Epilogue: The Next Search

I’m home now. Back in a place where the big things are more or less stable and the attention is on the details. Living with my parents, I am cradled in comfort and security. There was no initial rejection; it was a completely natural reversion. I had created a world in my mind – one of peace, abundance, and comfort – as something to look forward to upon my return. And now I am living as if I am in that world. I bought a sandwich for $8.39 without flinching. I gently manoeuvred the car back to the right side of the road when my Dad pointed out that I was driving on the left without assessing the could-haves. I left my wallet out in public places fully expecting it to be there on my return. So far I haven’t been disappointed.

But I am expecting, as the weeks go by, for this fog to lift. I will start to feel strong emotions again, rather than a gentle baseline buzz. I will note aspects of my life here that feel emptier, despite all of the abundance, because I have lived in a place that in many ways was more nurturing.

My last week in Cape Town gave me a good sense of closure. The CD release for Khoi Khonnexion’s Kalahari Waits was very well-attended. Many people said very nice things, including the group, who has seen this as a defining moment in their ten-year history. We sold dozens of copies, and since then more have been sold to South Africans and people all over the United States and in Europe. Several press pieces have come out about it, all of which have been positive. Soon, for U.S. customers, the CD will be available on independent music site CD Baby. If you are interested in a copy, however, the best way is to speak to me about it.

After the release I had a farewell party and jam session at Tagore’s in Observatory, where I had played the out-of-tune piano several times a week for loose change over the summer. On Tuesday, Glen, Jethro and another friend took me to the airport. There we ran into the outgoing national Minister of Arts and Culture. He already knew Glen and Jethro, and we had a few minutes to kill before our planes took off. He wanted to buy a copy of the CD, but we didn’t have one with us. Then he showed us a new songbook he had helped put together for schools. He proudly pointed out which songs he had written, and performed them for us right there in the check-in line. A touching note to leave on.

As a musician, I often think about the process of assimilating experience and moving forward. Somehow, by some psycho-physio natural selection, my fingers go from fumbling a melody one hour to nailing it the next. From weak chord voicings one year to more harmonically rich ones the next. I think it’s a big part of what keeps me going – my ability to see that I am, slowly but surely, moving through some sort of terrain.

It is the moments when I doubt this progress when I feel the most fear and uncertainty about myself as an artist. Preachers use the same rhetoric and logic today to attack homosexuality as their predecessors used to defend slavery not long ago. Hundreds of civilizations in history have collapsed due to overpopulation and environmental degradation, but the same mistakes are being repeated. Does that mean it is possible for me to lose all the lessons I have learned while in Cape Town?

I am working under the hopeful assumption that my experiences have become part of my tapestry – lessons learned on an unconscious level will stay with me as long as they stay true. But I think it would help to condense into a list some of the lessons I can extract now in immediate retrospection:

1. My biggest barrier to understanding people is my own notions about them.

2. I can’t not be an artist. When I came to Cape Town, I had decided that I could succeed more as an academic. I soon learned that this was irrelevant. My core impulse is to create, and if I ignore that, I will not be happy.

3. For everything that I’m good at, there are a million people who are better. So stop dwelling on it.

4. There are as many ways to listen to music as there are styles of music. I can shamelessly practice as many as I want.

5. People in developing nations are caught in a complex love-hate relationship with America. Meanwhile, Americans don’t know they exist.

6. Poverty doesn’t have to be about feeling sorry for yourself.

7. Money can destroy relationships.

8. Relationships can destroy money.

9. Artists are the guardians and destroyers of myths.

10. Comfort is placatory.

11. A lot of people are struggling with what modernity requires them to believe. Many First Nation people struggle with the antagonism between the wisdom of their traditions and what modernity requires them to believe.

