Freewheel Burning

Unfortunately, I couldn’t tape a mindblowing TV Malawi special on Malawian street bands, but I was able to get this while walking in downtown Blantyre. Catching a Malawian band on the street is like catching an elusive animal, you’ve got to do a serious bit of walking before you can find one. As my previous posts have said, what these people can do with very little is truly incredible.

These guys are from Ndirande (and friends with the Refuse Stealing Band), I couldn’t get their name, we were pretty much unable to communicate unfortunately!

Enjoy.

Ndirande is a sprawling community built up alongside Ndirande Mountain in Blantyre, Malawi. Most residents of Ndirande came from rural areas to take advantage of work opportunities in and around Blantyre. Originally a government owned plot of land, squatters have turned the area into one of the most busy and productive regions of the country. Residents are still widely poor, crime is common and population density here is probably among the highest in the world, but the rapid and unplanned urbanization of the area has created what I think to be one of the most exciting areas of the planet.

Residents of Ndirande first obtained work in factories and the industrial trades in a nearby section of Blantyre occupied by larger manufacturing operations. The proximity of Ndirande mountain to the industrial areas gave workers the freedom to walk to work and was close enough to be convenient for shift workers, who often had to commute to work at night. When jobs dried up and consolidated, workers took their new-found skills and started their own workshops and small manufacturing operations. The area produces vast amounts of furniture, iron building materials, steel buckets, household items, charcoal and food products. Items fabricated out of steel and iron are made completely out of scavenged and recycled materials, mostly out of scrapped automobiles and building frames. The developed world is the first port of call for manufactured automobiles. From there, cars and other items trickle down through the world until they reach areas like Ndirande, where they are given new life.

Around this burgeoning and locally driven small manufacturing sector has arisen a vast sector of stands which sell scavenged hardware items and tools, scavenged auto parts, and movie theater district, a bar and entertainment district and even book stores and informal schools. There is a vast market place that sells used clothing from the United States, school supplies, household goods, foods, produce and anything else you can think of. Ndirande is a testament to the ingenuity of humans faced with few options for survival. It is 100% home grown, completely unregulated, unplanned, but spontaneously has risen to provide the same services that any large urban area around the world does. Most of all, it is a sustainable internal economy that is essential to Malawi’s survival, a once squatter community which has become an engine in the machine of a struggling developing country.

Whenever I’m in Malawi, I make sure to patronize Ndirande Wood Carvers. Hamilton and his staff of 20 produce fantastic hand carved goods out of local and legally obtained woods and sell them in Malawi and around the world. Recently, I had the welcome opportunity to visti Hamilton’s shop and see first hand how his operation works. Hamilton runs his business without electricity, working under a grass roof in the open air. Woods are hand cut from local forests and brought to his workshop. A small wood fired oven fires the wood before carving. From there workers toil (barefoot!) to rough in items before fine finishing and sanding. Carvings are sanded by a pair of guys in a neighboring building and eventually stained and finished for sale.

All of the work is done without any power or gasoline powered equipment. Incredibly, tools are made in house from recycled auto parts and discarded files. Hamilton told me that he get bad wheel bearings from local shops, heats them up and unrolls them, then hammers and sharpens them into chisels. Saws are made from discarded files. He claims that the advantage to making his own tools is that they can be retooled and reused at any time. Whereas store bought saws are thin and have to be thrown out, Hamilton’s saws are thick enough to allow resharpening at any time. Honestly, I was blown away.

Hamilton started Ndirande Wood Carvers on nothing. He would take chunks of wood and carve goods out and sell them to tourists. Reinvesting everything he made, he was able to grow the business, start hiring and training help and increase his overall output and sales potential. Through his efforts over the past 20 years, he has put all 10 of his siblings through school, employed more than 20 people and put all of their children through school. In addition, he trains the handicapped to make brooms that they can sell to local residents. Hamilton told me that he’d probably be an extremely wealthy man had he not taken responsibility for his siblings and treated his workers so well, but that the benefits to the community far outweigh whatever material gains he may have foregone. Regardless, the man does not live like a pauper and he proudly showed me his house that he built for himself and his siblings.

Hamilton’s business model is an absolute inspiration. Unlike traditional capitalist models of self-interested financial gain, Hamilton’s model is entirely community based. The goal of the business is to create a source of livlihood for the long term health of the entire community. It is a truly Malawian model, create by Malawians, for Malawians with little assistance from western advice. Because of this, it is sustainable, and the prioritization of long term community benefits over short term individual gains could stand as an example for American businesses as well. It is through the efforts and ingenuity of amazing people like Hamilton, that Africa will rise in the next century. As Hamilton put it, “from zero, the only place to go is up.”

Coming out of Malawi into South Africa is always a bizarre experience. Only two hours of flight separates these two countries, but the difference between the two is so vast as to be almost different continents. Whereas Malawi is dark and electricity scarce, South Africa is light. Where roads in Malawi are lined with 6 foot maize, South Africa’s are lined with illuminated billboards and vast brick walls to control crime.

