A Typical Drive in Malawi

So much has been going on. But I realized I’ve never written about the typical things I see – only the extraordinary or unusual. So I decided to write down what I saw on our 45 minute bus ride to Mitundu FPS; everything normal and regular. And then I realized just how astonishing it all is.

• A police truck that drops off policemen who will stand in the middle of the road waving cars to the shoulder. They don’t have squad cars to follow anyone driving, so they are stationary. The newly emptied police trucks now give locals rides around town.
• A woman with bananas piled two feet high carefully placed in a tub, perfectly balanced on her head.
• Coffin street: hundreds of beautiful coffins and ribbon decorations in every color for funerals that haven’t been held yet – and I barely notice. Death is different here. John, who works in the World Camp house, told us that we fear death too much. It’s a natural part of life that is accepted and even embraced here. Ten minutes further down the road: stone tombstones. And you’d be hard-pressed to find one without a cross on it.
• A mother who carries a boy, maybe nine or ten, on her back as she would an infant because he has casts on both legs.
• Full goat carcasses hanging from stands on the side of the road fully exposed to car emissions, flies, and the intense sun.
• A group of women pumping water for the day – enough for drinking, cooking, and washing.
• Glad we didn’t get stopped by the police today, even though I know we have a licensed driver and a properly insured bus.
• Men pushing their bikes with wood stacked eight feet high because they are too heavy and unstable to ride.
• Waiting at a red light next to a begging man with shoes on his hands because he cannot stand upright and walks on his hands and knees.
• Billboards in English next to billboards in Chichewa advertising safe driving, Carlsberg beer, female condoms, Bingu’s new agricultural policies, and paint brands.
• Girls in pants remind me of a quote from yesterday’s Nyassa Times: “There is a growing tendency among girls in the country to wear miniskirts, exposing thighs, which force men to rape them.”
• Signs advertising for plumbers, electricians and key makers hand painted on large pieces of wood and nailed to trees: PLUMBER tel: 099725673
• Barber shops, where I know kids fear they’ll contract HIV.
• Two women, each with a child on her back and a bundle on her head carrying another huge bag between them.
• All while I sit in a dirty bus that I’ve complained doesn’t have a tape deck that burns through diesel as if Malawi wasn’t experiencing a fuel shortage.
• Telephone lines that run along dirt roads.
• Children run beside our bus for as long as they can, always chanting azungu. azungu. azungu.
• Brick homes with tin roofs, brick homes with straw roofs, brick homes without roofs.
• People chewing sugar cane and thinking it’s cleaning their teeth.
• Beautiful cloth blowing on clotheslines.
• The line of eight women with their faces hidden by the massive bunches of brush they carry on their heads; at least ten feet long and three feet in diameter.
• The village drunk that stumbles along the road.
• The flat bed truck with at least forty people crammed in for the ride.
• A group of ten sitting in a dust brown field picking ground nuts.
• Goats.
• Chickens.
• Cows.
• Dogs.
• Donkeys.
• Pigs – for variety, and only if you’re lucky.
• AVOID AIDS GUYS spray painted on the back of a road sign.
• Barbed wire around Bingu’s farm with more than twenty workers picking maize.
• Taking the same detour we took in January – will they ever finish the road?
• Stopping in the middle of the road to wait for a herd of unattended goats.
• A line of three men on bikes with woven baskets on the back.
• Forty minutes outside Lilongwe and there’s still telephone wires next to the road. I don’t know where they’re going; no one has any use for them out here.
• Kids that wave, although I’ve done nothing to win their admiration.
• Traditional skirts. Western shirts. An AYSO jersey.
• Trash.
• Piles and piles of burning trash.
• A graveyard.

And we’re here. A quick 45 minute drive and it’s time for Day 4 at Mitundu FPS.


Written by: Karen Clark, WC Coordinator
(Karen is currently studying in Botswana and interning at a VCT clinic. Check back for a reflection on the HIV crisis in Malawi and Botswana.)


**Part I in a series of impressions and memories of volunteering with World Camp. Please email submissions to info@worldcampforkids.org or katy@worldcampforkids.org. Journal entries & emails/letters home during your experience, pictures, etc. are encouraged!**