I think these lessons I am learning are part of being a global citizen. There is a growing body of people who are educated, financially stable, and mobile. These people live in a global village, and so have added power and added responsibility. I grew up in the place where I am now, the small town of Huntington, West Virginia, where many residents have lived for generations and generations. I knew that the opportunities I was looking for didn’t exist here, but at times growing up it was hard to imagine not being tied to this place. Now I am joining the ranks of other global citizens, and learning what that means. At the same time, by taking myself farther from my familiar context, I am learning what it means to be a West Virginian.

At Michigan I first learned to be proud to be a West Virginian, because I saw West Virginia’s uniqueness and I had to dispel others’ ignorance about it. In Cape Town, most people didn’t know it was a separate state from Virginia, but they also didn’t know the stereotypes that aren’t worth knowing. So it was tabula rasa for me, and I had to make a first impression. Natural beauty, strong culture, isolation, and economic woes were usually my talking points. And I would usually end up talking about dependence on coal and explaining mountaintop removal, which was always met with incredulity. When I was flying in to Charleston, I sat next to a businessman from California who was coming here for vacation. It felt good to be a local again.

Like the Zen cycle of awakening, I am now back at the exact spot where I started, but with my eyes a little more open. There is so much to explore about this place and my relationship with it. Now that I no longer find myself in Africa, it’s time to find myself where I am.

Thanks to all of you for reading over the past year. I have appreciated your feedback and support. I welcome you now to help me re-narrate this year by sharing your own reactions to my experiences and the lessons I have learned. With our complementing and conflicting perceptions, we can start to get a glimpse of something true…

Ch. 14: The New World

Classes are out for the term, and yesterday I had my one and only exam – a piano practical. For the previous few days I had put all my energy into preparing for it, and so when it was over I felt like celebrating. My official business with the University of Cape Town is now complete, except for nagging the administrative offices to put Jazz Ensemble on my transcript (I registered of it at the beginning of the term but they never got around to entering it into the system). This exam marked the beginning of a two week period of tying up loose ends before my departure on 9 June. This is the part where I start thinking about the practicalities of getting and being home. Kind of exciting.

It was with this on my mind that I went into a performance of Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (“Symphony of the New World”) by the university’s Symphony Orchestra last night. I sat there with a South African friend, a few meters from the cello section, letting Dvořák’s melodies wash over me. This symphony was based on the Czech composer’s visit to “The New World” in the late 19th century, and the themes are modelled on American folk styles – especially African American spirituals and Native American music. Hearing this in Cape Town, it occurred to me that this symphony, and its title, probably evokes a sense of exoticism for those who have not visited America. Perhaps it functioned more this way before America’s pop music took over international airwaves, but I’m sure even in that audience last night there were some people with the thought in the back of their mind, “So, this is what America sounds like.” I’m guessing this because I found traces of that thought in my mind.

I’ve been out of touch with my homeland now for eleven months, and I’m wondering what it will be like when I get back. Will I suddenly remember, in a rush of disappointment, all the things I was happy to leave behind in July? The hyper-consumerism, the technology cult, the de-emphasis on personal communication, the pursuit of the meaningless? More likely, this will come bit-by-bit, but my first sensation will be one of return to comfort.

I’m also wondering how this experience will look as it is disappearing over the horizon of my past. What will I miss about being here? The diversity of people and experiences? The musical gatherings? The individuals I have come to know? The bond I have with the friends that I have made here is becoming more tangible as it is about to be broken. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.

I think, experience-wise, what will stick out most in my mind will be my time with Khoi Khonnexion working on our recording project. We’ve finished all the recording, mixing, mastering, and album design, and we’re now in kind of a limbo stage. We still haven’t exactly come up with all of the money to pay the manufacturing company, but we’ve already given them the master and the CD design, and we’re confident that by the 5th of June, when we receive our 1,000 copies, we’ll have raised enough or be able to invest enough to pay them. It’s exciting to think that in just a few days we’ll have the finished product in our hands. It has been a creatively challenging and fulfilling project. Both the form and the content are new territory for me – indigenous consciousness in Southern Africa, expressed with sounds that, for the most part, lack what I have come to learn to be the basic elements of music. It has involved a lot of experimentation, and the result is something quite fresh and, I think, compelling. I have learned so much about possibilities in the arts, and the people I have met through the project will serve as models for me as I try to carve out my path as an artist.