Malawi is mostly uniform, a country occupied by the artificial, colonial construction known as Malawians. It is a patchwork of tribes and ethnicities that has, for the most part, morphed into a people defined by their national identity, a welcome but rare phenomena in post-independence Africa. South Africa has yet to truly coalesce into a unified group. Rather, it clings together in the way that the patchwork of Americans does, a loosely linked union under a progressive political system, but vastly divided at heart. Malawians seek to improve Malawi for all Malawians, South Africa still fights along racial and ethnic lines over resources and opportunities, in the very same ways that Americans do.

The economic differences are less apparent when making the step down from the US to South Africa to Malawi, but incredible the other way. Though both countries have vastly hopeful futures, South Africa’s is especially bright. Malawi’s future may creak under the weight of bad governance, misguided economic policy and world superpowers using it as a battleground for their own selfish sets of agendas. President Bingu has gone insane. We can only hope that his brother, Peter Mutharika, St. Louis Washington University Law Professor, thought by many to be a shoe-in for the next presidency, follows the path of common sense and sanity.

There is good reason to be optimistic about Africa’s future, having an increasingly educated populace and a rising middle class seeking better opportunities for their children, and having been thoroughly exhausted by warfare. The anchor of an economy like South Africa’s could even be the engine that propels the Southern part of the continent to the next level, assuming that embarrassing stalwarts like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe finally kick off and allow the country to move forward.

Mostly though, sitting at the the Jo-Berg airport, aware of having to exit this incredible place, I think about what I get out of being in Malawi (and Africa in general) and how much bigger my world has become in the past few years. It seems like it was just yesterday,that I was some punk kid trying desperately to get out of Mississippi.

Leaving Africa, though, it’s hard not to think about what gets left behind. I’ve decided that the most important and meaningful thing you can do to get along in life, is to remember the name of everyone you meet and greet them like they are your best friend, no matter how brief or long ago your first meeting was. Shake hands with everyone, multiple times, if possible. Look everyone straight in the eye and treat them with respect. It’s really basic shit. If the US would learn or relearn these basic lessons, we’d probably all get along a little bit better.

My friend George, the head of the Malawian Secular Humanist Society, was kind enough to take me to the Maula Prison in Lilongwe to visit people who have been imprisoned on witchcraft related offenses. Readers may remember that a couple of months ago, George had arranged for the release of some of the oldest “witches”, paid their fines and returned them safely to their homes.

George has deep connections to this place. He was imprisoned here for 18 months during the Banda regime. A former civil servant, George returned from Zimbabwe to find police waiting for him at the airport, who immediately took him to prison. No formal charges were filed and no reasons for the imprisonment stated. That’s just how life was under the dictatorial Hastings Banda.

The prison structure in Malawi, like all Malawian services, is rudimentary and poorly funded. In a country where most people live on less than $1 a day, tax revenues are scant, and competing needs such as health care, roads , schools and Bingu’s publicity machine don’t leave much for prisons. Walking up to the prison gate, I can’t figure out which would be easier to walk through, the wide open gate, or the eroded 3 foot space underneath it. Two unarmed guards sit at a makeshift desk, while two prisoners play cards next to them under a tree.

I couldn’t get any pictures of the interior of the prison. Cameras are strictly forbidden. George says we can’t even bring cell phones, and he leaves his own in the trunk. I would push it and perhaps keep a recorder in my pocket, but I don’t want to jeopardize George’s ability to visit the prison. As I could not take photographs, I have opted out of brevity in this post, and have tried to preserve as many details as possible.

George is greeted by the guards, explains who it is he is here to see but they already know. A heated argument ensues. I can only make out that they are arguing over when someone is to be released but nothing more. I am afraid that my presence is somehow troubling to the guard, but, thankfully, the word “azungu” never appears. George throws his hands up, walks away against the protestations of the guards and we proceed in. Our entry is so loose, that it feels more like we are walking on to a school campus than a prison.

We stop by the prison store before we visit the prisoners. Three guards are outside drinking beer and playing cards. Yes, guards in Malawi are able to drink beer on their breaks. All of them know George and look up from the beer to greet him by name. The shop is like any small shop in Malawi. Bread, drinks, soap, sugar and other staples are sold here for families to take to the prisoners. Soccer posters and chalk-written scoreboards adorn the walls. I buy some soap, sugar and bread to be taken in and given to the people we have come to visit. It seems like a small thing. Maybe I should buy more. I stick with what I have, though I feel guilty for not doing more.

The guy running the store pokes at George: “I’ve been bewitched! My back is hurting me terribly!”

The prison grounds are a concentric series of barbed wire fences. A larger fence surrounds the compound and is easily circumvented through the rickety front gate. There is a center administration building and a outdoor kitchen area. Beyond that is a 10 foot barbed wire fence that surrounds the main holding area with several smaller buildings inside.

People mill about everywhere. Prisoners who are dressed in white uniforms do work outside the inner prison area. They are allowed to tend the grass, do cooking and maintenance jobs, and whatever else is required of them by the prison guards. Presumably, they are allowed this privilege for good behavior and unwillingness to escape. Some prisoners have CD players and radios to listen to while they work outside and nearly all will greet you as you pass by, just like any Malawian.

