Better Homes and Gardens: Malawi Edition
The boundaries of our village are lineated by the shore of
Lake Malawi to the South, and the unpaved road (prowling with baboons)
stretching to the provincial capital to the Northwest. Our house is located close to the market, at
the base of a hill that leads to the health clinic. The market, the bustling heart of the
village, teems with women relaxing in the shade and selling their husbands’
catches of fish, male tailors sewing outfits out of beautiful chitenje fabric
on hand powered sewing machines, and people selling eggs and soap out of
closet-sized shops. During the school
term break, children often work in the family business. The other day, while
buying Chinese cabbage, we observed a boy, aged approximately seven, buy a
single cigarette out of a pack from a female vendor aged around ten, presumably
for his father or uncle.
If you walk for approximately 200 metres in the opposite
direction of the market, you’ll reach the borehole. One of half a dozen in the village, it draws
clean water through a hand pump. Small
girls methodically pump the handle to fill several buckets full of water
without pause, while my arms ache after one bucket full. No matter, because the girls often insist on
pumping water for us themselves.
Another landmark in the village is the cemetery. It is a swath of land covered with scrubby
trees and dotted with wooden crosses. Located to the side of a path we use to
traverse between our house and the guesthouse/office, we’re overly cautious
about stumbling upon it in the night time.
To do so may impart rumors of witchcraft among village inhabitants. Witchcraft is the solution to all that is
unexplained. Recently, one of our local
staff members explained to Chris that on several occasions he found small sums
of money missing from his house. Rather
than question his family members or search for it in his house, he immediately
suspected witchcraft.
As I mentioned in the last post, two mountains tower over
the village on either end. One is
uninhabited and is habitat for baboons and hyenas that occasionally skulk
around the village at night, resulting in a cacophony of angry dog howls at
2am. The other mountain contains some
houses, as we can occasionally glimpse tendrils of smoke from cooking fires
rising from the trees. On Tuesday,
inhabitants of the mountains attempted some controlled burning of the
bush. This is usually done at the start
of the dry season, to prevent wildfires from careening out of control as the
months pass and the land becomes parched and highly flammable. Rarely, however, have I seen truly controlled
burning. Often times there is collateral
damage as winds change. As night fell,
the burning bush stretched down the sides of the mountain, molten
twinkling. By moonlight it looked like a
volcano erupting.
Our closest neighbors, whose yard borders our back wall, is
a family of four. Matthews and his wife
Janice are in their late 20s, and they have a five-year-old son named Moses and
a 7-month-old named Davies. They invited
us to dinner this week, and we feasted on the staple food of nsima (known as
nshima in Zambia), beef with a rich soup, and cooked Chinese cabbage. We also watched a Bollywood movie poorly
dubbed over in ChiChewa. There was a lot
of violence, and a glaring lack of musical numbers.
Many of the houses in the village have some sort of wall,
often constructed of thin reeds and tall grasses, to separate the dwellings of
one family to the next. Our house is a
square white building surrounded by a sandy courtyard and a brick wall. Housing is provided by my employer, which
pays K 20,000, or $50 a month, to rent the four room building.
In the front of the house, there’s a large
living room with four comfortable, brown couches and a coffee table. A small hallway leads to the rest of the
house. On the left there is our bedroom,
equipped with a double bed shrouded by a green mosquito net, a shelf, and a
pole for hanging clothes. Next to that
room is a guest bedroom, (which lies empty in anticipation of Todd and
Maureen’s Christmas time visit!), which we use mostly for storage. The right side of the house is composed of a
pantry/kitchen area.
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| The living room |
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| The hallway behind the living room |
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| The bedroom |
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| The rememberance wall in the bedroom |
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| The guest bedroom |
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| The pantry/indoor kitchen |
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| Our "sink" |
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| Water storage |
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| The pack porch, used as our outdoor kitchen |
Our actual cooking are is on our back porch, as we are currently using a charcoal burning brazier. To cook on one of these, you add a small pile of charcoal, some parafin or a candle stub to get the charcoal lit, then fan it vigorously until all the charcoal ignites. It takes about 20 minutes to get it hot enough to actually cook on, so no meal here is ever instant. However, during the week we eat breakfast and lunch prepared by our excellent cook at the guesthouse, and often take home leftovers for dinner, so we only have to cook for ourselves a few times during the week.
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| ...which is a re-purposed USAID container of cooking oil. |
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| Our "stove," a charcoal brazier... |
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| Lastly, our "chimbudzi," or latrine. There is an inside wall dividing the structure into two small rooms. Our bathing area is on the left, and the latrine is on the right. |
Electricity has been a new development. Some of our neighbors have reported waiting
years for the ESCOM electricity company (based in Salima) to come install electricity, but our wait was
only about three weeks. Our landlord has
been very persistently asking them to come, which probably helped. Our house was already wired for electricity,
so they only had to connect the line and install a meter. We will have to
purchase prepaid units of
electricity in Salima, then enter a code at our meter at the house to use that
power.
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| Our steadfast security guard, hard at work protecting the compound from errant chickens and curious children. |