One of these people is local visual and musical artist Brendon Bussy. He went to school for visual art, and then started making money doing interesting projects that came his way, and even more interesting projects that reflect his own voice as an artist, but aren’t as financially rewarding. Right now he has what he describes as a “pizza delivery job” managing the production of a boxed set of South African documentaries, which will be manufactured in the thousands. In his spare time he finds ways of incorporating local indigenous musical styles into his mandolin playing, makes field recordings, and beta-tests electronic music software. He lent me a pair of speakers for the project, and showed me how to mix a piano so it sounds like shattering glass.

And there’s Isa Suarez, a French composer who spends much of her time in Cape Town. Her latest project is working with choirs of school kids, developing songs about their views about the world, and performing them on minibus taxis as they travel throughout the city.

Manfred Zille is a German-born artist who came to Cape Town during the apartheid struggle. His work was banned when he painted portraits of government officials and invited the public to add their commentary, graffiti-style, to the canvasses. These canvasses are now owned by the South African National Gallery.

The biggest inspiration to me has been Garth Erasmus – visual artist and member of Khoi Khonnexion. He too got his start during the time when the revolutionary task was to make the nation “ungovernable” by the apartheid system, so that it would collapse on itself. He stencilled tributes to recent victims of the regime’s violent tactics on the walls of the city. After apartheid ended, he began the quest for healing in his work, focusing specifically on his Khoisan heritage. He began research into indigenous history, and found his way to indigenous instruments. He began to create them as sculptures, and soon was taken in by their sounds. He also has taught himself the saxophone, and has the largest record collection of free jazz that I have ever seen – libraries included. From Garth I have learned about personal authenticity in artistic work, putting process over product, and integrating artistic vision with personal mindset. Garth is one of the most compassionate, understanding people I have known, and he seems to cultivate this in his artistic work.

So when I go back to the New World, I will have to keep my memories of these artists and their work alive. In America I found I had a crisis of cultural identity, but I have learned that there is a lot to explore in my own background, and I hope to use the models of these artists to go about it. No longer a fish trying to define water, I will go home having seen what my culture is not, which will bring to light what it is.

Ch. 13: Shooting Yourself in My Foot

Last Friday I did my first load of laundry since I’ve been here. My German housemate pointed out to me that I had been putting powder detergent in the liquid compartment of the washing machine. For nine months. “Yah, you see the little pump. He cannot pump powder.” Somehow it always gets diffused enough to convince me that it had served its purpose.

But, come to think of it, my clothes have always seemed clean anyway. And, assuming that I haven’t been rolling in harmful contaminants, seeming is all that matters. So how necessary is detergent, really, after a rinse and a spin and a few hours hanging in the sun?

In modern civilization, we use resources and much more than we need to, because we rarely get a glimpse of how unnecessary they are. And rich nations have largely been able to preserve this hegemony by remaining blind to the consequences these unnecessary uses of resources have on the global ecosystem. I read somewhere that Great Britain has kept its emission promises under the Kyoto protocol only by outsourcing manufacturing, and therefore emissions, to India. While corporations are greenwashing consumers in North America and Europe into thinking that they can be “eco-friendly” by buying unnecessary products with woodsy color schemes, the much less “enlightened” African continent is inflicting a tiny fraction of the impact on the Earth’s resources. Yet it is suffering the consequences. Nations with agricultural economies which are unstable anyway after generations of imperial leeching are more prone to suffering from erratic climactic patterns. Not to mention the even more fragile dependence on subsistence farming, as I saw in Malawi, where the rains-to-meals ratio is locked quite tightly. The first-world nations have cushioned themselves from these issues by their power to import despite rising food prices.