We approach the main area to visit with the accused “witches.” Within the barbed wire fence of the prison area is yet another barbed wire fence of the same variety. They aren’t the machine made fences of the west, but rather iron poles thrust into the earth below. The posts have barbed wire horizontally and vertically hand strung between them that is rusty and easily broken. The gate is somewhat more sturdy, but between the gate and the fence sits a foot wide gap that someone like myself could easily squeeze through. Prison builders merely wrapped more barbed wire to cover it.

The women’s’ area is largely empty. Presumably, the imprisonment of women is a rare occurrence. A few female guards come to greet us, and apparently all are on friendly terms with George. One calls out and an older woman comes hobbling out to the fence and sits on the ground. She is merely 8 years older than I am, but looks to be nearly 70. A conversation begins (in Chichewa). I can make out that another of the group has recently stepped on a bottle and injured her foot severely. She will be out shortly, she says.

Another older woman ambles out from the grounds with a bandaged foot. Behind her, we can see a woman on crutches who quickly falls to the ground. This is the oldest of the three. I try to say that she doesn’t have to come, but another prisoner kindly loads the old woman onto her back and carries her over.

Namakhalepo Kamphata is over 80 years old, an incredible age in a country where the average life expectancy is only about 45 years old. Though aged beyond belief here, despite her mobility problems, she is talkative and alert, and complains to the joy of everyone around her. Africans respect old people. All around will dote on even complete strangers as if they were their own parents. The guards and the other prisoners clearly make every effort to take care of Namakhalepo.

We give her soap and bread and some extra money to buy whatever she needs. She miserly counts the money to make sure that no one has pocketed any of her share.

Namakhalepo, despite her incredible age and frail state, has been imprisoned for “pretending witchcraft.” She was sentenced to three years in prison for using witchcraft to kill a small child. Her accusers were members of her own community. Truly, if she had magical powers, she would have flown out of the prison a long time ago.

The other two are sisters, Margaret Jackson (60) and Eviness Elifar (50). They have been accused of teaching witchcraft to children and must remain in prison for five years. Their accuser is their own brother, who is a village leader. Both have several children. Eviness is epileptic and experiences frequent seizures. It is common for epileptics to be accused of being possessed by spirits or of being witches.

The atmosphere is so friendly, that the only thing reminding me that we’re in a prison is the barbed wire. We could be in a friendly home for aged women. Despite that, this truly is prison, and the conditions are generally deplorable. Prisoners only get as much food as will support life. Vegetables have to be bought by individual prisoners themselves. Meats and sources of protein are non-existent here. The Norweigian government recently donated shower and improved sleeping facilities for the female ward, but the lives of prisoners are still miserable by any measure. That these women have been imprisoned in this state on charges of practicing magical acts is comedy on the one hand and a gross and disgusting violation of human rights on another.

We proceed to meet Alubano Alibereko, a gentleman who was accused of practicing witchcraft after relating the contents of a dream to his friends. He has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. We approach the men’s section.

The first thing that you notice as you move from the relatively tranquil women’s area toward the men’s section is the incredible stench. The barbed wire becomes more concentrated and tangled, haphazardly wrapped around the tops of fences likes mottled hair. Approaching, you see thousands of men packed onto the prison grounds, many standing near the fence and shouting out to their families who have come to visit them. Many stand up and look at me, and should out “Hey, basu”, just like Malawian guys do on the street.

The conditions are absolutely inhuman. There are more than 2000 men packed in to this small compound, and sleep 200 to each 20*30 building. A quick calculation makes you realize that these men would have to sleep sitting up to be able to fit in the buildings. Some men, in prison whites walk freely in and out of the compound, which looks more like a concentration camp than a state run prison. Most of the men are young, in for petty offenses. Stealing a $12 goat will get you two years in this hellhole. Some guys play soccer with a home-made ball.

There are some seriously scary looking dudes here. Some try to get me to give them money. One of them is the largest Malawian I’ve ever seen. He’s almost six and a half feet tall and has to weigh nearly 300 pounds. Most of the guys look fairly healthy, but it’s well known that HIV and TB run rampant here. Malnutrition and violence make survival for the weak unlikely.

The man we have come to see, Alubano, is thin. He looks either malnourished or in the throes of HIV. His teeth are nearly gone. He converses freely, but I doubt that he will survive his sentence. He says that he is very worried about his four children back in the village and bring two of his friends who have just arrived. They look frightened to death.

Tough guys walk all around. It’s clear that this prison, like all others, has created informal hierarchies of prisoners, with the strong dominating the weak. A gentleman wearing an ivory cross comes to talk to us, standing in between the prisoners and us, clearly aiming to prove his position as an informal prison captain. Alubano’s frightened friends are likely targets for incredible abuse and beg on their knees for help. George apologizes and says that there isn’t much he can do for them, as they aren’t there on witchcraft related crimes.

Woke up way too early to catch this bus to Lilongwe. My biggest mistake in Malawi is always assuming that anything will happen on schedule. Patience is a virtue, but waiting is a way of life here.

