Little House In The Woods, Part II: Bana Wane

My behavior brings laughter, curiosity, and entertainment for everyone in my village no matter what I do, so I long ago went above and beyond the default role of “weird white woman” and found myself in the territory of “weird white woman who keeps asking the names of all the dogs in the village.” In the past two months, I’ve carried kittens on minibuses, toted a puppy on my back, given human names to chickens, and publicly referred to all of these creatures as bana wane – my children – in only partially a joking way. And people around here clearly understand my priorities: I still don’t have comfortable chairs, shelves, or other basic furniture in my house, but they made sure my chicken coop was finished weeks ago. And I’m so glad for that.

So, meet my babies.

This is Elsa: fragile and bird-like in stature, but independent, fearless, and named for the brave little lioness that Joy Adamson raised in Born Free, the book/movie that explains so much about why I am the way that I am. She is always the first at the food bowl, the first to investigate new things, and the first to find my lap when I sit on the porch to drink coffee in the morning. She is also sitting on my shoulder as I write this. Secretly, she’s my favorite.

This is Annie: sleek, beautiful, fun to watch, but with serious prey drive and way more erratic behavior than her sister. She lost bed sleeping privileges within the first week for using my mosquito net as a jungle gym, but she is also the sole reason my home has stayed cockroach-free.

 

I also have two young hens of indeterminate African breeding that will (if all goes well) start laying eggs by February or March. Chicken ownership has already been the realization of a dream, for sure, but training has been a learning process – within an hour of their arrival, both hens had already waltzed into my house and decided to roost on my bed, for example. Boundaries have since been established. Mostly I just have to chase them out of the kitchen now.

This is Aretha Franklin: diva extraordinaire, with attitude in great excess. I shoo her off the porch and hurl cuss words her way at least three times a day.

 

Meet Diana Ross: undoubtedly the more placid, easily handled, and frequently bullied of the two, but also the more clever one. Serious velociraptor vibes when she’s stalking insects. Look at that face; it’s like something out of the Cretaceous.

 

And then there’s Chalo, who is possibly the greatest tool of cultural integration I’ve ever had, the best icebreaker for encouraging shy students to talk to me, and the biggest reason for my recent exponential rise in happiness. His name means “land” or “country” or “earth” in Chitumbuka and “let’s go” in Hindi, which seemed like a nice linguistic coincidence in a place where Indian immigrants and Malawians work alongside each other. And, call me biased, but this little dude is smart – wildly easy to train, even with verbal praise as the sole reward. At only seven weeks old, he already has a solid grasp on “sit” and “come” and gets the basic idea of “down” and “shake,” but he only responds to Chitumbuka commands, and only when spoken in an American accent. Example: picture a few dozen of my students whistling and yelling, “Chalo! Za kuno!” simultaneously, while he looks at them with only vague interest. Picture me softly saying the same command from thirty feet away, with Chalo immediately spinning on his heels and running full-speed in my direction. I can’t decide if this is problematic or awesome.

 

Because this is my first experience raising a puppy on my own, as an adult (…whoa), I was fretting for weeks before I even brought him home. What if he doesn’t learn bite inhibition because I’m taking him away from his mother too soon? Should I teach him commands in Chitumbuka or English? How do I housetrain without a crate? How do I socialize him without puppy kindergarten or dog parks? What do you feed a dog in a country where dog food is only sold in cities? And most of all, what will happen when my service ends in two years?*

But really, I shouldn’t have worried. In lieu of rawhide, he gets potatoes and toilet paper rolls to gnaw on. He has a collar made of spare cloth, a bed of cardboard and blankets, and a diet of usipa (small dried anchovy-like fish) and porridge. After a couple horrifically sleepless nights, I made a makeshift crate out of a chair, a cardboard box, one of the wheels from my bicycle, a bungee cord, my Peace Corps medical kit, and, of course, the all-purpose garment known as a chitenje. (…101 uses, yo). My neighbor/best Malawian friend recently bought Chalo’s littermate, so we have daily puppy play dates that ease my worries about socialization. And I take him everywhere – to the market, to friends’ houses, to nearby villages, and to school if I’m not teaching – to give him a chance to meet lots of people and see lots of things. And now I can’t go anywhere alone without being asked, in tones that vary between worry and amusement, “Where is Chalo? Where is your child?”