South Africa’s economy benefits from soil that is fertile in a different way – it contains some of the richest deposits of gold and diamonds in the world. Coupled with its history of apartheid, which allowed a portion of the population to consume resources and produce waste at a rate comparable to first-world nations, this puts it in the unique position of being both a perpetrator and a victim of resource-based environmental problems. One might think that this would produce an attitude of “we are shooting ourselves in the foot.” But this is prevented by South Africa’s limits of national cohesion. The apartheid legacy of contrast has remained, and so the perpetrators can still distance themselves from the victims. Alas! it is only a microcosm of global-scale dysfunction.

South Africa faces many environmental disasters, from polluted rivers and destruction of wetland ecosystems, to waste and energy. For a modern city, Cape Town’s attitude toward recycling is anachronistic. When looking at apartments, I asked landlords about recycling facilities, and received blank stares in response. My current landlord collects newspapers, glass, and tins, but says that “South Africa has a surplus of plastics.” South Africans haven’t fully grasped the idea of separating waste. And taxes for industrial dumping are so low that manufacturers have little incentive to reduce.

One issue that I feel right at home with is dependence on coal. My home state of West Virginia is a top producer and consumer of coal in the nation. South Africa, too, burns coal for most of its electricity. To my knowledge, the violent practice of mountaintop removal, which has been damaging water sources, ecosystems, and communities in West Virginia for many years, hasn’t found its way into the tactical handbooks of South African mine companies, but the other dirty attributes of coal are equally problematic here. 73% of carbon emissions in South Africa come from the burning of fossil fuels (primarily coal) for energy production. Jacob Zuma, the President-in-waiting who still needs to go through the motions of campaigning, recently said, “we want to escalate our national efforts towards the realisation,” (my “rhetoric” LED is now lit up), “of a greater contribution of renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power, as part of an ambitious renewable energy target.” Make it happen, JZ. Make it happen.

But the backbone of any real environmental change is not governments or corporations, but the people: constituents, consumers, those who make tiny decisions which, taken en masse, have huge consequences. A couple of weeks ago the World Wildlife Fund hosted a global Earth Hour. It asked all citizens of the world to turn off their lights for one hour, as a demonstration of solidarity against global warming. I was surprised that in Cape Town, despite its outdated tendencies, this was publicized on billboards and placards. In a minibus taxi one day I heard Desmond Tutu’s voice over the radio, urging my participation. It doesn’t take much of an excuse for South Africans to party, so this event was celebrated across the city. The Cape Town Philharmonic played at the waterfront. I had to miss out on a friend’s braai (barbeque) to play a candlelit gig at a local bar.

As an artist, I am concerned not only with material repercussions of environmental attitudes, but also the psychosocial concerns of a people living with not only the immediate effects and a guilty conscience, but the knowledge that it’s getting worse and it’s nearly unstoppable. This Wednesday I am presenting a performance at the College of Music which is conceived as a reaction to these building pressures, and a mythological response to them. Featuring masks, dancers, props, a storyteller, and music that is edgier than the tastes of most of the audience members, it will attempt to serve as a moment of catharsis. It’s something we all need to experience in order to be emotionally able to face the reality of the situation, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Ch. 12: A Glint of Light in Woodstock

“Avoid conspicuous clothing.” Advice from page three of my passport. My passport, which has no clue where I am, except that I’m not in the United States. I wonder if South African passports say the same thing, or if it’s only America that would have such a superiority complex. You want to go out there? asks Uncle Sam, turning his pointer finger to the dark beyond. The wind picks up and thunder grumbles from somewhere over the Atlantic. I won’t stop you, he says, finger trembling. But please, avoid conspicuous clothing.

Lucky for me, I prefer earth tones. But I do have an orange backpack.

