I’ve been skirting around the task of detailing all that has happened, in large part because so much of it defies summary. The bare facts are important, certainly, but they only skim the surface: I’m more than halfway through training, I’m nearing the end of my six-week stay in the village of Katsekaminga, I’m practice teaching at a local secondary school, and I’m learning the minority language of Chitumbuka while living with a Chewa family in an overwhelmingly Chichewa-speaking community (sort of akin to learning Italian among Spaniards). By this time next week, I will finally know the name of my home for the next two years, but for now all I know is that it will be in the north, the region with the highest literacy rates, smallest class sizes, longest history of missionary-led education, and lowest population density.
But this paints only a skeletal outline of my life here; it is missing the flesh of my days. It lacks the little glimmers that, in many ways, matter most of all: the inky nights, the smoky mornings, the gecko on my wall, the permanent film of red dust coating everything I own, the pack of dogs that has become our fan club, and the gang of children who know me as “Jane.” I like those better.
So, to chase down an illustrative gleam, here are some selected-straight-from-my-journal moments that capture the ups, the downs, and the in-betweens of one month of life in the warm heart:
July 3, 2012
I watched my amayi cook sima [the hearty, gooey, intestine-clogging, amorphous, porridge-like staple of Malawian cuisine, which appears in similar forms but under different aliases all over sub-Saharan Africa] for the first time a few days ago – a process that removed some of the mystery surrounding the food, but was, fittingly, presented to me in near-darkness.
In the mud-slab-and-concrete theatre of the kitchen hut, the stage was set. My amayi sat hunched in one corner, nursing the charcoals and ladling corn flour into a rickety pot; my ten-year-old sister Aisha stood poised in another, balanced one-legged in a flamingo contrapposto and pointing a flashlight at the floor; and the mixture itself groaned and popped between them, beginning to rise into a thick mound of maize-paste as it was beaten and spun by the twirl of a spoon.
The effect was alchemic, and the potion grew fast – building in ferocious little spurts, big billowing rumbles, and intermittent soft sighs until the mass seemed to move almost with a life of its own, bucking and twisting and growling as if in protest. It wasn’t long before plumes of smoke were spouting through the windows into the fading evening glow, creating a scene of high drama worthy of a painting. This was no longer merely the preparation of dinner; this was war. By the epileptic pulse of the fire, everything seemed to be cast in chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark flashing over my amayi’s focused gaze, illuminating my sister's ballerina-at-rest pose.
Finally, my amayi sat back with a sigh, poked the last gas bubbles out of the sima, and watched it deflate. "Eet ees a very biiiiiiig job," she announced, corralling it into six plate-sized patties.
As she finished the task, half-haloed in light and half-obscured by shadows, all I could think was how impressed I was – by the show, by the process, and undoubtedly by her – but most of all by sima, the only corn-based food that has to be tamed before you can eat it.
July 8, 2012
Priceless moments:
- My Chitumbuka teacher Maggie, after realizing she has kept us ten minutes late, rocket-ships the marker in her hand onto the table while screeching, "SOOOOORRRRY." I lose it.
- My amayi, noticing me gingerly testing the temperature of my sima, reaches over and begins slicing it into bite-sized pieces with a spoon. I laugh and say, "Oh, I'm just like a baby." She laughs and says, "Yes! You are my baby! Janie baby, baby Janie."
- Greeting from a very drunk, notably bra-less woman in the market today: "I KNOW YOU HAVE LOTS OF MOOOONEEEEY."
- Agatha, one of the Chichewa instructors, crafts the greatest pun of all time: "Chimnastics." (A chim = a pit latrine demanding nearly acrobatic precision. Agatha = a non-native English speaker. The moment = explosively funny.)
- My host brother Patrick, in a scene that is certainly one of my favorite mental photographs so far: picture an eight-year-old boy clad in shorts and green rubber boots, buried under a fur-trimmed parka in 50-degree weather (hood up), working on a popsicle while watching the Chichewa-subtitled version of Kung Fu Hustle.
It’s at times like these that Pliny the Elder’s words keep cycling through my head: “Out of Africa, always something new.”
July 10, 2012
We get ferried between villages via Peace Corps jeeps, which affords the unique privilege of getting a sense of topography at 40 mph. Usually it's accompanied by giddy revelry, but tonight we pulled away from Mpalale half an hour late, in fading light, and something felt different.
Everywhere I was struck by the rustling of human life tucking itself in for the night – the hills were lit in a constellation of cooking fires, the roadside punctuated by groups of children no older than ten huddled around their own tended flames. It was a landscape completely without electricity but still studded with lights, each connected to a person. There was something about being surrounded by such bright, visual evidence of human presence –– and about being aware of myself hurtling past, spitting out dust, encased in a box of steel and plexiglass on wheels – that left me feeling very close yet very far away. That basic sense of imbalance is such a large part of why I'm here, but it's also such an unwieldy emotion – difficult to define, tricky to unpack, and even more difficult to place into appropriate action.