5:30 am, the African sky is so close that you almost could reach out and touch it. As I walk to the bus stop, an elongated cloud like smoke from a brush fire stretches from Mount Soche and completely envelopes Ndirande Mountain. The streets are mostly empty, but there are still signs of life. People are slowly arriving at the hospital for work and for treatment, and the minibuses have already started hawking for passengers.

I sit in the side of the M1 waiting for the bus and get stared at by commuters for the better part of an hour. A newspaper guy sells me today’s copy of the Nation, where I get to read all about Presidents Bingu’s public calls for the youth to violently control his critics. Fortunately, Malawians are outraged that the country is slowly sliding back to the miserable days of Banda’s repressive dictatorial regime. The President has gone mad. He won’t sleep in the Presidential mansion because he claims there are ghosts there and becomes more and more paranoid on a daily basis.

President “His Excellency Ngawazi Professor Bingu Wa Mutharika” just put out a book that he’s been pushing on state TV for the past week. It’s ridiculous really. The book costs $50, the equivalent to two months wage for the average Malawian. “The African Dream: From Poverty to Prosperity” is 1000 pages long and is written entirely in English. Most Malawians couldn’t even read it if they wanted to. The guy at the book store just laughs hysterically when I ask about it. The President is mostly thought of as a joke these days.

I board the bus. I’m lucky today. I get a double seat to myself, but am painfully subjected to Kenny Rogers best. Inexplicably, country music is vastly popular here.

It’s 6:30 a.m. and already the streets are filled. The street vendors are already set up and doing business. Malawi has begun its work day. In the west, industrialization has conditioned us to efficiently maximize output in the shortest time possible. In Malawi, people work from sunrise to sunset, not wanting to miss that potential $.30 that can be made from selling a bunch of bananas. In a country where even yearly school fees of $10 are an out of reach of most of the population, every cent counts.

8:00 a.m. the bus meal arrives. At first, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s a tiny chicken leg and some type of sandwich in a plastic wrapped Styrofoam tray. I’m afraid to eat it, but I brave a variety of enteric diseases and bust it open anyway. It’s an onion sandwich and a cold chicken leg, which reminds me of those cheap, cold bentos you get at Japanese convenience stores. The ones that people get food poisoning from.

8:15 a.m. The police don’t have much better to do, so we are subjected to a search of the vehicle at a stop. Police board and make sure everyone is sitting while women outside try to sell us okra and eggs. Produce here is amazing. It’s all organically grown and taken to the market only when absolutely ready for sale. No early picked green tomatoes here.

10 a.m. The in-flight entertainment has ended. We’ve just passed through powerless rural villages little changed since before there was ever power in Malawi. Watching Hollywood against a backdrop of impoverished Malawi should be strange, but I kept having flashbacks to the incredible divide between West Coast television shows and the realities of Mississippi. No wonder I grew up such a mess. I really believed that life in the outside world was like that. I bet the Malawians who have access to TV’s and the amazing pay DVD theaters believe it, too. It must make them feel like total shit.

I will never ever use a restroom on an African bus again.

11:30 a.m. Arrive in Lilongwe and immediately get ripped off on a taxi fare. So stupid, I should know better by now.

4:30 Back on the bus. The same bad BET videos are running all over again, this time in reverse. At least I know what Justin Bieber looks like now. Youth culture is miserable. Has it always been this shallow? I guess people like to watch beautiful people crash and burn. Mostly, it makes me want to kill myself.

5:00 “Dinner” appears. I haven’t eaten anything all day besides the tiny chicken leg and the onion sandwich. It a single biscuit and an egg roll. It’s delicious, though cold. Hunger will make anything seem delicious. If there’s anywhere that I’ll get intestinal worms, it’s here.

6:15 “S.W.A.T. Detroit” has started on the video screen. It’s odd to see home on a Malawian bus. I don’t see how anybody on the bus can understand what’s going on in this movie. It’s so riddled with common images of Detroit, US race politics and placement advertisements for guns that it must be incomprehensible to the passengers, who are primarily old ladies. The bumps on the highway are so bad that the DVD keeps skipping. The stewardess restarts it a couple times then gives up and restarts Kenny Rogers best.

7:30 We stop in Ntcheu. Every couple of hours the bus will stop and allow the driver to get up and walk around. Everyone on the bus gets off and we’re immediately mobbed by the same okra selling women as earlier, but now they are not women, but teenage girls. Some have oranges and boiled peanuts. A guy tried to sell me 20 pounds of potatoes for $.60. I give the girls $.30 each for 5 oranges and a pound of boiled peanuts. The okra girl is dejected. It looks like she’s desperate to make a sale. In my broken Chichewa, I try to explain to her that I love okra, but I have no kitchen. I probably should have just bought them anyway.

I look around and realize that I’m in the middle of one of those trading centers that I’m not supposed to go to. According to white people, a guy will be killed on site at the trading centers. I take a walk, knowing that this is likely my only chance. It’s amazing, all manner of fried and grilled meats, fried potatoes, ice cream, batteries, drinks and candy stands… I consider just getting take out dinner from here, but the bus is calling us to get back on.

