Mpherembe

Last week (because of delayed internet access, I mean July 6-13) was busy!! I went into the field twice, attended another Malawian dance party, and visited Austin’s village, Mpherembe. I feel so full, so content here, however tumultuous my emotions may be at times. Back in Seattle something felt lacking but I couldn’t identify what it was – something was missing. But now that feeling, which I felt for so long, is completely gone.

Last Sunday (July 13) the main survey supervisors made another trip to Nyika, and Phil paid for their gas this time since he felt bad about the previous, unsuccessful attempt. This time, thankfully, they made it and had a great time. I wanted to join them, but had arranged to visit my friend Austin in his village and meet his family that Sunday. I mentioned him in a previous post; he was orphaned and has lost all his siblings and volunteers for several CBOs (community-based organizations) on HIV prevention, education, and treatment. I couldn’t imagine turning down the invitation to see his home and get a real taste of life here in Malawi. The evening before our departure was a huge farewell party for the main survey team, which headed down to Balaka to start training interviewers for the next survey site. I intended to stay only till 10 p.m., but the music was so good, and the company was so wonderful, and there was so much good dancing that even though I was extremely tired, I just couldn’t leave early. I had become close with Felix and Hastings, more than I am with any of the azungus here, and I’d enjoyed sharing a hotel with the group. I felt their warmth, their energy and community, even when I was in my room and not hanging out with them. I felt safe with them there. The party came around the time of my halfway point here in Malawi, and the realization that I’d have only 3 weeks with these friends in Balaka made me even sadder that I’d miss them for a week. To compound all this, at the party they kept playing one of my absolute favorite Zambian songs (a popular one here), called “It’s Over, Over”, which is very upbeat and danceable, but the lyrics are about a man whose wife has died and he’s dreaming about her and wakes up and has to remind himself she’s gone. The music alone is compelling, but the contrasting lyrics make it poignant, painful, genuine, heartfelt. This song is so wildly popular here, that it’s actually playing right now as I write, outside my hotel room. So I stayed and stayed at the party and felt so full and appreciative of this unique and precious time. I went home around 12:30, energized from dancing and with all these different emotions swirling around in my mind, and fell asleep around 2, knowing that I had to get up at 5 the next day.

Austin had told me the trip to Mpherembe took 2-3 hours, which sounded like a reasonable day trip to me, considering how accustomed we are to travel. But as the weekend approached, he said it might be best to stay overnight since buses can be infrequent and irregular on Sundays. He assured me that we could get back by 7:30 a.m. Monday, plenty of time to be at work by 9. (We work Saturdays, so Sunday is our only day off.) We departed at 6 a.m. Sunday. The first bus took quite a while to depart since we had to wait for it to fill up, but the ride to Ekwendeni was smooth. In Ekwendeni, we waited an hour or so for our second “bus”, which turned out to be an open-back truck piled high with 50-kg bags of, what I thought was maize, but was actually dried fish. The idea was, people would pile on top of the fish bags, so we’d be riding about 10 feet above the ground on this already top-heavy vehicle. This didn’t look too safe, and I thought about how most Peace Corps deaths are due to car accidents, but I climbed up there with Austin to get a feel for it, since he said it might be 2-3 more hours before another vehicle departed. And the feeling I got was, this was not a good idea. So I explained that I didn’t feel safe on that, and I’m an only child and how horrible it would be for my parents if I died over here. He completely respected my wishes, and we climbed down and he actually got us seats in the cabin of the next truck that was in line. We waited and waited, for about 2 hours, but the truck wasn’t filling up. Finally Austin found another open back truck (but with no cargo) and we squeezed in the back with about 15 other people and I had a great seat on top of the spare tire. The road was unpaved, but the ride was smooth (by African standards), and we stopped only once to change a flat tire. We arrived at Austin’s home around 2:30, his daughter and niece running out to greet us. Tana (named after the Peace Corps Volunteer who funded Austin’s studies after he was orphaned) beamed at me and let me hug her, but Phirirani (Austin’s niece) looked scared of me. Austin’s very shy and sweet wife Mitness had a feast prepared, hot and ready as soon as we got there. Since he knew I’m vegetarian, he told her not to kill a chicken for me, which would be the proper way to receive a guest in this culture. For my part, I’d been culturally prepped by Felix and Hastings, and was prepared to eat the chicken so as not to be rude. But Austin knew me well enough. (Although I saw he felt bad about not killing a chicken!) Mitness set out rice, nsima, and three different vegetarian dishes: beans, greens cooked in a creamy sauce, and beans with greens. The only thing I’d consumed all day was about a half liter of water, since I was never sure when a pee break would come during our various bus travels, so I was dehydrated and hungry. The feast came just in time.