On Saturday I decided that it was about time to inject some fresh energy into my music collection. I planned to head downtown to the fabled Musica superstore at the Waterfront. Despite my best efforts, I wouldn’t make it to the Waterfront. That is, until today, when I found myself sitting in a bank hoping I would not be defeated by bureaucracy, and that I would be able to afford my groceries after all.

Just before I left for the music store, I got a call from Cizzi, a Swedish student who was my housemate briefly in Observatory. She wanted to know if I would join her at an organic food market at the Old Biscuit Mill, a touristy establishment in Woodstock. I wasn’t sure where it was exactly, but she said it was just a walk down Lower Main from where we used to live. It was on my way to the Waterfront, and I needed food anyway. So I hopped on a taxi, which in Cape Town means a minibus that goes back and forth along a certain route, at times stuffing in more passengers than there is enough oxygen to support. But this one was pretty empty, so I was at leisure to talk with the man who collects the money. “Do you know where the Old Biscuit Mill is?” I asked. He showed no sign of recognition, and in Afrikaans he consulted with the driver who showed no sign of recognition. They arrived at a conclusion. He promised to drop me off close by. As we continued along Main Road past anything within walking distance of my old house, I began to get antsy. But he insisted he would take me there. As the taxi was slowing down, the coloured woman next to me turned to me. “Do you want to get robbed? You’re a white guy, and only coloured people live here.” Neither of these points was news to me, so I chose to continue, but to listen to the driver’s advice: “keep your belongings close.” It wasn’t hard – I was wearing an orange backpack, which couldn’t have been closer to my back. He said the Old Biscuit Mill was right there, and pointed a short way down a side street.

I took this short street and rounded the corner. There, with boarded windows and chipped paint, was The Biscuit Factory. I wondered how far I was from my actual destination. I called Cizzi. “What street are you on?”

“Can’t find the name.”

“Do you see train tracks?” I did. She didn’t.

I knew I was at least still in Woodstock, so I followed this street back in the direction I had come. It was parallel to Main Road, and busy enough that I wasn’t too concerned in broad daylight. I ran into a couple who actually knew the place. They told me I was about 3 km away. The midday sun had already brought a shine to my forehead. Forget it, I said, I’ll just go back to Main Road, catch another taxi, and find that music store. I took out my phone and sent a text message to Cizzi informing her of my plans. On Table Mountain, tourists with binoculars would have seen a tiny explosion of light coming from Woodstock as the sun glinted off of my phone’s display. “That one’s on borrowed time,” they would have said to each other. That is, if they had read the warnings in their passports.

Putting the phone back in my pocket, I started down another side street toward Main Road. I heard anxious shouts from a group of people sitting in front of a shop. They were waving frantically at me, don’t go down there. A shirtless man with a crystal hanging from a cord around his neck approached me.

“Where are you from?” He asked. I told him.

“So you’ve heard of the Bronx. You’re in the Bronx right now. Come sit by my sister’s shop for a few minutes. I’ll go fetch a shirt and I’ll take you to Main Road.”

I appreciated his looking out for me, but I had no reason to believe he wasn’t one of the ones he was warning me about. I was just a few blocks from the side street I had taken to get here, which was less residential and more open. I thanked him and told him I would just go back the way I came.

A few steps in that direction, I heard the same question from another man. “Where are you from?” He was a big guy, with two diamondlike earrings. Still walking, I told him where I was from. Next thing I knew, he plunged his hand into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. In his other hand appeared a big, jagged knife. He pulled my orange backpack off my back without much difficulty. He retreated, and another man walked toward me with eyes that said, you don’t want any trouble, do you? I didn’t but, remembering my beloved sound recorder in my bag, I shouted after my assailant, “There’s stuff in there you don’t want, man.” Then I turned and kept walking, as the other man was drawing closer. Again, I heard a chorus of voices drawing my attention. This time it was a group of people at a filling station. What did they want? And would this guy intercept me if I tried to go to them? Then I saw that they were gesturing at my orange backpack, which was now in the hands of the shirtless man. So I crossed the street and went to this little shop, where I was given back my bag. “Check to see if anything’s missing,” said the shirtless man.