8:20 Feeling better after the boiled peanuts and oranges, but the narrow seat is giving me cramps. On top of that, the heat is fermenting the urine in the toilet and the bus is beginning to reak. Kenny Rogers, however, is far more torturous.

8:40 Reach Blantyre. We can barely get off the bus because of the mob of taxi drivers. When they see a white guy, they get even more excited. I bark at one guy trying to block my way and opt for an older guy sitting on the ground. I ask him how much to Kip’s (local Pakistani grease proprietor and ice cream mogul) and then to home. He tries to overcharge me, I walk away, the price drops. Unlike before, I am determined not to get ripped off on a taxi fare again.

I will also never again order the “large” fried fish from Kip’s.

Today on my way home, I stopped by the Blantyre market and checked out the bootleg video stalls. You can buy 12 brand new Hollywood movies on one disk for the incredible price of $2.00. They come complete with incomprehensible English subtitles translated directly from Chinese using Google’s “Translate” feature. You can get just about anything you’d ever want, including movies that haven’t even come out yet! Hollywood action, Hong Kong Kung Fu flicks, awful Nigerian C-grade straight to video collections, and the esteemed “Complete Works of Demi Moore” which featured a instead of Demi, a picture of Angelina Jolie on the cover.

If you’re really lucky you might be able to get your hands on the latest volume of “Sex of the Animals”, where you get to watch the megafauna of the African sub-continent passionately procreate. According to the guy who owns the stall, it’s one of their most popular titles. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to spend any money on it nor was I willing to take a picture of the two rhinos featured on the cover.

It’s worth mentioning that pornography is illegal in Malawi begging the question as to the reasons for the popularity of the aforementioned piece of cinema. Even bootleg horror movies have to be passed through the “Malawi Censorship Board” to make sure that they won’t negatively influence the moral character of Malawi.

And just when I thought things were getting too normal here….

After a moderately harrowing week of planning meetings and dissertation discussions, I am looking forward to getting out and away from this academic nonsense. I plan to spend a day at the Zomba Plateau, a rocky formation that overlooks the old Colonial capital of Zomba. I plan to take the minibus up to Zomba, which will take 2 hours to drive the short 70km distance. The minibus will be an experience in itself, but good fortune would have it that Nelson the driver shows up and I am able to borrow the Blantyre Malaria Project truck for the weekend.

Nelson is a 25 year old driver for the BMP, who appears far too educated to be a mere driver; his knowledge of tropical diseases dwarfs that of many PhD’s in the subject. On the way to drop him off at his home, he explains to me how faith healers can cure AIDS and cancer, assuming that one believes in God enough to make Him pleased. He has yet to learn to speak in tongues, and I assume that he’s just not faithful enough yet.

Driving in Malawi: Driving in Africa is like running a gauntlet. Most true accidents involve minibuses. Drivers are often fatigued, working constantly with little breaks to make sure that no fare is missed. To maximize earnings, drivers will pack as many people into the bus as possible. One accident can horrifically kill up to 30 people at once. Fortunately, though, accidents are rare in Malawi. Driving on the left side of the road is strange, but even stranger is the incredible amount of cooperation which occurs on the road despite the obstacles.

“Highways” are fit for only one lane in the US, but accommodate two way traffic here. Encountering an oncoming vehicle requires quick assessment of the width of the vehicle one is driving, the condition and width of the section of road available and the size of the oncoming vehicle. It is assumed (hoped?) that the oncoming driver is doing the exact same thing. Drivers engage the right turn signal to warn the other that space is limited and somehow, like everything in Malawi, things just kind of work out.

The worst hazards are children and goats. Hitting a goat will cost one about $20 and a litany of sincere apologies recognizing the incredible burden a goat’s death will have on the family. Hitting a child will summon the wrath of the entire community and certain death from a rain of clubs and panga knives. Hitting children is to be avoided at all costs.

The Zomba Plateau: It is 9km from the bottom of the plateau to the Ku Chawe trout farm, where I plan to stay. I forego the irrationally expensive SunBird hotel, just a quarter of a mile away from the farm. The Brits were obsessed with fishing, and made sure that the rivers here were stocked with their favorite fish. A livery for the introduced trout still operates to this day, stocking trout into the rivers which drain into the great Lake Malawi. I am unsure as to why the practice is continued, but it provides generous fuel for the tourist economy here in Malawi. On the side, the trout farm offers rustic accommodations and camping areas for cash strapped travellers.

I am unlucky today. I get there 15 minutes too late. Four angry Chichewa speaking whiteys have taken the last room, apparently by force. I am relegated to sleeping in the car in the campground for $3.00, which isn’t ideal, but it will just have to do. I make some calls to local lodges, but they are all just way too expensive to make it worth it. For $10.00, I hire a guide who will take me on a three hour tour of the plateau. I wonder if I will end up in some sort of lost Gilligan’s Island fate, stranded on the mountain never to be seen again.

After being introduced to my guide, Andrew, I quickly ask him about the mosquito situation on the mountain. He claims there are none. I press him and ask him if he’s ever had malaria or if his children have ever had it. He says emphatically no to both, that there is no malaria on the mountain. Given how cold it is and the lack of mammalian fauna, I tend to believe him. The last thing I want is to stupidly contract malaria while sleeping in a $3.00 campsite.