Here’s a photo of Mitness, Austin, and their daughter Ellen:

I was exhausted and headachy, and tried to drink a lot and sneaked some aspirin (not wanting to reveal my discomfort), and we went to a choir festival, a fundraiser for a local church. Austin was an excellent cultural interpreter. He warned me, before we went, that at the festival they might call out my name and ask me to make a specified donation while they were singing. The church-building was in-process, the walls almost done but no roof yet, and about 150-200 people were crammed in there, some on plastic chairs, many seated on the ground, sun beaming down on us, and a charismatic master of ceremonies dressed in black slacks and a bright pink button-down shirt held a microphone up on the stage. Different choir groups would get up and perform songs, and the MC would call out requesting donations, and at the end of the song he’d call out the total amount donated, which was the amount you’d have to give if you wanted to hear the same song again. They found a seat near the front for me and Austin, since I was a foreigner and so an honored guest (or was it white privilege?), and as we proceeded down the aisle I heard one of the old ladies say “azungu” (“foreigner”), and I turned and grinned at her. She and her friends burst out laughing, delighted that I understood at least that much. Not long after we were seated Austin explained that they called me to come up and dance on stage with them. Crap! “Really?” I asked, “Did they really say the azungu has to go up on stage?” and he said yes, and that the woman who’d just come over to us was there to take me. There was obviously no choice, so up I went, and the crowd whooped and laughed, so delighted that the azungu would do this, and I joined their dance that involved lots of skipping, and at one point one of the men grabbed my hand and we hopped on one foot all the way around the stage and the crowd got all excited again. It was a beautiful experience. I enjoyed the rest of the singing and dancing without anxiety. After the choir festival, a women came over to greet Austin, and he introduced us and explained that she has HIV, and he encouraged her to get on ART a couple years ago. Now whenever she sees him, she comes to greet him and thank him again. “He saved my life,” she told me.

Austin showed me around town, and back at his home, more family members kept trickling in. He’s supporting 6 children: two of his own, two of his wife’s siblings, his deceased brother’s daughter and his deceased sister’s son. Since Mitness is from a remote area, far from a school, Austin offered to take in her two siblings so that they can receive an education here. His sister died about 10 years ago, and her husband refused to care for his own child; apparently this is common here. And Austin’s brother and sister-in-law recently died of AIDS, so now he is caring for their son as well, and may take in their other 3 children (now with their grandmother). Austin is fed up with the social network structure in Malawi; his experience is that when you have money, your relatives want to be close to you, but when you are orphaned, they don’t want much to do with you. But he is obviously doing way more than his share. And he only about 25 years old!

I did some meditation in a spacious shack (made of hay) that Austin uses to store tobacco and maize, which gave him time with his family without having to translate into English all the time. And after dinner I went to sleep around 8 p.m., which gave him more time to get errands done and have some quality Tumbuka-speaking family time. We rose at 4 a.m. the next day, and like he said, we were back in Rumphi by 7:30, and made it to work on time. I was pretty tired but I was happy. The team appreciated that I went; the Malawians appreciate that I want to really understand their life and relate to them. This is important to me. I appreciated how Austin and I were able to communicate and respect each others’ needs: I got my meditation time, he got time with his family, and we compromised on transportation without conflict.

