The Word Cloud

Several times a year, containers are sent out here from England, packed with equipment for the charity my husband runs. Mostly, they are filled with donated bicycles, computers, sewing machines, books and even an odd Landrover or two. Stuffed in between all this requested equipment are often ‘little extras’. These are usually items that people have donated for their convenience, to save themselves a trip to the dump. Things like old clothes, broken shoes or outdated things, like reams of transparent overhead projector paper that no one uses anymore. Sometimes these things are a nice surprise, other times they are just awkward to dispose of out here.

In the last container, someone had stuck in a bag full of swimming noodles – those long polystyrene sausages that kids use to help them float in the water. The only thing is that they were all torn and in short broken pieces. No good for using as a swimming aid, that’s why they had been chucked out. So, yesterday, I drove around the local swimming pools to see if I could off-load them on anyone. No one was interested, and I can’t blame them. These were just dirty lumps of faded foam.

On the way home, I stopped at the supermarket for milk. There were only a few minutes before closing time, so I left my four children in the car, while I ran in. While I was gone, the usual melee of beggars and street children crowded round the car, peering in at my children and holding out their hands for money. My children know that I don’t usually give the street kids money, as I have seen some of them buying cigarettes and alcohol with their proceeds. (Not sure if it’s for them or for adults controlling them). However, if I have a bag of milk or a doughnut in my shopping bag, I might offer it to them if they look really hungry.

So, my kids wound down the car windows and told them that they had no money, but they did have noodles! One by one, Santa-like, they handed out these toys to small grabbing hands. But, to their horror, the street kids stuffed the coloured pieces of polystyrene in their mouths, and started to chew off great lumps.

‘Osadya! Don’t eat them!’ my kids called out, in alarm. But by now, the street kids were chomping their way through the noodles, aggressively fighting off any competition.

By the time I returned to the car, the noodles were filling up several hungry bellies, and the smiling kids were begging for more.

As I pulled away, my children were begging me to do something.

‘The noodles were dirty, mummy. Won’t they hurt the children’s tummies?’

I shrugged. What could I do now? At least the kids wouldn’t be hungry for a while. And polystyrene is pretty inert stuff, isn't it? Not much different from the cheap, fake-cheese maize puffs sold universally here. It probably wasn’t what the UK donor had had in mind for them, but the noodles had made a pretty satisfying meal for a hungry child.

Yesterday, I was stopped by the police again.

Last week they fined me for my passenger not wearing a seat belt.

Last month, it was for not having a reflector strip on my car boot.

This time it was for not having my ownership details displayed on the windscreen. I wouldn’t mind, but whilst I am pulled over, a dozen or so vehicles drive past, held together by bits of string, spewing out black exhaust fumes and overloaded with passengers who are literally hanging out the backs.

They want me to park at the side of the road and walk through the crowded bus depot to pay my fine of six pounds equivalent. It is almost dark, I am late for my daughter’s piano lesson and have left my other children at home alone. I don’t have time for this nonsense.

Can’t I just write my name and address on a piece of paper and stick it in the window?

Yes, madam, but first you must pay the fine.

All my other discs are displayed and are in date… insurance, tax, MOT. I show the officer my driving licence, and tell him that my husband has just built the police a new victim support unit (after an employee was raped and there was no support available for her). He takes my licence and tells me to come back tomorrow with the fine.

Fine!

This morning I drive through the bus depot, where most of the petty crime happens, and into the traffic police station. It’s a dump. I politely pay my fine and ask for my licence back.

Ah – ah!

A maize sack is produced and hundreds of driving licences are tipped out onto the desk.

Surely they didn’t confiscate all those yesterday?

No, these belong to the drivers who can’t afford to pay the fines.

Now I know why I keep being stopped.

I rummage through the piles of grubby white Malawian driving licences. Mine is pink. A UK one. It’s not there. The police officer who took it must have it still.

Do you have airtime on your phone?

No, my credit ran out last night. I meant to buy some from the lady at the end of my road on the way to school this morning.

So, how can we contact the officer?

Err… don’t you have a phone here? A radio?

No land line, no radio, no credit.

Eventually, I spot it lying on a desk. It’s examined and handed over.

I’m out of here…

One of the things I enjoy most about going back to England is the choice of fresh bread available. Over here, there is only one sort of loaf. Its crust is thick and tough, and the bread is hard and often full of holes. Sometimes it is sliced, but often if the power is off, it is sold whole. It never lasts more than a day, before becoming stale. Either that or the ants move in. I will never forget the first time I met my future father-in-law, back in the early ‘90s.

I was staying with my husband-to-be and his parents in my husband’s lakeshore house. That sounds rather grander than it actually was. A modest teacher’s bungalow, with a cold shower and a wood-burning stove, it was run-down and infested with cockroaches.  The cat had died after eating insects, which had been doused in ‘Doom’ (it does what it says on the can), and his pet monkey, Monica, had recently hung herself in a tragic accident with a mosquito net. At that time, my husband was renowned for his poor hygiene; a friend of ours had spent New Year in hospital with severe food poisoning, after sharing Christmas lunch with us.

Anyway, this particular morning, trying to impress the future in-laws, I decided to make toast for breakfast. The wood burner was glowing, and I had pounded some of the slower cockroaches in the cutlery drawer, with the rolling pin, as was the daily custom. I carefully sliced into the new loaf of bread, purchased the day before, and let out a shriek. My father-in-law (to be) was first on the scene. A stocky Welsh retired engineer, he had no time for Southern girly wusses, like me.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said, as I stared open mouthed at the loaf, with the knife raised in the air.

‘A…a…ants,’ I cried, waving the knife.

‘You’re not afraid of a few ants are you, girl?’ he scoffed, pushing me aside. But then he saw the full horror. The entire interior of the loaf had been eaten away by what seemed to be a seething mass of ants. There must have been thousands of the things, and not a crumb in sight.

