A week less ordinary

5 days and 5 nights in Gongonya village (T/A Kwataine)
I’ve toyed with the idea of “sleeping rough” during my placement here in Malawi since I’ve arrived really. I thought that would be one way of getting closer to the traditional way of life of the people I meet everyday in the hospital and also to better understand some dynamics. For the first few months, I couldn’t even entertain the idea with the rainy season still in full force. After that, I got myself into a routine of work and travelling/meeting people, essential for my early integration, which left me with hardly any time for such ventures. Knowing that the national conference would be a real climax in my agenda here, I finally thought that if I don’t do it in the anticlimax period, before the rainy season reappears and more importantly before Janet arrives, then I might never get to do it. So I hit the iron!

The experience was a unique self-styled escape into a world far removed from the conventional tourist or expat worker trail of Malawi. My expectations were mostly based on 2 previous cultural village visits, but even those were heavily geared at tourists with plenty of extras. This time round, I would taste the real thing- or as close to it as I may ever get. Thanks to Patrick, a great friend at work who works as a HSA (health surveillance assistant) at Madzanje village, I got my keep organised there. Patrick, in that genuine self-offering way typical of most Malawians, decided to join me on my mission and shunned his own comfy bed in town for this. The adventure was partly what lured him but also the opportunity to develop our friendship. Malawians, I have found, will really go to great lengths for this.

The plan was to commute to and back from work in the way the villagers themselves do. That meant mostly matola rides in the evenings, whereas in the mornings, it was essentially a chance affair. Since the time we set off was the peak time, all public transport was too full to stop. We’d end up hitching lifts or trying our luck with any vehicle with a spare seat (for which they charge). It seems that my muzungu status helped at least one tiny beat, not in getting me a lift from the passing cars, but in getting a big bus to stop on two occasions at this roadside lay-by which they normally give a wide berth to, leaving such petty duties for the minibuses. From the main road to our village, we would cover another 2.5Km on foot- a perfect daily constitutional as it were. The first time to the village and the time when leaving didn’t feel quite like this though, more like a full work-out rather, since I had my full week’s luggage with me as well. True to my villager emulation, I ended up carrying it on my head, and indeed that proved to be the most efficient way of going about it. Also one day, Patrick and I cheated, partly for the fun of it, since Henry, my flatmate, offered to lend us his motorbike. Given Patrick’s gregarious elation at this mode of transport, I discreetly declined a repeat offer the next day. The transport experience alone was enough to paint a picture for me of what difficulties the local villager might experience getting to the district hospital when ill. Madzanje, from which it takes a maximum of 3hours to get to the hospital, should really be considered nearby, when you consider such places as Kasinje, which are up to a 100Km away.
Nelly & Agogo- my super hosts

Let me now describe the actual village. I should point out first that I began by telling a few people at work where I was going on Monday, since they were all intrigued why I was carrying a travel bag to work. After noting their puzzled, somewhat disgusted, reactions at being told that I was going to swap my own comfortable house for such basic conditions, I decided not advertise it anymore. When one has to work so hard to get away from such an existence, it becomes quite understandable why they would never do such a thing voluntarily. But I really wanted to experience this way of living at least once properly. And in fact it’s not as bad as it’s made out to be. My hut was essentially a mud brick two-bedder with a thatched roof (very leaky, which is why I chose to do this before the rainy season) and my room a furniture-less rectangle with a concave mud floor on which rested my mat. The only challenge was hanging my mozzie net from was the roof beam and I reached it by way of saccadic jumps while stretched spread eagle against the wall. My rock climbing skills have come in handy like that a few times already! Once you’re used to lying on a hard surface, you just don’t think about it. After all some 80-90% of all Malawians do it. The only difficulty is lying sideways as the bony prominences of your pelvis do get sore after a while. But the thing about back pain, well I don’t know if it’s true! The concavity of the floor (from erosion) made sure I lay in the same spot every night! Patrick, who initially shared the same room, had to relocate in the other room (our dining area) the next night. The concave floor simply meant we would be converging to one same spot on the floor- a bit too close for comfort if you ask me...
Mat & Net!