There were a lot of other adventures last week, and I can’t write about all of them, but I’ll tell you about my first foray into the field. All of the students on this project can go with the interviewers into the field to get a taste of village life and an understanding of how fieldwork is done, and help the supervisors with checking questionnaires. Last week included my first two ventures out into the field. First I went with Keshet, a Penn student who recently arrived. She’s British but of Israeli descent, a microbiologist who is working on the HIV virus, here on the same scholarship as Amanda. Like me, she is struggling to find a career path that will satisfy her passion for socially engaged work and also make use of her scientific training. She told me about the background of the virus and why it’s so hard to combat, and why it’s so hard to develop a vaccine for it. The virus infects cells, and it’s programmed so that whenever those cells reproduce, they are also infected, so a person is never rid of it. Since no HIV patient has ever mounted a completely successful immune response against it, it doesn’t fit into our traditional conception of how a vaccine should work: the immune system’s response is always inadequate. While we were alone in the vehicle chatting, a group of children gathered around, in awe of this strange sight: a vehicle with two white people in it. We look bizarre to them, like no one they’ve ever seen. Our pale skin, our flat cheekbones, our long and pointy noses, our smooth hair that won’t go along with the cool kinky braids they wear; everything is foreign. They stared for quite a while, some smiling back when we smiled, but the little ones taking shelter behind the legs of the older ones, not sure whether these foreign beings were trustworthy. Although Keshet and I weren’t doing much, some of the kids eventually plopped down and took a seat to watch us as if we were the most interesting movie they’d ever seen. We were in a remote village, and these kids lived a very simple life. Their clothes were torn and un-mended, but their faces were radiant. There was one boy (around 9 or 10?) in particular whose smile seemed very wise and gentle. One of the older children (around 12 or 13), was the leader among them, and she was fearless. She held a long axe that she swung around while she talked, and at one point while the kids were standing around I noticed she was unconsciously chewing on the edge of the blade. She clearly called all the shots: she ordered the kids around, ran fast to get sugarcane, and ran with a stalk of it in her mouth, which seemed hazardous. She was the only child brave enough to respond when I asked “muli uli?” (how are you?) in Tumbuka, though even she was too shy to look at me when she replied. The others just continued to stare radiantly (or shyly), especially that one boy. I pulled out my sheet of 25 Tumbuka-English phrases that Austin had so carefully printed out for me, and asked him what his name was. He didn’t answer, but beamed at me beatifically. He, in this impoverished setting, didn’t seem to think at all of the inequality or injustice of our different situations, instead he appeared to experience only the purest delight at encountering such a foreign and interesting creature. Eventually the leader got brave enough to come right up to our car and pointed her stalk of sugarcane through an open window in the back, right at me as if it were a gun. She looked excited and afraid and aggressive (which was her nature), and I wasn’t sure if this was an offering or an attack! I decided it was probably a gift and that her aggressive manner was only to cover her fear, so I fished an orange out of my bag and passed it to her. She whooped and took off – with both the orange and the sugarcane! We felt duped as the kids ran up the hill with her to examine this treasure. Our audience was gone; the show was over. But a while later, another of the older girls walked by our vehicle with two 4-foot long stalks of sugarcane and laid them sweetly against one of our open windows. “Oh thank you!” I exclaimed, but she only smiled sweetly, without looking at me, and walked away. So we still weren’t sure if it was a gift for us, but when our Malawian counselors returned we told them the story and they said yes, it was “the reciprocal gift”, and we all divided it up and enjoyed it. The next evening Jonathan (one of the counselors) told me they had returned to that village, and that the boy had told him he wanted to learn English so that he could communicate with me. I was so touched. We didn’t exchange a single word, but I felt very connected to that boy. People are very open-hearted here.

So those were some of the highlights of last week. It’s a very special time, being here. After the departure of main survey team, time stood still again for me. It’s been still for the past several days. No worries about the upcoming transitions. Just being here, being alive, completely and deeply alive.