With breakfast steeping, there's no excuse now for me not to do my exercises. Every morning requires an act of will, but beginning is the hardest part. I roll out my yoga mat in the living room. Once I begin, my body wants more, and by the end of the series, the stiff, sore places are stretched out. I'm motivated to find there are poses in which I feel stronger, and now I have a good sense of how my body's feeling today.
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| Apple bananas, my favourite! |
That accomplished, I get my lunch, water, and work things ready, and then finish assembling my breakfast on a tray. This morning, I cut up two apple bananas (given to me by a family in my neighbourhood who grows them), add fresh strawberries (sold for months now in cardboard trays by vendors walking along the streets), and sprinkle a heaping teaspoon of home-ground baobab powder over them. I've been eating this every morning for a week, and am every day amazed that I have these three delicious and exotic things, and that I get to eat them all together.
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| Baobab tree fruit, the strangest fruit I've ever seen or eaten The tart, dry, powdery chunks contain hard, shiny, dark brown seeds. |
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| Apple bananas, strawberries, and baobab fruit powder — amazing! |
I take my tray of breakfast outside, along with a journal, pen, and the exercise book I use for Chichewa. During the cold season from June through August, I would bundle up in wool socks (knit by my sister), my down jacket, and a light blanket to wrap around my legs. Now that the hot season is here, I wear flipflops and spray myself with insect repellant. On the mornings I forget, the no-see-ums, gnats, and mosquitoes remind me.
I'm happiest when, like this morning, I get outside before dawn breaks, while I can still see the stars. Orion hangs directly above me. I've literally woken up with the birds. A few of them, earlier birds than others, have begun the morning recital. As I look up at the stars, in the distance a man's voice joins the bird chorus, droning a call to prayer for the nearby mosque.
At about 5:00, the sky begins to lighten. As the call to prayer ends, the rest of the birds awaken and bring the morning recital to a crescendo. Doves, roosters, larks, southern cordon bleus, starlings, crows, what sound to me like wrens, and others for which I still have no name -- they all join the chorus. As dawn breaks, I can now see the many green mangos slowly, slowly ripening on the trees in front of me. Many of us in the courtyard are anticipating the coming of their succulent abundance.
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| Mangos!!! |
Gilbert, the night watchman, is up now, too. Six nights a week, he sleeps on a bench in the tiny brick guardhouse beside the gate, bundled in a red winter coat. He's doing his morning tour of the courtyard, looking for plastic, paper, or firewood to burn so that he can make his morning nsima. Seeing me, he comes over. "Mwadzuka bwanji, madam?" he asks. "Ndadzuka bwino. Kaya inu?" I reply. "Inenso, ndadzuka bwino, zikomo." All of which translates to, "How have you woken?" "I've woken well, and you?" "Me, too, I've woken well, thank you." All the guards who work here are friendly, but I'm especially fond of Gilbert, and he likes me, too. At his request, I taught him how to do the royal dancer yoga pose in his chunky black leather ankle boots. When the mulberry bush in our courtyard bore berries, he would bring me handfuls.
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| Gilbert and me |
Morning is my favourite time of day, and breakfast is my favourite meal. I savour my tea, fruit and oatmeal, write a sentence or two in Chichewa (my daily practice), meditate for a few minutes, make some notes in my journal, and think about the day ahead. The sun has risen and is already warming the day.
Time to start moving before it gets too hot. I water my struggling little garden of tomatoes, kale, and arugula, wash my dishes, and get ready to cycle to work.
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| With Sniper, my local bike mechanic |
The steep, long hill at the start of my ride quickly warms up my leg muscles. After that, the rest of the ride feels easy. Here and there, people sit on the side of the road selling mandasi, beef samosas, bananas, or other fruits and vegetables. Sometimes in the morning there's a woman selling warm cassava, one of my favourite treats. I look for her today, but she's not here to tempt me. I pass a man hoeing a plot by the side of the road, preparing this land to become a maize field when the rainy season comes.
The CSONA office is a house in a residential neighbourhood, tucked behind a brick wall and a grey metal gate. In the face of the wall is a mini-shop run by Martha and her daughter Deborah. Peter, the young guard, greets me as I bring my bicycle through the gate.
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| View of the CSONA office from the outside |
Veronica, the cleaner, is sitting on the curb of the driveway, which means that no one with a key has arrived yet. "Mwadzuka bwanji?" I ask her, and sit down beside her to wait. She, too, is very young and looks cute in her uniform, having removed the chitenje she wraps around her waist to ride the mini-bus to work. We chat a little in snippets of Chichewa and broken English, then check our cell phones. I pull out my Kobo and read.
