Stay on the Ride: Parallel worlds

Savanna Courtyard is in Area 3, a neighbourhood predominantly occupied by the upper-middle class and moderately wealthy. The Lilongwe Golf Course is less than a kilometre away. The nearby shopping mall is not that different from an older street-facing mall back home: grocery store, hardware and appliances store, mobile phone outlet, meat market, optometrist, etc.

A tailor shop up the street from Savanna Courtyard

Just past the shopping mall, though, is something very unlike anything I've experienced in North America — a roadside maze of ramshackle wooden stalls where people sell a vast array of produce, chickens, home-made mops, hardware, and second-hand clothing. One Saturday early in my stay here, I wandered into it in search of produce, took a wrong turn and found myself in a residential area which until then I didn’t even know existed – tiny, weather-worn one-room concrete or brick homes with corrugated metal roofs, no water or sanitation services, tightly packed together and only accessible by footpaths.

While wealthy people like me spend most of our days in offices, homes, cars, and gated gardens and restaurants, poorer people spend most of their days outside working as guards, gardeners, farmers, or vendors. Business is conducted along the roadside at wooden stalls and tables, or from a mat on the ground; people cook outside over small charcoal stoves, ziwaya, barbecues, or open fires; and women do their laundry at the river, or in a big plastic bucket outside their homes.

Breakout meeting during a community scorecard exercise

There are no public parks in Lilongwe, although there are many private ones, rented for weddings and other social functions. I’m fortunate enough to have Havalah Park (searchable on Google Maps) right across from the CSONA office where, at the invitation of the couple who own it, I take my lunch break each day. It’s rare to have this luxury, and I don’t take it for granted.

My lunch spot in Havalah Garden

Although there are seasons here – a rainy season (December to April), a cold season (June to August), and a hot, dry season (September to November) – overall, the weather is incredibly consistent, and rarely a topic of conversation. Sometimes I think about saying to someone, “Isn’t it a lovely evening?” or morning or whatever, but then I remember that pretty much every evening, morning, day, and night is just as lovely.

Nights and mornings are cold in the cold season, but daytime temperatures are in the low 20s (Celcius). The hot season is very hot and dry; trees lose their leaves, and the landscape becomes bleaker and more barren. Daytime temperatures rise in the mid to high 30s. This is the best time of year to see wildlife, as there is so little foliage, and animals come to the larger water sources to drink. With the rain’s arrival, everything becomes lush and green again; newly planted crops sprout and flourish.

"Hunger"

Ironically, this is also the season in which there is the most hunger, as food supplies from the last harvest diminish, and people wait for the maize to mature. This is the cost of having become so reliant – as are most other sub-Saharan African countries – on a single crop.

Not that it’s difficult to grow things – that is, with enough water, the biggest challenge for farmers here. Early in my stay, I bought arugula and kale seeds and made a garden in the grassy plot outside my door, where an earlier resident had established two clumps of parsley. A few weeks after I added compost from the large pit tucked behind our flats, numerous tomatoes spontaneously sprouted – so many that I dug up most of the seedlings and gave them to the gardener, maintenance man, and the guards. Greens are only MK100-200 a bunch, depending on the variety ($0.18-0.36), and a bucket of tomatoes -- probably 3 or 4 dozen – only costs MK1,500-2,000 ($2.70-3.60). That doesn't provide much motivation to grow them myself, but I get a lot of pleasure from my tiny plot.

Dirt for sale on the street beside Savanna Courtyard

My tiny garden also gives me a small sense of connection with my colleagues, who almost all have farms or large gardens. One young guide at a wilderness reserve asked me whether most people in Canada were farmers, as they are here. When I told him very few of them were, he asked how people got their food. “Do companies just bring it to them?” My immediate impulse was to say, “No,” but on reflection, I realize that’s pretty much how it works.

Cattle being herded to the slaughterhouse, as seen en route to work one morning

Just as I find things strange and interesting that are very normal for people here, so much about how we North Americans do things seems strange or even bizarre to a Malawian. During the lunch break of a CSONA workshop, the executive director of one of CSONA's member organizations asked me where my parents were buried. I think he found my description of cremation and having their ashes in different locations slightly disturbing. He told me that here people know where their family land is by where their grandparents are buried. The implicit questions that raised about how or whether I know where my family is rooted remained unanswered.

Zitenje drying in the backyard of a well-to-do village home

I read an article recently in which the author was refuting “information processing” theories of human cognition. One of the author’s arguments is that our brains don’t store memories literally, as computer systems do. Not only do we not have literal and exact memories of events and things, but different cells and areas of our brains are activated even when we try to recall the same experiences. He argues that “a snapshot of the brain’s current state might be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.”

Reading that took me aback. As much as I’ve known that my perspective is different from someone who has always lived in Malawi, reading that really made me consider HOW different, and appreciate once more that there are very few similarities in our experiences that I can take for granted.