The other proclaimed deterrent for staying in a village proved also not to be a big issue for me- the food. Essentially I had Nsima every night, with a green vegetable dish (sometimes cooked with a delicious groundnut sauce) and a tomato-based relish (lerish here!). On the first 3 nights, the latter would comprise dried local fish, with eyes still on, as its main ingredient. I have to admit that it took quite some hesitation before my taking the plunge, but once I did it turned out to be quite tasty. I reckon that as zungus, we tend to be put off from these foods purely from the sight and smell of them in the markets, looking quite untidy, with flies around. But that doesn’t mean it’s not cleaned properly before cooking. In fact it’s partly boiled and that softens the meat and gets rid of the smell. The last 2 nights were nonetheless somewhat easier for my own diet, with beans being brought in to replace the fish. The most memorable part of that food experience had to be the freshness of it all. Almost all of it was made from local ingredients (except for the fish) either cultivated the same day or dried and preserved beforehand. It has unwittingly turned me into a real Malawian food fan.
Patrick about to eat all my dinner

Regarding, hmmm, the more basic facilities, I have to say that the absence of a toilet with a septic tank was not an inconvenience I even noticed. Considering the amount of hassle I have with keeping the one I have at home working properly, with frequent water shortages, a defective flush mechanism and leakages, this hole in the ground was clean, not overly smelly and piece of cake to maintain! As for washing, again since I’m so used to having bucket showers by now, I even underwent an upgrade from my routine by staying there. My hosts were so obliging they made sure I had hot water in the mornings to wash. When you’re out in the crisp morning air, before the day heats up, few things come close to those 5minutes of bliss behind a reed enclosure splashing tepid water over your body! The day ahead seemed like the least of details to tackle.

The rest of my agenda in the village was made up of a number of encounters to allow me to peer closer into the village way of life. Among other things, I discovered the morning beer call of sowing/harvest time, the Nsima chain, the village headman’s quarters and, more impressively, the Traditional Authority for the entire region! Right now is the rainy season preamble, where all the farmers are frantically preparing their lands for the big downpour, so they can get the best harvest in a few months. This is a survival necessity in this part of the world- to the point that I have even had to discharge patients well before they were ready to go home because they and their guardians could not afford to desert their land, their food basket. With this routine comes the inevitable need for distraction in the evenings. Hence the morning beer call. Since there are no designated pubs as such here, different houses take turns in providing the evening refreshment, namely a home brew called “Masese”- not very different from Chibuku I would guess. I was not allowed to go and check by Patrick, who insisted he had my best interest at heart! The one big difference with drinking in town there was the fact that more than half of the participants were in fact women. Obviously since they are the ones who’ve toiled the hardest all day clearing these fields! I especially keep this heart-warming image of two giggling 50-odd-year-old women stumbling past my hut one night singing Waka Waka without a care in the world. Exhausted. Happy. That strangely reminded me of my own university days with my buddies after a weekend session!

I think I must have seen every part of the Nsima chain and as I understand it, it goes like this: Maize harvest, drying of corn cobs, plucking of kernels, soaking of kernels in water in big vats, drying out of the soaked kernels on mats, grinding (either by laborious pounding in a mortar or if one can afford it, at one the numerous maize meals scattered across the village) and a final round of drying again. If one only recognised the labour that went into making every single scoop of that most Malawian of all dishes, I think one might appreciate it a bit more!
As for the village headman, I actually met him on the night the drunken women lilted past my house. He had not been spared a similar fate, having been at it most day too. He was in a most jovial mood when meeting me, which I found incredibly welcoming. He even appeared to be the more grateful out of us two and he was effectively my host! Oh Malawi, what a warm heart you have! The traditional hierarchy of authority in Malawi and many other African countries, I believe, starts from small units, which coalesce gradually until one large block is formed. The final division then tends to be tribal or national. In Malawi we have the following steps: village headman, group village headman, sub-traditional authority, traditional authority(T/A) and finally chief (usually one of the T/As). This is separate from the political hierarchy comprising MPs and the rest. Chiefs however are somewhat politically appointed too and there is an inevitable marriage of politics and tradition.