So, it’s really little surprise that my reputation as an eccentric animal lover/wannabe farmer is growing by the day, but my collection is now final. Someone offered to sell me a cow the other day, and I politely declined. Applications to my zoo are no longer being accepted. (The sole possible exception: honeybees. We’ll see…)

Stay tuned for the next things bouncing around in my brain, which include: flowers, a vegetable garden, bucket wine, cheese-making, and mango jam.

*This is the question that almost kept me from getting any animals at all, but thankfully there are two very good answers on the table. If I’m still in a position to have a dog in two years (and if I feel like he would make the adjustment easily), it’s possible I’ll bring Chalo back to the States. If not, I have animal-loving Malawian friends who are already a daily part of his life, who already adore him, and would gladly welcome him into their homes permanently.

Pardon the culturally inappropriate flashing of thigh.

Lloyd mean-mugging with kittens and cake dough.

My masterpiece: a dog kennel crafted from locally available, sustainable resources.

This is what my life looks like now, except usually the dog is eating the chickens' food, the cats are sleeping in the chicken coop, and the chickens are in the dog's bed.

I think in patchwork these days, so here is a string of totally unrelated moments you might appreciate:

I Think I’m Turning Japanese

It’s mid-afternoon. I’m ravenous, exhausted, and eager to get home, and one of the neighborhood kids is approaching on a bicycle. I rev up for a hasty exchangeof “Mwatandala uli,” but he races by with a cheery “Konichiwa!” – and from the grin he shoots over his shoulder, it’s clear he knows exactly what he is doing.

Sister Act

Time is fluid, schedules are negligible, but the morning greeting ritual is sacred. Anyone entering the teacher’s lounge must be asked individually if he or she woke up well, if the family woke up well, and if everything at home is going well, and then he or she must ask the same questions of everyone else in theroom, and if anyone fails to adhere to this pattern, the social glue starts to ooze and the entire fabric of the day collapses. (I’m just guessing here – but it’s such a highly prized ritual that the consequences must be dire.) The pointis: ever since I jokingly referred to Annie and Elsa as “bana wane” (my children), it has become customary to ask me, “Mwawuka uli? Na bachona balongosi bawuka uli?”(How did you wake? And how did the sister-cats wake?)

“Lloyd. JULA CHIJARO SONO.”

My neighbor’s three-year-old son, Lloyd, trapped me within my own fence today by locking the gate from the outside. I had to stand on my chicken coop and yell to passers-by for help while Lloyd sat eating peaches. I hope to draw a picture of it someday.

We Did, In Fact, Start The Fire

Shortly after sunset on Sunday night, I was lying on my reed mat and lesson planning when I heard a rhythmic pounding on my roof. In the time it took for me to wonder, “…Is that rain?” a knock came at my door. I stepped out to find a weird yellow glow, a loud crackling sound, and Mrs. Wanda trying to explain something to me about fire, questions, and snakes. What I thought was the early start of rainy season was actually the sound of windswept embers pelting my little house, and those embers were blowing from an enormous brushfire approaching (quite swiftly, I might add) right in my direction about thirty feet from my house.

So, picture me standing awkwardly in the dark in my pajamas, uncertain whether the fire was started intentionally or accidentally, whether it was in its last throes or just getting started, whether the people around me were ecstatic or panicked, and whether I should be carrying my cats to safety or doing anything to help. (Slowly I pieced together the story: my Indian neighbors had started the fire on purpose to clear the fields, kill the snakes, and prepare the ground for their cricket practices. It was under control, even if it didn’t look like it.)

Picture, also, middle-aged men beating the ground with branches, sending red-hot cinders flashing and shooting twenty feet into the air. Picture kids prancing against the amber glow, shouting, “Moto! Fire! Moto! Fire!” and laughing maniacally, their cartwheeling silhouettes making abstract, barely human shapes in the smoke.

And picture me sorting it all out, ruminating on the same feeling I got when we cornered and killed a rat in the dorms during the first week of Peace Corps training, which is the same feeling I always get during football games: “I really don’t get this at all.” I don’t get it, but I feel it: the visceral charge in the air, the ancient rush in our blood, and the knowledge that none of us own it.