The trek up the plateau is breathtaking. In contrast to the bottom, the plateau is covered with dense pine forests and lush vegetation. Poaching has decimated much of the old growth, but proactive efforts of the Malawian government have replenished vast sections of greenery. We pass by groups of women carrying wood on their heads to legally sell in the city below. In return, they plant pine seedlings for the forest service.

Poaching is still rampant, however, and signs of the illegal harvesting of trees are everywhere. Guys come out at night and whack at 12 inch thick pines with pangas until they fall. They then section them off and sell them to dealers in the cities. If caught, they are sometimes shot, and other times imprisoned, where, I am informed, they east Nsima (a corn meal gruel) mixed with human feces. Most often though, I think that the local forestry service are in on the practice, as everyone, poachers and police alike, are locals whose connections span generations.

It’s actually fortunate for the forests that chainsaws haven’t penetrated the Malawian wood market. Deforestation is already an incredible problem here, and mechanization would only hasten its negative effects, which include landslides and the introduction of habitat for malaria carrying mosquitos. With proper management however, a booming lumber industry could be grown here, but without centralized investment and transportation infrastructure, it is unlikely that Malawi will become a lumber exporter.

Andrew takes me to the falls. Beautiful, but nothing that can’t be found on a grander scale elsewhere. It’s a selling point for tourists that can be written in the tour books as an attraction to see. It’s easy to write about water falls, no matter how big or small. It’s a lot more difficult to write about biodiversity and the incredible beauty of pine forests in a way that will attract middle class city dwellers. Crystal dealers are to found everywhere. The plateau has vast deposits of quartz of all colors. Locals dig it out of the ground and sell them to tourists. My father was a geologist. I have tons of this kind of thing at home and I’m weary of adding to my already unmanageable collection. In short, I’m the wrong guy to try to sell rocks to.

Andrew does his job and tells me the names of many of the local plants and trees. He knowledge is clearly practical rather than scientific. He can tell you which plants are edible and poisonous, but there’s the thousands of others that are neither and of little interest to sustaining human life. Baboons populate the forests, eating the pine fruits and generally staying clear of humans. They know what we are and flee at the first glimpse of us, form packs which follow us when our backs are turned and cheer when we leave.

Chingwe’s Hole: The supposed highlight is Chingwe’s hole. It is a hole in the ground which supposedly reaches a depth of 1500 feet and finally drains out into the side of a cliff. To reach the hole, we have to drive 30 minutes on some of the worst terrain I have ever attempted. Miles and miles of rocks, 180 degree turns, water puddles that double as ponds, mud and more rock create a obstacle course of danger and I think to myself that this place better be good. Reaching our destination, I praise the name of Toyota and vow to buy a Toyota Pajero should it ever become available in the US.

According to Andrew, people used to throw dead lepers down it, presumably as a rudimentary form of public health. People afflicted with madness were thrown off a neighboring cliff after death as well. Lepers in the hole, the insane off a cliff. As he’s telling me this story, I’m wondering if the “after dead” portion is merely after the fact wishful thinking and suspect that these unfortunate people were likely thrown to their deaths. I wonder if anyone has ever strung a camera down the hole to see if there is a collection of bones at the bottom.

After the tour, I had plenty of time to spare and considered going back to Blantyre. I even drove down the mountain, picked up a hitchhiker and was set to go home, when I had a change of heart. I let my aged hitchhiker exit, and drove back up. I parked the car at the trout farm and went and got some food at the SunBird. Ridiculously expensive, I ate a plate of Chambo that would have cost me a quarter the price anywhere else. The view off the deck however was fantastic and I got to see the sun over the vast Zomba plain. Soon, it became incredibly dark and I had to somehow make my way back to the trout farm in near pitch black.

At one point, a car came down the road. To avoid being hit, I scrambled off the road. Snap. Shit. I twisted my ankle like I do every time I travel. I curse the man-made drainage channels and pray that the pain doesn’t get worse tomorrow. I carefully walk through the darkness, using my cell phone as a flashlight and hoping that I don’t twist the other ankle. After a half an hour, I can feel myself going up, which means that I’m going to wrong way straight in to baboon-ville. I quickly have visions of being killed by poachers or worse, eaten by wild boars, or becoming the victim of baboon revenge. Fortunately, I had the sense to turn around and eventually found the trout farm, miraculously.

Weighing out the costs and benefits to sleeping in the car or driving back to Blantyre, I opt for the latter. Driving in Africa at night is equally harrowing as the day. At every turn there are people. Where these people go in the pitch black of unlighted night, I have no clue, but they are there, wandering like zombies along the side of the road, asking to get hit.

Although I know many that go without, anyone travelling to a malaria rich area like Sub-Saharan Africa, should take anti-malarial meds. It’s almost stereotypical, and is seen by many as a symbol of the colossal failure of African economies to create hygienic environments, or an indication of the terrifying blackness of Conrad’s “Dark Continent” spoken to scare privileged white children at night. The truth is, that it’s only been in the past 60 years that the United States successfully eliminated malaria, and even more recently that Europe experienced it’s last indigenous cases. For the rest of the world, malaria is still a fact of life, such as that which has been the norm for all of human history. To this day, the number one killer of children worldwide is malaria.