We passed a woman in her forties carrying a pail of water on her head – a pretty ordinary sight around here, but something about the splash of the liquid and the steady directness of her gaze that caught my eye. She was taking slow, rocking steps through the darkness from a borehole of unknown location to a destination of unknown address, probably making a trip she makes everyday, likely several times a day, and Ke$ha was playing, the abrasive whine of "Tik Tok" grinding from someone’s speakers. As the water was sloshing out, the woman glanced in our car and met my gaze for a split-second, and the moment passed unnoticed by everyone else but it filled me up and sucked me dry all at once, leaving me lurching with a feeling I still can't quite place. "E'rbody getting crunk, crunk / Gotta slap him if he's getting too drunk, drunk," the song continued, and the juxtaposition made me reel. But what I felt was not quite pity and not quite guilt but mostly vast, vast space: a sort of separate, distant awe.
There's a passage in A Tale of Two Cities that has been reverberating in my head for the past 24 hours or so, and I'm sure it's at least tangentially responsible for my frame of mind tonight. (It may also be aided by the fact that I took my weekly dose of the malaria drug Meflaquine today):
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! [...] In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?" (Dickens 8)
Even while living among Malawians, I’m still hurtling down a dirt road listening to a song about brushing your teeth with Jack Daniels. And the more I think about that woman on the road, the more I am astounded by the fact that we inhabit such distinct, disparate, and mutually unknowable worlds. But there is one thing that staggers me more: the fact that we all do.
July 18, 2012
Recent eye-gems from the market:
- A boy of about fourteen walks by, pushing a makeshift model car made of chicken wire and bottle caps. He’s heartwarmingly conspicuous – gangly and puppyish, sparkling with ingenuity, but perhaps just a little too old to be playing with toys.
- The crowd parts to reveal a man running full-tilt after an escaped ox who happens to be heading my way. People are scattering off the road in a rush; the ox ambles by in no particular hurry, in no particular direction, and allows itself to be caught near a patch of grass.
- A woman walks by pushing a wheelbarrow – or rather, the skeleton of a wheelbarrow – with the support beams intact and the basket missing. A toddler stands in the middle, walking along where the basket ought to be, in what I can only assume is the Malawian equivalent of a stroller.
August 4, 2012
On a Saturday afternoon not long ago, I had a cake-baking date with a Chitumbuka speaker named Aida, an assignment that required the procurement of eggs, milk, and flour (known colloquially, and pretty darn adorably, as flawu). The baking powder, salt, and sugar (the ishuuuuug) would be provided, I was told, and the eggs and milk did not take long for me to find and barter for in the market – but I decided to wait on the flawu. “Your amayi will have some,” someone had said, apparently with enough sagacity that it seemed unquestionably believable. “Just buy some from her. You don’t need that much.”
After lunch, with elaborate mime and stilted Chitumbukewinglish, I approached my amayi with what I assumed would be a simple proposal – I asked if she had a half-kilo of flawu I could buy. She assumed the typical expression that appears anytime I try to voice an unrehearsed thought: a sort of squint-eyed straining, halfway between looking askance at a solar eclipse and recoiling from a beginner violinist, but always paired with a smile. After taking a beat to process my wobbly sentences, a flash of recognition passed over her face.
“Flawu?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You are making cake?”
“Yes.”
“Half-kilo?”
“I think so. You have some? I have kwacha.”
“Mmmmm.” Another pause, for mental calculations. “One-fifty kwacha.”
“Okay! Great! Thank you!” I said, handing the money over while thanking her profusely.
And with that, I thought the task was over. I expected my amayi to walk into the kitchen hut and emerge with a scoop or two, or perhaps to pull out a bag from the grain storage room, but instead she dipped into a semi-bow, spun on her heels, and slipped out of our compound briskly, imploring, “Wait – I am coming.” Already I could tell there had been a misunderstanding – or rather, a false presumption – on my part.
Ten minutes passed, and I prayed that she had just gone to a neighbor’s house.
Twenty minutes passed, and I began rehearsing an apology in Chichewa.
Thirty minutes passed, and I resigned myself to the fact that my amayi was making a trip all the way to the market, which I had just returned from, to buy me the flawu that I could have gotten myself.
Forty minutes after the original question had been posed, my amayi trotted into the compound, sweating and panting a little, and I burst out of my room spouting every apology in every Bantu language I could think of.
Her reaction could not have been better: joyous, uproarious mirth. She laughed the loudest I had ever heard her laugh at that point (a record that was later shattered when I tried to stir sima for the first time), gave me a rib-crushing hug, and said, “Ai, no, mami! Don’t worry! Be happy!”
And that is the story of how I fell in love with this place all over again.
Epilogue: the cake was a minor disaster, burned on the outside and ciabatta-like on the inside. I presented it to my amayi in crumbs and pieces stuffed in a plastic bag. She devoured it and loved it.
No comments:
Post a Comment