The "Road" to Malawi

I have a new record for the most dilapidated car I have ever seen, which is, incidentally,
the same car that took me over the worst roads I have yet to see in Africa. The safari camp I was staying at in South Luangwa Park had promised to give me a lift to the nearby village, from which I was assured there would be a shared minibus that I could pile into for the 120km journey to the Zambian border town of Chipata. On my day of departure, in typical African fashion, the minibus was suddenly no longer running, and I basically had no way to get out of South Luangwa.

Then I met a lovely American family from Chicago, the Spectors, who were in a similar
predicament. Fortunately, two of their daughters, Elizabeth and Maria, were living in Zambia and spoke the local language. Liz was here with the Peace Corps, and Maria was a medical student doing a rotation at a local hospital in the town of Lundazi. They were able to work with the nearby village to find what surely must have been the only minibus in town, and a driver to take them to Chipata, and were kind enough to invite me to join them.

I wasn't prepared for the pile of rusting steel that arrived though. It was a Toyota
minibus that was surely older than I. The body and chassis had rusted through in parts,
most windows were missing, and the sliding door didn't close. Springs erupted through the fabric of the seats in a fierce, rectum-pinching sort of way. There were four bald tires--one with literally no tread left on it--and, crucially, a horn that no longer worked. How you can drive in Africa with a dysfunctional horn is beyond me, for this seems to be the single most important feature on a car here. Because there are so many pedestrians on the roads, and due to the bad surface conditions, drivers rarely stick to their own side of the road and the horn becomes a critical element in arriving safely at a destination. Driving without one seemed dangerous, as did getting in the car with our driver, who clearly had been drinking all day. But, that was the only transport option to Chipata, so in we piled.

Our first stop on the 120km journey was at kilometer #1, in the local village, where we switched our drunk driver for a sober one and filled up with fuel. There was a BP filling station in town, but instead we bought gas from the boys on the street who regularly make the 120km journey to Malawi with empty jerry cans to fill with cheaper Malawian fuel to resell to locals in the village. While we were waiting we cahatted with this guy, Leonard (pronounced either "Leonard" or "Reonard" as R's and L's in Bantu language are interchangeable, so you hear lots of "Herro, wourd you rike some more flied lice?" around here). Reonard was so off his trolley that all he could manage to say was "Amen!" and "Hallelujah" and point to himself and, chuckling, say "Reonard" over and over again.

As an aside, the Christian missionaries have had more success here in Zambia than any other African country I've been to thus far. For example, I asked our safari guide's assistant, Karima, what his name meant and he said--in the first intelligble English I had yet hear him say--"It means, I believe in only one God and his son Jesus Christ." It also seems that all of the young village kids that you meet here have biblical names like Joseph and Abraham and the like. And it's common to see stores with names like "God Only Knows Best Grocery" and "Radio Maria, Christ in Your Home". In general, I expect to continue to see a strong correlation between the poverty and misery in a country and the success of the Christian missionaries there. If your pitch is eternal salvation from a miserable life on earth, it helps a lot of your targets do lead miserable lives on earth. But I digress.

Back on the minibus we were traversing some of the worst roads I'd yet seen in Africa, often at a pace that seemed slower than walking. The rains last season were much higher than normal, and the resultant flooding had wiped out much of the road. We passed many villages along the way, collections of four or five thatched huts where people live a hand-to-mouth existence largely based on growing maize, which they beat into a powder and mix with water to form a porridge called nsima.

Every once in awhile you pass a sign for the chief’s house, which is usually much more substantial structure, some with even solar panels to provide electricity. I couldn’t help but think that the solar panels were donated by some well-meaning Western charity or government, and I wondered how the donor might feel to see the panels they donated to some distant African village sitting on top of the roof of the chief’s house to provide him a greater level of personal comfort.

As we would drive slowly past these villages, kids would run out after us on the road, extending their hands and asking for money, tic-tacs, or pens. Again I thought of the well-meaning tourists who traveled with sweets or stacks of pens to hand out to the village children they see while on their vacation. “They don’t even have pens to study with!”, I can just hear them exclaim. Little do they know that all such arbitrary handouts seem to do is encourage children to abandon their studies and run out to the street every time they see a mzungu, or white person/foreigner, to beg for more. I’m all for bringing things like pens that are cheap and easy to carry to donate to local areas that you visit on a trip, but my god why do people insist on handing them out to the children themselves rather than to the headmaster of the school who can distribute them to the kids that need them most? I can’t help but think that so many of those who insist on handing out goodies to kids are doing it really only for one reason: to make themselves feel good.

I just finished a book by Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (I’ve also read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela and Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton while here), and in it there’s a great quote from Thoreau that sums up the mixed emotions I’ve had about all of the aid that’s gone to Africa:

“Be sure you give the poor the aid they most need. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce the misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

Again I digress, and both of these digressions warrant posts of their own so I will wait until my thinking is more solidified to write about them. Back in the bus we saw throngs of people walking along the road, often balancing heavy loads of water or maize on their heads. Even children learn to carry this way from a very young age. This brings me to another observation that I’ve seen both in Africa and other parts of the developing world where hardship is a way of life: children don’t cry here. Literally. I’ve seen babies everywhere here (the median age in both Malawi and Zambia is 17 years), but I cannot remember the last time I saw a child fussing about or crying. It’s like they are born with a patience and tolerance for suffering that many of us never achieve. It makes me wonder what it is that we are doing in the Western world to create such fussing and expectant babies. I have a few theories, but won’t go into them here.

Anyway, after nearly a day of traveling such, tolerating the deafening sound of metal crashing against metal as the body of the car shook against the open sliding door over the washboard road (imagine a giant box of pots and pans being turned over onto a cement floor right next to your head, and that’s about what it sounded like), after being exhausted from bracing myself upright across the roughshod of the road, and after being covered in a dust so thick that my black hair had turned a soft shade of brown, we arrived in the border town of Chipata, where I crashed that evening at the Peace Corps regional headquarters with the Spectors.