Meds now have come a long way since the discovery of quinine, a miracle drug which allowed the white man penetrate his parasitic, resource extracting tentacles ever deeper into the African continent. Now, for those of us who were not born in a malarious area, we can safely travel to places which would likely kill us, or leave us incapacitated to the point where we wished we would die. Some medications are more expensive than others, but they all have a similar bizarre side-effect which varies in intensity according to how much you are willing to pay. Anti-malaria meds induce nightmares.

I don’t dream, or, should I say, I don’t remember my dreams, perhaps mostly because I don’t sleep well. However, on malaria meds, I do. These dreams are graphic to the point of being past NC-17, vivid and detailed visions of bloody dissections and exposed bone, of horrid beasts and killings performed with the precision of a scientist. It’s frightening to wake up from one of them, as the thread between dream state and awake state is often thin under the fog of being rustled from mid-sleep. The world is often still tainted with the color of blood red and pristine white bone matter against a back drop of gray tinged blackness that seemingly extends without bound. Fortunately, the details are quickly forgotten.

While the nightmares are reportedly milder on the meds I take (Malarone, $3.00 a pill, taken every day), persons who take cheaper meds such as Doxycycline and Mefloquine report graphic visions, sometimes leading to the point of insanity. Doxycycline prescriptions often recommend a psych evaluation. The suicide rate on Doxy is extremely high, one of the highest of all prescription meds, and the context in which they are taken likely doesn’t help. Women report commonly of graphic sexual assaults, almost as if the drug plays on the individuals greatest fears. During waking hours, hallucinations on Doxy are common.

For many that come to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the reality of actual human suffering, insanity and depravity comes as a shock. Against a back drop of contented smiles and a level of happiness absolutely unknown in the depressed and debilitatingly lonely developed world, one sees evidence of the spoils of disease. Walking TB and HIV cases publicly teeter on the cusp of death. Common are the scars of burns, some perhaps intentional, and mysterious lesions that could be the results of accidents or attacks. Worse yet is the linear gash of a panga knife across a head or face, remaining as a testament to the incredible violence that Africa is famous for.

Conversations with Africans will reveal that incredible 1 in 10 people, who tell tales of seeking refuge after entire witnessing entire families murdered in the midst of conflicts like the 30 year Mozambiquan civil war, of abductions by rebels in Somalia or of witnessing the decomposing results of mass killings by rebel groups. It’s a fucked up thing, and although the US is no stranger to violence, we do a much better job of keeping its victims sequestered silently away. Here, people will smile and casually relate horrific stories of senseless and disgusting violence as if relating any other past memory. In the US, we’re not allowed to talk in real terms about violence, and if we do, we’re considered weak and somehow deserving of our fate. Here, it’s a fact of life.

My feeling is that suicides on Doxy and Mefloquine are fed by this grim and terrible reality and the inability to parse out the apparent contradictions between a continent full of some of the most mild mannered people on the planet, and the incredible capacity for mass insanity and bloodshed. We rationalize things in the west, occupying our own separate compartments at the bottom of a greater hierarchy of powers. The heart is contained within the mind, which is contained in the body which is contained in the family, in the social group on up to the greater order of things. Here, the only order is as much that can be given on a day to day basis, security is only in the preservation of precious friendships and family relations, evidenced in Malawians incredible ability to remember those who even only casually pass through their beautiful country.

Cars in Malawi are mostly beaters bought directly from Japan, or trashed vehicles too far gone for other Sub-Saharan countries. Most of these vehicles would be wholly illegal in the United States, but drivers in Malawi don’t have much choice. On the way back from Lilongwe last night, we blew a fan belt and had to turn around to try and find another. Parking at a local market center, about 20 guys run out offering assistance. 10 minutes later, the driver come back from the market with a handful of random belts. A guy armed with nothing more than a 6 inch 14mm wrench and a tree branch (I’m not kidding) proceed to try and put the belts on one by one, until a fit can be found. No books, computers or looking at the numbers, just vehicle repair by brute force.

His “supervisor” comes out from the hardware store to survey the situation. The “boss” is a 16 year old kid in a homemade, bright red tie and a homemade half-sleeve button down shirt. To complete the uniform, he had some soleless, white leather shoes and proceeded to do not much more than stand over the mechanic, alternating “supervising” with glaring at the white guy. “What, what…”, he kept repeating. I thought he wanted to fight, but I finally figured out that that was the extent of his English. This guy is going to go places. I’m convinced that in Malawi, education is the first key to social mobility. The second key is a button down shirt, tie and leather shoes.

While being eaten alive by potentially malaria carrying, bloodthirsty mosquitoes, no less than 30 people came attempting to sell goods. In Africa, people will try to sell anything, even items you wouldn’t think could ever be sold. Food, baskets, pens, dog collars, pieces of broken electronics, single shoes, anything that can be sold, will. There’s a guy in Blantyre that walks around in fake animal skins trying to sell pieces of iron that he wears like clothing. If this country had the incredible capital wealth that the United States had, it could be the richest area on the planet. In contrast to Blantyre, however, these country areas are largely free from beggar kids. Most people just hope to make a quick sale, and there’s little problems with the incredible price gouging that goes on in the urban areas.