On my last day, I managed to rub shoulders with the traditional authority for the area, T/A Kwataine. That was an honour and a half when you consider his status around the place. Meeting the man felt deceivingly like meeting my next door neighbour. Not to my surprise, he welcomed me with a most comforting familiarity and showed me all the way round his quarters. I was particularly impressed to be in the company of a kindred spirit in terms of environmental preservation (he grows many indigenous trees around his compound and encourages the same around the region he controls). His other project, which he would compel me to mention here were to know I was blogging, is the health centre he’s building near his house. Effectively a multidisciplinary clinic with capacity to deal with general medical conditions as well as labour and deliveries. Quite laudable really.
Green Chief

All good things naturally have to come to an end. And to mark my village sojourn’s one, I decided to share some of that joy with my friends from Ntcheu. With the all-obliging Patrick again, we lined up a group of 10 Ngoni dancers to delight us with a traditional performance. The fact that everyone joined in is testimony enough to its success. The whole dance was complemented by a fabulous meal, the best one of my week, i.e. a combination of my favourite choices from the week gone.
Ngoni Warriors

To say merely that it’s been a great week would miss all the other things it’s been- cultural discovery, personal adventure, new friendships, new insights, new standards etc. I have certainly got over my anticlimax feeling pretty successfully through it. What I can’t promise though is that another anticlimax from that very week itself is what’s gonna set in next!

National Conference/ Peer Support

The next few paragraphs would really have sounded like a déjà-vu of a previous blog (Africa a la VSO), were it not for the fact that this time round, it was my mates and myself organising it! What a completely different experience that makes it all of a sudden. All these fun things, for example, that I took for granted in March, now revealed the hard work that went into them. All in all, it is still fun but a different kind of fun- one with greater longevity. But then also one with a steeper anticlimax- state that I’m in right now. Just to clarify things a bit, I got myself (expectedly for most of you who know me) into a rep seat for the volunteers at the last conference. Since then, I’ve been keeping quite busy outside work really sorting things out between VSO and the volunteers. The culmination of this role really, as I already anticipated, came with the organisation of the national conference. True, I won’t take the biggest credit for it. That, by far, should go to my hardworking city-based mates- Hazel, Ruth and Misja. Of course nothing goes plain sailingly in these matters, as a mere 3weeks before the scheduled date, we got a email from the central office telling us we might have to pull the plug on the whole thing. How do you react to such a shocker after you’ve spent the last two months chasing quotes around like a headless chicken and squeezing business discussions into every social gathering where there was a slightest chance of meeting another rep? But we persevered and made amendments to the programme to allow it to go ahead. The end result, with hindsight, at least in my opinion, couldn’t have worked out better. We had the assistance of a super-motivated team from the programme office, including our interim country director, Anne Wuijits. We included talks and presentations ranging from social volunteer-to-volunteer booster sessions to proper development-centred discussions. I even got to do a talk on environmental issues relevant to volunteers based in Africa. This was in-keeping with the new global strategy for VSO, which our revised agenda had to reflect. Beside all this business talk going on all day, we also got treated to some pretty top-act quiz, as orchestrated by our own Bwana Joel (bwana= chief!). And just to put the cherry on the cake, I even found two spots where to rock-climb in the early mornings (without hangover by the way!). The first one was this brilliant quarry with the longest sweetest traverse I’ve tackled in ages. It got so hot in there though that by 8am it was already too scorching to even breathe. That’s why the second spot had the effect of an El Dorado. It was actually just that in every way. Quaint little volcanic island about 2Km from the shore, which you got to by way of a pedalo (and back from using your own propeller power, if you’re called Ashtin or Klaas!), littered with ascents and traverses of all grades. My overexcitement is manifested, even now, by the deep scratches on all but 4 on my finger pulps from the severe friction with this voracious rock. I was being quietly deceived by a placid looking water with cyclet fish circling around in a bliss-like state.
Facilitating


Taking the plunge!
Rock is back...

