matter how illogical it would appear if they actually thought about it.

Then again, given the outcome for Limited who was able to think for himself and thought himself into getting sacked because of what he did when we were away - bringing girlfriends and women into the house for sex and bribing guards so he could, mostly with our liquor - it is perhaps best if too much thinking does not happen. Although some would be good.

I went down to make a cup of coffee as I usually do about eleven and nearly skidded across the kitchen floor because Andrew had just washed it. Clearly he forgot to wash it earlier before we got up and decided to do it then, not thinking, or remembering that this was a time I was likely to be walking into the room. After going arse over turkey in Namibia a few weeks ago and cracking my head hard on the tiled floor after the cleaner mopped the floor with a liberal overdose of detergent, in that African way, I was not impressed.



Photo: Making bricks, Malawi.


I don't get angry with him, annoyed a bit sometimes but not angry, and I just stated quite clearly that it was dangerous and in future floors needed to be washed early, so they were dry before we walked on them.  Well, the kitchen floor does because it is terrazzo while the rest of the downstairs is polished brick which is not so smooth and where there is plenty of grip. They are quite lovely these floors, made of local bricks from a town called Denza, about an hour south of Lilongwe.

But it has been an exciting week for Andrew because his employment has been formalised and he now gets his salary paid into the bank and gets a bankcard to get it out and the company is providing health cover and superannuation as part of his package. He was not previously on the company payroll. He also gets a bit more money so it is probably enough to have him distracted.

He has had to go into the bank with Sharon the office manager a few times to get it all sorted out and it is strange to see him dressed up in a suit and well-polishes shoes since most of the time he is barefoot or in thongs. He dresses up when he goes to church as I have seen him after special meetings. It is easy to forget but in Malawian terms he is very well paid and one of the more fortunate with a very nice house provided and water and power included.

And in that way of Africa, he went in two weeks ago to open an account and went in a few days ago because his salary had been paid and he wanted to access it, only to be told his account had been closed because he did not use it, which is just an excuse for saying, 'we have lost your account.' The search began and he returned two days later to find the account and his money. So it goes.

We went to a UNHCR refugee aid function the other night and it was something of a shambles in that the date was changed for the event and we only found out because we checked and most people did not so the hundreds they expected and for which they catered, was reduced to a couple of dozen. We arrived on time although the time had also been changed from six on the original invitation to seven, and they were still setting up, hanging flags and getting ready for something which had been planned for weeks. But it is the way of things around here, last-minute everything.

The number of times an invitation arrives for a function the night before or even the morning of, where someone is expected to give an address, grows and grows. Planning, along with foresight and strategic thinking seem not to be valued. The entertainment consisted of a rather wonderful drum performance by Burundi refugees, a very long and not very good poem and an account of one refugee experience. Yes Malawi has refugees and many thousands more than Australia is handling.

The approximately 18,400 refugees and asylum-seekers in Malawi originate mainly from Burundi, the DRC and Rwanda, and reside in Dzaleka camp. The number of new arrivals from the eastern DRC rose in 2013 to an average of 600 per month, about three times more than had been initially projected. Finding the resources to move asylum-seekers from the border entry point to Dzaleka, which is some 600 kilometres away, is a challenge. Upon arrival at the camp, many women and children are in need of psychosocial support.



Photo: Burundi drummers.


We have a new government in Malawi and are hoping for changing times after the Cashgate scandal where hundreds of millions of donor aid dollars were stolen - even to the degree of people driving out of Government offices with billions of Kwacha in their boots.

I would just say that billions of Kwacha is easier to achieve than billions in dollars.   For instance, $100 AUD equals 37,000 MK  and the basic wage in Malawi is K5,000 a month. But billions of Kwacha for an ordinary Malawian is the equivalent of billions of dollars for us, perhaps more so.

The major donor countries, the US, UK and various European, got so pissed off they pulled the plug and said no more funds would be forthcoming until Malawi cleaned up its act. Let's hope they do.

Although even if they do it will probably be temporary. Most of those in power in Africa, as South Africa also so clearly demonstrates, seem incapable of caring about the good of the people or the State and focus purely on lining their own pockets. It is as always depressing but probably has more impact on us because we know differently and we expect differently as the saying goes, 'you don't miss what you haven't had.'

Then again, you need to be able to think about your situation and what it might be to 'miss' anything. And that does not happen much here. It's just Africa.....

Malawi, maize, meanderings and muddling on.

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.