A car honks, and Peter opens the gate. It's Jimmy, the senior finance officer, one of the key holders. The wait is over.
We enter through the small kitchen which has a kettle, microwave, water cooler, sink, and cupboards. The two small, open rooms next to it are the domain of the junior finance officer and the three interns. The rest of us share bedroom offices, each with its own ensuite bathroom.
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| The master bedroom ensuite bathroom |
Bessie, the national coordinator, and I share the master bedroom at the back of the house and have the biggest bathroom -- the one with a full bathtub instead of just a shower. I was excited when I first saw it, but of course there's no hot water in the house, so I've learned to appreciate a very refreshing cold shower after my morning commute.
Fresh and dressed for work, I come out of the bathroom and greet Bessie, who's now here and focused on her laptop. I set up mine, and continue compiling the results of the interviews with some of CSONA's members, funding partners, journalists, and members of parliament that I conducted over the past two months. We have electricity and water this morning, but wifi service is slow and intermittent.
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| Bessie and me |
Meanwhile, Veronica is cleaning each of our offices, spraying insecticide, and mopping the floors. When she's done her rounds, she'll find a cool place to sit. She spends a long time sitting during the three days a week she's at our office. Later in the afternoon, she'll wash dishes and do a round of spot cleaning.
After Veronica first started, I asked Bessie why she spent the entire workday with us, when she didn't have enough work to fill her time. Bessie said that our contract with the cleaning company was for them to keep our office clean on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. If we needed something cleaned on one of those days and Veronica wasn't there to do it, the cleaning company would be in violation of their contract.
Peter also spends most of his day sitting idle. CSONA staff who own cars will often pay him to wash them. Otherwise, his only task is to watch the gate, and open it when someone needs to come in or go out. People's labour is very cheap here. Those in minimum-wage jobs either work extraordinarily hard, building roads and buildings with manual tools, or they are just waiting most of the day at the office or the gate in case someone needs them.
As I work, I overhear Jimmy talking with the interns in Chichewa. It's the language most often used by people both in this office and at CARE Malawi. I can now pick up a few words here and there, sometimes enough to make out the topic of conversation. In some ways, the language difference is another reminder that I'm an outsider. On the other hand, I find people's conversations much less distracting when I don't know what they're saying.
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| With intern Faith in the CSONA meeting room |
This morning, I think they're talking about the WhatsApp messages and photos we all just received from the CSONA staff who are in the field today. Project officer Mike Khunga and communications intern Blessings Msibande are in Zomba as part of an urban governance project; advocacy and campaign manager Joseph Gausi is in Dedza leading district members through a week of district government nutrition budget analysis. I've been lucky in the past to get to join Mike and Joseph on some of these field trips. Most of my days, though, like this one, are spent in the office.
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| Facilitating a team development session |
At 11:00, Bessie takes a break from her work to talk with me about plans for the next CSONA team building session I'll facilitate. I'm lucky to get some of her time today, as she's working on another project proposal. CSONA's existence and survival depends on these. All the staff positions, including Bessie's, are temporary, only lasting as long as the current project funding.
At noon, I take my lunch and walk across the street to Havilah Garden. Peter is laying on the floor of the tiny brick guardhouse, tucked away from the scorching sunshine, eating slices of white bread and margarine, and drinking a bottle of iced tea. "Kalibu?" he asks, which is Swahili for "a little bite?" I politely decline. I, too, will find a shady place to eat.
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| Banana blossom and fruit in Havilah Garden |
The shade I find is that of a half-constructed cement block building in the garden. I spread a sarong over one of the cement blocks laying on the floor, and pull out a large yogourt container full of cabbage-bean salad with tahini garlic dressing. I'm not alone here. Now that the weather is hot, I'm seeing many more iguanas, geckos, and insects than I did just a month or two ago. As we hot-blooded animals have become slow and sleepy, the cold-blooded ones have re-appeared and gotten faster.
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| The most beautiful lizard I've ever seen |
When I get back from lunch, I find we don't have electricity, which means no fan during the hottest part of the day. The blinds are closed, and we open all the windows to get as much airflow as we can. An hour later, we completely lose our internet connection, too. I have email and Microsoft Office 365 through CARE USA, not very practical when our office wifi service is so intermittent. Fortunately today I brought my personal wifi USB stick. When all else fails, I've also learned how much work I can get done with a pen, paper, and my brain.
