A Walker in the Suburbs

My one-week trip to Malawi was so packed with experiences that some of them are bound to overflow into the week that follows … and beyond. So as I sit here in front of the Christmas tree with Copper curled beside me, I think about the walk I took on the beach Saturday.

Lake Malawi is ocean-like in its long beaches, and I walked as far down as I could in one direction and almost as far as I could in the other. It was a “working beach” with only a few tourists. I saw fishermen mending their nets and women washing their clothes. I saw children carrying bowls of silvery sardines for sale. I’m squeamish about dead fish but these were beauties.

This hour-long walk Saturday was some of the only free daylight time I had during the trip, not counting the lovely hours staring out the car window at scenery as we drove from village to village. But it was so full of sights and sounds and activity that it sent me home with (almost!) a skip in my step.

I leave Malawi today after a quick and jammed-pack trip. During the last five days I’ve interviewed school children, teachers and a village chief.  I’ve listened as staff members outlined their programs and families shared their dreams.

I’ve seen women knead clay and shape it into cookstoves that will provide them an income for the first time in their lives. … children act out the perils of child labor with plays and dance … tender new corn and tobacco plants in red soil with craggy mountains in the background … and everywhere the energy and drive of a country full of young people.

I’m ending this trip on the humid shores of Lake Malawi, which consumes more than a third of the country’s area. Tomorrow we drive back to the airport in the capital city of Lilongwe.

I’ll take home what I often do from these travels — the knowledge that the world is a big place and there is more under the sun that we can possibly imagine. It’s heartening to me, this knowledge. It brightens my days.

I haven’t walked much in Malawi. There hasn’t been time. But as I’ve bumped along unpaved roads and zoomed along paved ones (in one memorable trip catching up with the Malawian president’s motorcade and pretending we were part of it), I’ve seen many people walking.

Walking in Malawi isn’t done for one’s health. It is done simply to get from one place to another. It’s riding shank’s mare, using one’s legs for transport.

Not to in any way glamorize the poverty here, nor go back to a time when most travel was foot travel, it still does my heart good to see these peopled roads. They aren’t just ribbons of vacant asphalt as far as the eye can see; they are alive and vibrant.

Today we drove through some of the most dramatic scenery I’ve ever seen, the southern end of the Riff Valley, with majestic views that went on forever. But the best moments were when we strolled down the road from a cookstove demonstration to see a woman’s poultry business.  It was just a few steps, but it made me feel, for a moment, like a walker in Malawi.

Years ago, a friend who had visited South Africa told me that she was amazed to notice that water draining out of a sink there rotated in the opposite direction of the way it did at home.

This odd factoid has stuck with me through the years, so finding myself in the southern hemisphere, I decided to check it out. And yes indeed, the water does seem to be draining in a counterclockwise direction, the opposite of the way it flows at home.

Still, I thought maybe this was a fluke, so like any modern person who occasionally has access to the Internet, I googled it. Turns out, this question is one of scientific debate. While water should flow counterclockwise in the south and clockwise in the north (a phenomenon known as the Coriolis force), the direction is due more to the configuration of the sink than anything else.

In other words, perhaps I observed the Coriolis force … and perhaps I did not.

We could hear the singing before we parked the car. The women of Chabula were greeting us in song. Their voices harmonized as they clapped in rhythm.

It was a day for singing. Later, inside Chabula’s early childcare center, the teacher led his students in English recitations: the days of the week and the months of the year — followed by a rousing rendition of “If You’re Happy and You Know It” in Chichewa.

Later in the day, as we conducted video interviews of anti-child-labor club members, once again I heard the sound of voices singing. It was a choir, practicing for a concert. Their harmonies will likely be caught on some of our audio recordings.  But if they’re not, I have them where I need them, right up in the old noggin.

Last night, which seems like a week ago already, I snapped this shot of the sun setting behind some exotic foliage.

Tonight I’m in another town, another district, but I’m still holding this memory. It was a peaceful stroll before dinner, and there were insect noises and frogs croaking.

Most of all, there was this southern light, here south of the equator. It’s different somehow, more brilliant, lit from within. I’m glad I was there to see it.

This was one of those days when most of what I saw of this fascinating new country was through the window of a car. Work trips are often like that. And you know what? I’ll take it!

Today was one of two days we’ll spend in the capital city, Lilongwe. Tomorrow through Thursday we will be “in the field” — although all of this seems like “in the field” to me since I usually work in Arlington, Virginia.

But “in the field” also means seeing the project’s work close up, and that’s what makes these trips so valuable. Instead of just writing or editing stories about vegetable production groups or village savings and loans, I will actually be experiencing them first-hand, meeting the people whose lives are being changed.

In the field? Bring it on.

(Above: One of the sights I saw out my window today. You’re never so far out in the field that the colonel can’t find you.)

Malawi is known as the “warm heart of Africa,” and has so far has lived up to its name. The people are friendly and the weather is hot and muggy. The rainy season has begun, and as I write these words the storm that was brewing in the distance is now pounding the Mafumu Lodge in Lilongwe, where I just got settled.

Even on the 30-minute drive from the airport, the scenery didn’t disappoint. The plains stretch out for miles with jagged-edge mountains rising from them. Trees are sparse and twisted in that way that says “Africa” to me. Women tote loads on their heads, men ride bicycles, children run barefoot along the road.

There is that great jumbling together of people and place that happens when you travel, the awareness, even in my sleep-starved brain, that the world is so much bigger than my little corner of it.

Last night wasn’t a long one for me, hemmed in on both sides by packing and writing and preparing for eight days away. But that’s OK, I tell myself, since I’m about to be on Malawi Time, which is seven hours ahead of us.

Until a few weeks ago I wasn’t entirely sure where Malawi was. I knew it was in southeastern Africa, but that’s about all. Now I know it’s bounded by Tanzania, Moazambique and Zambia; is dominated by Lake Malawi and has just commenced its rainy season.

Winrock has a wonderful project there, working to curtail child labor, which is higher in Malawi than most other places in the world. Thirty-eight percent of children are engaged in it, largely in the tobacco fields.

I will be traveling throughout the country, meeting students, teachers and others who are fighting to change this. One of them is Leonard, who was so inspired by the anti child-labor club at his school that he coaxed his friends’ parents into sending their children back to school.

It’s at moments like these, when I’m nervous about leaving my home and family, that I remind myself of the people I’m about to meet and the sights I’m about to see, God willing. And then I realize, all over again, how privileged I am to do what I do, how grateful I am to be able to see the world in this way.


(Look closely at the picture above. That’s an elephant, a photo taken on my last trip to Africa, to visit Suzanne and Appolinaire in Benin in 2015.)