Every market center in Malawi is mostly the same. A string of bars serve the local male youth and tired truck drivers. All manner of food, from the most amazing organic produce that you’ve ever seen, to baked goods, to fried and grilled meats that will make you cry, to not yet killed chickens, goats and cattle are for sale. Electronic repairs shops and video theaters dot the landscape. Agricultural supply stores, car parts, household wares, convenience stores serve the population in largely that same manner that those anywhere else do. After driving until nearly 2 in the morning, you can tell that these places are active nearly 24 hours a day, drunken men and prostitutes walking around at all hours. It’s a thrilling capitalistic exercise, free of official control, but also suffering from a lack of government provided infrastructure such as electricity and plumbing. Whereever a Kwacha can be made, a Malawian is there to make it.

Standing on the side of the road for more than two hours, the sun sank into the east. I watched a series of minibuses, Africa’s capitalistic version of public transportation, pass by, packing incredible numbers of people in a TARDIS like, “it’s bigger on the inside than the outside”, fashion. Nearly 20 guys stood on the side of the road, hitchhiking, and getting harassed by a drunken police officer, doing his version of public safety management. As night fell, storms roll in from the South, creating a panorama like scene of life giving rain blanketing some of the most fertile land on the planet. The humidity and fertility of this land pervade every facet of life here, causing one to wonder how on earth, in a place with three growing seasons and a seeming abundance of food, anyone could ever die of starvation. Yet people do.

A goat is worth more at the market than at home, especially when one has to balance the $50 that one can make over a single mean for the 20 plus people at home who depend on the goat-seller to pay for clothing, school fees, salt, sugar and fertilizer. Subsistence farming is horribly inefficient, and a combination of a misguided World Bank demanding abolition of government farming subsidies (batshit free-marketing Americans) and vast fuel and transportation shortages (more bat-shit free-marketing American meddling) keep consolidation and streamlining of food production from happening. The result is that food is expensive both in time, money and physical labor. If Malawi had the means, I am sure that this tiny country could feed all of Sub-Saharan Africa and potentially the entire European continent. It’s literally that rich. You can drop a bag of seeds anywhere in this country, and a month later, you will have a culinary bounty worthy of hundreds of dollars in Whole Foods Organic Produce. I’ve truly never seen anything like it.

I think that I’m fucking nuts. Am I nuts? Someone tell me. No other foreigner I know here walks from one end of a city in a developing country to another in a day, savoring the overwhelming human landscape this country has to offer. As far as I can tell, most over 40 white dudes just sit in their hotels in suits, drinking cheap beer and watching sports. It’s a pretty miserable life, and after five minutes in a bar, I get restless in the presence of fat, nowhere foreigners and equally nowhere fat, middle class Malawian business men and want to get out walking as soon as I can. This place is a gold mine of knowledge. Missing out on the opportunity to learn of the resilience and ingenuity of human beings would be a crime.

Downtown Blantyre, the financial capital of Malawi, is like a world upside down, with representatives from just about every occupation on earth, competing to offer the same service as every else, for the same price. After inquiring as to the source of the manic screaming of a Nigerian faith healer, I had a chance to meet Larry from Zimbabwe. He has been fixing watches and cell phones on the same corner in Blantyre for the past 20 years. He’s nearly blind and can’t afford glasses, but appears to fix every manner of watch you can think of.

Malawians are really good at doing the same thing in the same way as everyone else. There’s some variation depending on local demands and conditions, but, in general, wherever you go, people do the same job in the same fashion as everyone other similar entrepreneur. Throughout Malawi, farming is done mostly in the same manner, using the same crops as everyone else, despite the fact that nearly all of the crops originally came from North America. Corn is an example.

Larry the watch-repairer is just one of more than 50 watch and cell phone repair men on his block, who all have identical stands and do the exact same job. Not a single repair man offers special services in order to compete with the other guys. Tailors are much the same, offering the same sewing services with the same 100 year old manual sewing machinery as everyone else. Outside of the radio and television repair people, no one on the street uses electricity.

It makes you wonder how people choose what they buy and from whom they get it, but then when you spend five minutes walking around with a Malawian, you discover that business operates through a vast network of social contacts and family relations, quite similar to that of Japan, another country where multitudes of proprieters offer the exact same services as everyone else. You get introduced to taxi drivers, restaurants where everyone knows one another and food stands where cousins/brothers/aunts and uncles work. Malawians who have been abroad complain that having missed opportunities to build contacts throughout this resource poor country, they are effectively shut out from the job market. Malawi certainly misses incredible opportunities to capitalize on the skills of those who have been educated abroad, justifying the incredible brain-drain that this country experiences. For a foreigner, its equally better and worse, although I’ve pretty much given up on makes inroads here. I just do what I do.

As long as I can keep eating chambo (local tasty, freshwater fish), I’m happy.