‘Toast’s off,’ my father-in-law stated, very matter of factly. ‘Got any bacon?’

That was about twenty years ago now, but the memory has stayed with me. Since then, I have encountered ants of all shapes and sizes. Like Eskimos, who have a hundred odd different words to describe snow, my kids have a large vocabulary to describe the many varieties of ants here. Their favourite are the stink ants, which when squished, release a powerful, foul odour. Once, when staying in a rest house by the lake, there were so many ants in our room, that my youngest daughter, then aged about seven, got out of bed in the morning, with her back heaving with them. On the white bed sheet, there was the perfect shape of her body outlined by red ants.

But, to bring me back to the start, yesterday I bought a loaf of bread that amazingly closely resembled any white sliced loaf you might find in supermarkets back in the UK. It could have been a Kingsmill or Mother’s Pride (does that still exist?), and yet I purchased it here in Malawi. It even came packaged in a plastic bag, printed with ingredients and other nutritional information and a best before date. These things are all taken for granted back home, but here nothing is ever sold with any sort of information like use by, or best before. It doesn’t really matter with bread. You know it will only last a day, and can tell, with a squeeze, whether it is fresh or not. But for meat and dairy products, it is so valuable. Around a third of the milk, cream and yoghurts that I buy, I end up having to throw away, as they are off before I get them home. Such basic necessities that we all take for granted, like fridges and freezers, are alien here to most of the population. So, when shop assistants receive a delivery of milk, they do not realise the urgency to refrigerate it. Milk can be left sitting in the midday sun for hours before it is put in the cooler. Since they are unlikely to drink it themselves, with it being priced way out of their reach, they don’t realise how the taste is affected.

So, at last, a sliced loaf that compares with home. In the last few months Malawi seems to have been crawling into the 21^st century. We are now proud to have a proper cinema which shows real films (not just the badly dubbed ninja rubbish), albeit a few months late. We just saw Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Our first fast food burger restaurant, owned by a South African chain, opened last week. Not quite MacDonalds, (are we the only country in the world not to have a MacDonalds?) and not very fast, but that’s a whole other story. For now, I am enjoying my loaf of bread, which really is the best thing since sliced bread.   

We employ three night watchmen to guard our home here, on a shift basis, two working together at any one time. They are not the most burly of men and we do not pretend to think that they will be able to fight off any armed robbers, should our home be targeted. But we chose them for their integrity and because they have families to provide for.

Getting the right sort of security guard has been a learning curve. At first, we went to the local security service and paid an extortionate amount of money to have a different watchman every night. The service guaranteed that a guard would always be available, although it was never possible to build up any sort of relationship with them due to the transience of their posting. We soon realised that these mobile guards often spent more time casing the homes they were supposed to be protecting, and invariably it is these security guards who are involved in any robberies.

We then decided to employ three of them directly, and picked the youngest, tallest, fittest, strongest young men that had worked for us through the service. We figured that by paying them ourselves, they would receive a better salary, be more committed to protecting our home, and we could cut our costs too. All went well, and we built up a friendly rapport with the guards, until two of them stole from us at a Christmas party we held for them and our other staff.

We realised that these young guys were not bothered about risking their job for a chance opportunity to steal. They had no families to provide for, and just wanted to get what they could.

Instead, we asked our day guard, who is incredibly hard working and honest, to personally recommend some friends who were in need of work, were honest and trustworthy, and who had young families to support.

The men he recommended were not big or strong, but they needed a steady income and were reliable. We now had a good team of three watchmen, who looked out for each other and us. Each of them has a whistle and a wooden baton, so that they can alert each other and us to any unwanted intruders. We then have a system in place where we call up a network of friends who will come to our assistance, if needed. Sadly, armed robberies are becoming more and more common in the city here, and we are one of the few expatriates who have not yet been targeted.

Three weeks ago, however, one of our guards asked for a few days leave to attend his brother’s funeral in the south of the country. We gladly obliged, and the other night guards covered for him. But a few days stretched into a week, and then two weeks, and no one was able to contact our guard. He had moved out of his house a while ago, and no one knew where he was now staying. He didn’t answer his mobile phone, and his wife and children were not around. He seemed to have just disappeared. This was so unusual, as the guards had a good system in place to let each other know about problems, illness etc. The only logical conclusion seemed to be that he was in hospital somewhere or dead. We had noticed that he had lost weight recently, and wondered about his health. In Malawi, the average life expectancy is 37, due to the high prevalence of HIV and Aids.

After two weeks, we took on another guard temporarily, until we heard from our missing watchman. Pay Day came and went, and still no news. I was sure that someone would have come to pick up his outstanding wages, but we heard nothing. Then, out of the blue, yesterday morning I received a phone call, from a friend of his. It seemed our guard had attended the funeral, and had then inherited the dead man’s chiefdom. He was now acting chief in a traditional authority deep in the heart of the hot south. When we relayed the news to our other staff, they simply nodded. Apparently, he had been talking about becoming a chief, but no one had taken him seriously, despite all the charms he had acquired recently, from the witch doctors to protect him.

One story he had told them was how there was a hut in his chiefdom where a snake lived. It had once belonged to a prophet who was now dead, and the snake was believed to be the prophet’s spirit. Young girls would be brought one at a time, to live in the hut, as a wife to the snake, until they were bitten and killed. I asked my cook, a Christian, if she would hand over her daughter to live with a deadly snake. To my surprise, she said that if her daughter had been chosen, then she would, as the girl would be protected.

Now, it appears that our night watchman is ruling this area, and no doubt will be responsible for picking those young girls. Having lived in this country for almost seven years, on and off, I still do not understand what makes its people tick.