Feeling frustrated, I decide to shift my perspective and take a break. I walk outside to the backdoor of the mini-shop and call, "Odi!" People do that instead of knocking, which makes sense when many doorways are covered by cloth or have doors without latches. Martha opens the door. "Mwaswera bwanji?" I ask — the equivalent of, "How is your day going?" although I think it literally means, "You've skipped how?" I hand her MK100 (CA$0.18) and a re-used blue plastic bag. "Could I have some popcorn, please?" She fills it from the small theatre-style popcorn maker, sprinkles salt inside, shakes it, and hands me the bag.
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| The mini-shop in the CSONA office wall |
My delicious treat successfully consoles me. I offer some to my colleagues ("Kalibu?") who politely decline, having eaten their share earlier in the day. I would love to have a cup of tea with my popcorn, but of course with no electricity there's no kettle. At least it's gone off later in the day, and our laptops are all well charged.
A couple hours later, the electricity returns! But I when I go to make tea, I find the water is shut off. And we still don't have an internet connection. Aargh! I'm tired and hot, and my brain feels done for the day.
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| With Blessings, Faith, and Mike visiting Balaka |
I pack up my laptop and change for the ride home. Tomorrow I'll be a the CARE office. Internet service is much more reliable there, and I have coaching sessions with two of the senior leaders, one of the most gratifying aspects of my work here.
On the cycle home, I stop to buy a watermelon from one of the roadside vendors for MK2,000 (CA$3.50). She's set up in the shade, so the watermelons haven't been baking in the sun all day. When I cut open the last one I bought from a different vendor, I found it was already fermenting. And once, a watermelon bounced out of my bike bag when I went over a bump going downhill. I make sure I strap this one in much more carefully.
The ride home is more downhill than the ride to work, but much hotter. As I come through the gate to Savanna Courtyard, I exchange greetings with the guards. There are seven of them sitting on the curb playing draughts and listening to the radio. Their other major activity is gathering firewood and searching the garbage bins in the courtyard for plastic and paper so they can make a fire to cook their nsima. When there is so little for them to do, I don't know why Savanna Courtyard has so many guards. One jumped up to open the gate when they saw me. I think I should be able to say more to them in Chichewa by now, but my brain is very slow to construct the sentences. When one of them says something I don't recognize, I have to ask him to repeat it a few times, often to realize I know all the words, it's just that I don't yet recognize how they sound when spoken with a mother tongue.
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| Draughts (checkers) Bottle caps for one player are right-side up, and upside-down for the other |
After the heat of the afternoon and the cycle home, a cold shower and clean clothing revive and refresh me. I heat up a bowl of pumpkin lentil soup and a carrot maize meal muffin. The sun is setting by the time I go outside to sit and eat my dinner. The watermelon tastes delicious, and will be even better tomorrow when it's cold. The half moon that I saw in the blue sky on the cycle home is now bright in the dark sky above me. I sit outside reading a book borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library on my Kobo until I start feeling sleepy. I get ready for bed, turn on the bedroom fan, and climb under the mosquito net to nod off.
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| "Commitment to service development" |
As frustrated as I get with things here, I continually remind myself that the frustrations I experience are minor compared with the challenges and hardships most Malawians deal with every day. People like Gilbert, Peter, Veronica, and the vendors along the roadside don't have the luxuries and resources I take for granted. People living in the villages have even less.
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| Tailor shop on my cycle to work Note the treadle sewing machine, commonly used here |
I also remind myself that it is by design that things don't work here. The Europeans who colonized African countries set up systems to extract raw resources using cheap local labour, and to import processed and manufactured goods from Europe. Railroads were built not to connect the continent, as they were in Europe and North America, but to provide routes from the inside to ports on the outside.
Malawi has been independent since 1964, but the economy on which it relies has changed very little. South Africa and China are now the primary sources of imported goods. Malawi has virtually no manufacturing industry. European companies continue to buy and profit from the tobacco, coffee, tea, and sugar that are grown so cheaply here, on land that's no longer used to grow food in a country where many people routinely go hungry.
My petty frustrations highlight for me the privileges that I've always taken for granted — a varied diet and excellent education, to start. Here on the other side of the world, I have new appreciation for what I've always been fortunate enough to have — and a new curiosity about how much I really need.
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| My brand new bicycle being assembled at the local bike shop, with CARE driver Jeromy overseeing the job |
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Please note that the views expressed here are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cuso International.