The second major difference between this conference and the last lay in the fact that this time round, the end of the conference coincided with the start of another- the peer support. Klaas and I were the main organisers for this one and it took one great big bead of sweat off both our foreheads to keep things flowing as they did. I will probably look back at it as one of my medical achievements while here in Malawi. The peer support is really the main forum for doctors to pick each other’s brains about issues being faced at work and make a collective effort at troubleshooting them. A great opportunity to commiserate above all, but which this year we decided also to transform into something more than a rant- a set of recommendations. Thus we sat down and dissected each of our grievances in turn, trying to look for possible reasons to explain things and then formulating practical suggestions as to who should be made to address them and how. We are eventually going to make this into a consultation document, which hopefully will inform wider medical forums and ultimately land on a government desk sometime... Another greatly welcome innovation at the peer support was a number of joint sessions with the nurse and laboratory VSO groups. This was really an opportunity to explore new ways of working together and making a greater impact in our work. It’s difficult to make such serious work related sessions sound as glamorous as, say, a Lake of Stars festival, but, in our own modest way, we did also manage to throw in some good quality entertainment. This was largely aided by Klaas’s very own natural talent for turning seemingly irrelevant details into an all absorbing canvas of fascinating facts, as evidenced by his medical quiz and an incredible take on the intricacies of the Chichewa language! And this time, he didn’t even have his guitar at hand!

The music of my latest week of organising-meet-fun-meet-delirious-satisfaction will ring for a while to come in my own mind though. Once the anticlimax is over that is!

Sleepless in Ntcheu

Lately has been a particularly busy and stressful time, with me getting involved in organising VSO national conference and a doctors’ professional peer gathering, not to mention numerous projects coming to fruition at work. And the most valuable commodity for me during that phase? Without a doubt a good night’s sleep during which to recuperate!
Of course, I don’t want another blog to draw pity onto myself, but the combination of elements that contributed to my recent wide-eyed restlessness are quite informative in their own rights. The first element will obviously come as no surprise to you- the sound of Ntcheu. This, however, is not all from the main road bottlestores for once. They also include a number of social gatherings, including one of the volunteers’ leaving do, for which a deejay was hired to play in the garden. The party incidentally formed the climax of my composing skills, where a certain R&B song (Empire State of the Mind- Alicia Keys/ aka New York) was converted to the beat of Ntcheu. The next round involved gathering all the guests of the garden party at my place for a group singing session- with troubadour Klaas expertly commanding that guitar-, which we finally performed live for our departing volunteer in the garden!
With the nightclub beats having become a regular occurrence lately, owing to the hot season attracting more thirsty customers, my sleep was unlikely to improve. What with the heat making matters worse! Fortunately I acquired a fan, which partly helped to address the issue. Once I got over those first two obstacles (noise and heat), I would brace myself for a sound slumber until the morning. But here an unforeseen nuisance manifested itself. The Udzudzu... Any guess as to what that might be? Just try imagining the sound of the word by humming it a bit. Get it? Well it’s the pain that be the mosquito! Somehow, for days on end, a few of them managed to infiltrate my net as I was sleeping. As I would be woken up at 4am or something to relieve some violent bout of itching, the task of eliminating these intruders would prove harder than I imagined. Shaking the net, inverting and brushing it and even crushing it into a tight ball were to no avail. Finally on day4, having concluded I had merely been imagining things or resigned myself to the fact that my problem might be bedbugs rather than mosquitoes, I decided to “Doom” the net and go to sleep in the living room. What a cruel satisfaction overcame me when I finally turned up in the morning to find no less than 5 mosquitoes sprawled all over my bedsheets- DEAD!!!!!! Since then they have not dared make further appearances. The expression pain in the a... shall aptly be renamed Mosquito in the net in my vocabulary henceforth!