“Just my wallet,” I said, eyeing the sound recorder with relief. He and his brother had approached the guy, but when they saw his knife, they had backed off. He had dropped my bag, and taken only my wallet. Was he afraid of the stuff he didn’t want? I can only guess. I was given a crate to sit on, and I listened as the locals cursed the drug addicts for tarnishing the image of Woodstock and of Cape Town. The shirtless man’s brother escorted me to the police station, where I ran into a filmmaker I had met at a party. He had told me he was doing a documentary on crime in Cape Town. Was he here for research? I asked him. No, his car had been broken into.

After riding around Woodstock in a police cruiser looking for the perpetrator, I wound up back at the station. After waiting awhile, an officer dropped three cards on the table: two debit cards and my Eagle Scout ID, which also has raised lettering but is less useful at an ATM. For some reason they were all bent in the middle. So, where was the diamond-eared man? They had let him go. Something about the card companies and subpoenas. I gave my statement, and listed everything that had been in my wallet. My driver’s licence, I remembered, was not among them. I had used it to get my UCT ID the day before, and apparently had left it at the desk in the Leslie Social Sciences building. On Monday I went back for it. They still had it, and I told them my story. “Should have left your wallet here,” quipped the man behind the desk.

As with any misfortune which can be written about in this tone so soon after its occurrence, there are elements of fortune within it. Thanks to my absent-mindedness, I don’t have to go back to the DMV in June. Thanks to raised lettering, I still have my Eagle Scout ID. Thanks to the residents of the community, who publicly antagonized a violent man who probably knows where they live, I got my bag back and made it safely to the police station. And thanks to my parents dropping everything to help me, I did receive the money wire I was waiting for in the bank today.

While the implication is absurd that everywhere outside the U.S. is more dangerous than everywhere inside the U.S., it’s true that Americans tend to stick out here, and we tend to be targets. Preventing and preparing for crime is part of the everyday thought routines of people living in urban South Africa. While we’ve all learned that prevention is priceless, we also know that fear is futile. As soon as I get my cards working, I’ll jump in a taxi again. And this time I’ll come back with CDs.

Ch. 11: The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away

I have found myself in Africa for six months now. I am halfway through my stay here, and incidentally, halfway through my university education. No better time to find a new Africa.

I had the good fortune of spending Christmas with familiar faces. Mary Walsh and her husband Roy Heaton knew my father from his nomadic soul-searching days. Now their daughter, Mary Beth, was halfway through her term in the Peace Corps in Malawi. For Christmas, Mary Beth met them in Cape Town, where several of their old friends live. Luckily for me, this meant Christmas with families. Mary Beth was happy to see a more developed city, but, as it turns out, she had to pay for it dearly.

Before she left Malawi, Mary Beth had been bitten by one of the fiercest creatures in tropical Africa – a mosquito. But now Mary Beth was in Cape Town – a malaria-free area – and she hadn’t brought her medicine with her. So when she woke up Christmas morning with obvious signs of the disease, she had no choice but to seek medical attention. So it was a miserable holiday season for her, and she ended up in Pretoria, where the South African Peace Corps doctor took care of her. After a short spell in Pretoria, she returned to Malawi.

Meanwhile, I had met these friends of their family, the Horrockses, who lived most of the year in Malawi. Along with Amy, a friend from the Telluride Association who is on a Fulbright in Malawi, I was up to four contacts in the country. I had standing invitations from all of them, and I decided to take them up. So on the ninth of January I flew to Lilongwe, the capital city.

