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.