Soon the flames were beaten into ash, the soil was left black and smoking, and the only light left was from a few red sparks, twinkling across the field like bioluminescence on a beach. But still, people lingered. I stood on my chicken coop and watched what looked like shadow-puppets in a play about human nature, re-enacting a scene that could have taken place at any point in our history, whether that be thousands of years ago or (in this case) just last weekend. We’re still the same animals, still scared of the other animals hiding in the grass, and still emboldened and electrified by our tenuous mastery of fire.

Vignettes from the Road

In the United States, hitchhiking carries some deservedly sinister connotations (often of murderous proportions), especially for a young female traveling alone. But in Malawi the story is much different – in a country where the only people with cars are a) foreigners working for development organizations or b) educated, affluent host country nationals eager to practice their English, hitchhiking is not only common, but often safer than public transportation. And although I’ll happily spend one thousand kwacha to share a seat with three other people and a goat (why else am I in Africa, after all?), I’m not one to turn down a cheap (often free!) ride full of interesting conversation, air conditioning, and plenty of leg room, even if it does force me to check my privilege and feel my inner guilt-o-meter tingling a little (or, more often, a lot).

But the biggest draw is the fact that the story file in my brain is always open for new additions, and hitchhiking has a full supply of them. Here are a few.

***

            I had my first (and most authentically Malawian) hitchhiking experience with George Chirambo, my school’s headmaster: a character of gigantic proportions, tenacious resolve, and endless quotability, and someone who really deserves to be featured in a book someday.

            We stood on the side of the road and assumed the customary hitchhiking position – not a raised thumb, in this country, but a hand held out at waist-level and flopped up and down at the wrist. A little pick-up truck stopped almost immediately, urging us to hop in for a 600-kwacha lift to Mzimba. Squeezed in with four other Malawians, perched somewhat perilously on an upturned tire in a truck-bed, I had one of the most wind-blown and breathtaking 40 minutes of my time here so far, with every twist and bend and escarpment accompanied by the mental tune of “Remember this, remember this, remember this.” (You get to choose whether you want the phrase “my time here so far” to mean “my time in Malawi” or “my time on this planet.” It works either way.)

            About halfway to our destination, Mr. Chirambo explained that drivers are required to have a special permit to carry a certain number of people and that, oh, by the way – our driver doesn’t have one. It was unclear whether or not this was going to be a problem as we neared a police checkpoint manned by several large, heavily armed men, but I quickly assumed the Zen-on-command trance that I’ve learned well by now: “Don’t worry yet; just deal with things as they come.”

            The driver stopped the truck, turned off the engine, and greeted the officers with a stiff, sticky-smiled politeness as they inspected the vehicle for contraband and asked to see the appropriate licensing. I held my breath, but Mr. Chirambo broke the quiet. “Ah, one of my corrupt friends!” he shouted, because of course this is Malawi and of course Mr. Chirambo knows everyone and of course – of course – he knew this particular officer.

The men stood together in a laughing, hand-slapping circle, and I jumped into the conversation when it became clear they were referring to me (hearing the Chitumbuka words for “teacher” and “white person” are usually the dead giveaways). And after a few minutes, as we pulled away from the checkpoint amid smiles and laughter, Mr. Chirambo turned to me to explain: “That officer stopped me once while I was driving my car without a license, but I just gave him 1000 kwacha and now we know each other and drink cold beers together!” Oh. Okay.

            But I still had some questions about what I had observed about the Malawian legal system.

            “So, the police checkpoints are here to look for illegal activity, yes?” I asked.

            “Yes,” Mr. Chirambo said.

            “But if you are doing something illegal, you can give them money and they’ll let you go?”

            “Exactly.”

            “So, if the police officers don’t actually stop people who are doing illegal things, why even have police officers? Couldn’t the government save money by just not having police, and things would still be exactly the same?”

            Everyone in the truck erupted in laughter, probably partially at my perceived naivete, probably at the sheer anarchy of my suggestion, but also, I sensed, at the insanity of a system that already borders on anarchy.

            We waved at our corrupt friend on the way back, and the jacarandas in Mzimba were incredible that day.

***

           

             On our way to a meeting in Mzuzu, my sitemate Rebecca and I got a lift from a “businessman” named Goodall. I hedge this title in quotation marks because I’m still – for many reasons – not exactly certain what his line of business was.