Malawi is a small, skinny country that borders Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. On the eastern side of the country is a large lake – Lake Malawi. According to the U.S. State Department’s website, 90% of Malawi’s residents practice subsistence farming. It also has a very high population density. This means that if you are standing somewhere in Malawi, there’s a good chance you’re in somebody’s maize field. The country was only invaded by the British in the late 19th century. It never saw a large influx of European expatriates, so the British didn’t bother to Westernize it. Now independent since 1964, it still has rudimentary industry and infrastructure.

I spent a couple of days with Amy in Lilongwe. We took a walk through the streets of Old Town – the main trading district. Many of the scenes seemed anachronistic – old Singer sewing machines, hand-painted shop signs, scaffolding made from flimsy sticks.

This last image may be a good symbol for the Malawian professional music scene. One evening I got to play with some local jazz artists. The keyboardist with the group hadn’t had any formal musical education, and he asked me if I had a CD that I could give him that would teach him to play jazz. Later in the week I hitched down to Blantyre, the other main city in Malawi. There I met more musicians who bemoaned the situation – everyone who was good enough to leave the country, did. Visiting an international school, I was invited to teach two music class periods. It was a total of three students, and it was the only instruction they had had, and probably would ever have, in improvised music.

Early in the week I received an email from Mary Beth’s mother in Rhode Island. The Peace Corps office in Washington had decided to terminate Mary Beth’s service in the Peace Corps, in order to penalize her for not taking her medicine, and to make an example out of her for future volunteers. Everyone who had known Mary Beth and her work fought the decision, including the Peace Corps director in Malawi. But in the end, the appeal went back to the initial decision makers, and the decision stood. So, as it turns out, I would be with Mary Beth when she was saying goodbye to everyone she had known for the past year.

I reached her village and found the school where she had been working as a physical science teacher. Her house was filled with students; she was passing out photos to remember her by. Her house is made of concrete, with a tin roof. She has three bedrooms and two common rooms, with only a few wooden chairs, a table, and camp chairs for furniture. There is a small fenced in area outside where dishes are washed, and a shelter for cooking on the other side. The shelter has no chimney, and as I stood by to learn how to cook nsima, the local staple dish, a sort of corn porridge, I found my eyes continually assaulted by the smoke of the fire. The Malawians seemed immune. Behind that shelter there is a vegetable garden, and on the other side of that is the chim, another shelter with a hole in the floor and a BYO toilet paper policy.

We walked with Melita to her village, across a few kilometers of tobacco fields. We went from house to house so Mary Beth could say goodbye to her students’ parents. While Mary Beth chatted in Chichewa, I used only what I knew - by far the most useful phrases in the language: mulibanje (how are you?), ndili bwino (I’m fine), and izikomo (thank you). It’s no coincidence that these are all polite words. Chewa culture places great value on politeness and respect, as well as a virtue that I enjoyed the most as a visitor: hospitality. In Blantyre a man whom I had shared a hitch with went at least an hour out of his way to help me find the place I was looking for, even insisting on paying my minibus fare. In Lilongwe another man took about an hour to give me a tour of City Centre. And here in the village, everyone we visited invited us in for nsima. But Mary Beth had too many goodbyes to say.

The next morning I went with her to her school, where she addressed the students in assembly, giving them instructions on how to write letters to America. The staff and students were in despair – she had spent a year preparing her students to take the physical science portion of the national exam. But it required two years of preparation, and now that she was leaving halfway through, and there was no other teacher for physical science, all the students knew they were going to fail it. In my interactions with the students I got the strong sense that most of them had a strong desire to succeed, and many obstacles in their way. Mary Beth’s departure was one more obstacle.

All the children of the village came to watch the Peace Corps being loaded with all her belongings. She said her last goodbyes and the van pulled away. She is still fighting to be reinstated, and has collected many letters of support from her students, which she will send to Washington. Today I heard from her father that she was home safe, but still having difficulty coming to terms with the events of the last couple of weeks.

Pictures from Malawi at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/natepmay.