Malawi: An Epic

“Are you going to blog? Do you have a blog?” I had every intention to. But where to begin? What to say? It’s been three months . . . how can I capture it all in paragraphs and post it to a website? Post it to a form of technology so foreign and probably never even seen by the majority of those who live around me. I guess what I can do is start with some words written by Barbara Kingsolver (pg 265-266) in her book The Poisonwood Bible. In her story of life in the Congo one young character in the book says:

“Mother has nagged us to write letters home to our classmates at Bethlehem High, and not one of us has done it yet. We’re still wondering, Where do you start? ‘This morning I got up. . .’ I’d begin, but no, ‘This morning I pulled back the mosquito netting that’s tucked in tight around our beds because mosquitoes here give you malaria, a disease that runs in your blood which nearly everyone has anyway but they don’t go to the doctor for it because there are worse things like sleeping sickness or the kakakaka [diarrhea] or that someone has put a kibaazu [curse] on them, and anyway there’s really no doctor nor money to pay one, so people just hope for the good luck of getting old because then they’ll be treasured, and meanwhile they go on with their business because they have children they love and songs to sing while they work, and . . .’ And you wouldn’t even get as far as breakfast before running out of paper. You’d have to explain the words, and the words for the words.”

Last week around 9pm a child just over 2 years old died at my health clinic while seizing due to Malaria. The next day my friend and nurse at the health center, Febbie, went to the funeral of an 8 month old child whom she helped named (a very high honor). And yesterday, my friend Mphatso lost one of his closest friends at the young age of 32 to a stomach tumor due to Malawi’s lack of resources to operate. There is evil and pain and bad in the world everywhere but here it is so raw and so open and at times so helpless. Malaria, it’s a disease that is preventable- no one should have to die from it but they do- everyday. And last week one of my 15 year old students showed up at the health center pregnant. Her school career is over- she is now forever a provider and an adult and a woman from just 15 years old. Her childhood has been stripped and no-one hardly even blinks an eye. And what is childhood in a place where children not even 4 feet tall are carrying their baby siblings on their backs while gathering wood? Or months ago when the rains ripped the roof off of the family’s house where I was living and old women sat in a rain-flooded house with no blankets, lights, umbrellas, or ponchos only to show the utmost gratitude for a blanket borrowed to them. This is the reality of much of the world I now live in.

And yet these examples don’t tell the whole truth. The truth of how the land practically glows and sings with each beautiful rising sun as the ground turns from orange, to pink, to yellow and then back to violent and ruby as the sun sets at the end of the day. Days filled with laughter- always laughter and jokes. Children running and screaming with delight when cars pass by. Women who effortlessly carry 20+ liters of water on their head with a baby tied to their back and no shoes on their feet. Children teach me to dance and sing. The perpetual rising of smoke from every little house and thatch roof from where women are cooking, serving. The warmth with which every stranger invites me in and greets me as I enter their home. The enormous smiles and gossip that ensues when I manage to blurt out a little of the native languages- Chichewa and Chiyao. Or the woman who gloated with joy after being tested for HIV only to find out that even though her husband was positive she was negative. Her joy brought me to tears and she exclaimed again and again to the her fellow Malawian HIV counselor and myself how truly happy she was to not have HIV because she was so sure she did.

This is Malawi- a piece of Africa. The more I stay here, the less I actually feel like I know and understand. The more sheltered I actually feel. America- the land of information and opportunity and yet coming here teaches me how little I actually know about life and living. How incompetent I am at starting a fire, gathering wood, cooking, heating water, walking long miles/biking barefoot, caring for children, caring for the sick, not getting sick myself. At times I feel myself echoing the words Kingsolver wrote of one of her characters who says, “For the first time ever I felt a stirring of anger . . . for making me a white child from Georgia. This wasn’t my fault. . . My embarrassment ran scarlet and deep, hidden under my clothes.” While I have looked on Africa with pity, so many times I feel as if I am the one to be pitied.

This is a strong, beautiful, complex land and all the ways we have come to describe it or think about it over the years in literature and history books and in development theory seems so inadequate once here. What is the third world? What is underdeveloped? Are the smiles, simplicity, love, conversation, joy, giving hearts, open arms really “third world?” What is poverty? Perhaps some would say poverty is the disabled couple who lives just behind the clinic in a one bedroom house with a child where neither parent has the ability to form words or speak but can only grunt and make slight hand movements. Their daily living is about survival. And yet when I looked into their faces and they held my hand, I swore I saw the face and the love of God. Not poverty. Not destitution but hope- perhaps more than I ever have. It was so beautiful. I tell you this, when Jesus says those who are last will be first He is speaking of that family which lives in the shadows of the world never to be seen or known. But in my soul I am positive they are fully known by a God who has not and will not forget them. They are the poor who will be exalted.

What else is there to say? Everyday I am given a chance to go deeper and to taste more. Everyday this life reshapes me. Everyday I am challenged and sometimes I just want to flee for it is too much but then I wonder, “Where to? Where would I flee too? Where else in this world could I go that would stretch me as this place does?” In a place where I absolutely don’t fit in, I fit. Just like with faith, I have taken the leap and I cannot ever turn back. I am where I want to be even if I still stick out like a sore thumb every place I step. I will continue to walk down the dusty, brown, sandy roads toward the future- towards understanding. I am happy- I am learning joy when I am not happy. I am learning how to be teachable and humble and have that yes, child-like, faith. I am the lucky one- blessed one- privileged one. And I leave you with this:

“Once every few years, even now, I catch the scent of Africa. It makes me want to keen, sing, clap up thunder, lie down at the foot of a tree and let the worms take whatever of me they can still use. I find it impossible to bear. Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I’ve never even seen- I can’t say what goes into the composition, or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here on this island, in our little town, in a back alley where sleek boys smoke in a stairwell amidst the day’s uncollected refuse. A few years back, it found me on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where I’d returned for a family funeral: Africa rose up to seize me as I walked on a pier past a huddle of turtle-headed old fishermen, their bath buckets set around them like a banquet. Once I merely walked out of the library in Atlanta and there it was, that scent knocking me down, for no reason I can understand. The sensation rises up from inside me and I know you’re still here, holding sway. You’ve played some trick on the dividing of my cells so my body can never be free of the small parts of Africa it consumed. . . It seems I only know myself, anymore, by your attendance in my soul” (The Poisonwood Bible- Kingsolver- Pg 99).