As we approached one of the many police checkpoints along the M1, Goodall stopped mid-sentence, turned to me in the back seat, and casually announced, “Oh, sorry, I forgot: you are on a gun.”

I tried and failed to be articulate. “…wait what.”

He repeated the same words flatly: “You are sitting on a gun.”

I had noticed that I was sharing the seat with a long hard something-or-other, but I had been so involved in our winding conversation about economic flux and patrilineal marriage that I had failed to connect the dots. Now that I was giving it my full attention, I could see that, yes, indeed, the tweed sport-coat beneath me was in fact draped over a gun-case, and that the gun-case did seem to be holding a rather large weapon, and that, okay, well, yes, look at that, I was indeed sitting on it.

Part of my brain started running a risk assessment, flashing Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style scenarios of varying degrees of ugliness, while the rest of my brain insisted on staying in that tried-and-true “don’t worry about it yet” stupor. Thankfully the latter half of my brain was right: we passed the police with a wave and a smile, and I worked up the courage for my next question.

“Uh, so, Goodall, why do you have a gun?”

“Yes, I have a gun.”

“No, why?” I repeated.

“Yes, I have one.”

With our destination in sight, I dropped the subject and we diverted the conversation back to international economics. As he stopped for us to get out at a gas station, I slipped out of the back seat, draped the tweed sport-coat back over the gun, and bade a friendly farewell to Goodall, a man of mystery off to conduct some “business.”

***

On a short afternoon trip to pick up my kittens, I hitched with someone who may just be the most interesting (and interested) man in Malawi. The man (who will remain unnamed here) is a member of Parliament, world traveler, Doctor of Philosophy, former secondary school teacher, and published poet (whose poems are actually featured in one of the books I’m supposed to teach). But his accomplishments pale in comparison to his interests – and oh my does he have them. After exchanging the usual pleasantries about family, education, and place of birth, he turned to me and asked, with exactly this sort of emphasis, “So what are your hobbies?”

I stuttered the sort of response that would be expected of someone who had never thought about the topic before: “Oh, um…I like reading a lot. I like reading everything, actually. I like drawing. And painting. I studied art at university. Uh…and in America I worked with horses – actually, I owned a horse, but I had to sell him before coming here.”

He praised each hobby with soft noises of encouragement: “Oh! Oh, really! What else?”

And then I asked, “What about you?” and the floodgates were opened.

Over the course of the next hour, each of his subsequent dreams, diversions, pet projects, and pastimes was presented like a revelation – each time I thought the list had come to an end, another came spouting forth with just as much energy as the one before it. He announced each interest as though he had just thought of it, as if his passion for it had just been sparked in that moment.

            “I am also fascinated by compost!”

            “I am a great fan of computers, cars, and machines!”

            “I love design. I am interested in design of all kinds!”

            “I also hope to import donkeys!”

            “I would really like to have a fox!”

            “I am a lifelong fan of Shakespeare!”

            I learned about his forays into the world of food processing, his plans to invent a soft drink that will compete directly with Coca-Cola and Fanta, his recent acquisition of a mining license, his impending purchase of land for an orange farm, and his intention to import horses from South Africa (a plan that will not be deterred by the fact that he has never ridden a horse).

He also had a wealth of experience taming monkeys as pets, and strongly disagreed with Peace Corps’ rule that volunteers may only keep dogs and cats. “The wonderful thing about monkeys,” he explained, “is that they are very clever, and they do everything a human does. They are like children! But the problem with monkeys is that they do everything too much.”

“Oh? How so?” I asked.

“You are cooking; they want to help. You go for a walk; they want to come. You go to turn the knob on the radio; they want to do the same.”

“Ah, of course, just like children.”

“Yes, but then you turn around and the radio no longer has a knob.”

            But the climax of the conversation – the point where I very nearly lost it – arrived with a sentence that was made exponentially funnier not just by the brief silence immediately preceding it, but by the weight of every other thing that had already been said: “I also know how to keep hedgehogs.”

            And I choked back giggles long enough to learn that you can feed hedgehogs many things, but that it is better to handle them with gloves.

The one, the only, George Chirambo

Malawi is quintessential Africa in that red-soiled, big-skyed, acacia-tree-dotted kind of way.