Kumbali Lodge, Lilongwe, Malawi    

 

    It is morning and we’re packing up again.  We feel sorry to leave.  The rainy season makes this place as green as summer in Vermont.

 

Lilongwe Airport

    The departure section is about 10 yards away from the arrival curb.  We passed through 2 police blockades where we were stopped.  We went to ticketing, paid the departure tax of $120 at another window.  Four different government officials at four different desks looked at our passports, tickets and stamped our exit papers.  The metal detector looked like an ancient hospital x-ray machine with radiation warnings all over it.  There are no gates at the airport only a waiting area surrounded by duty free alcohol and perfume stores.  A woman will bring a leaky tea service to you if you have  few extra kwacha.  After walking down a ramp to the final waiting area we find signs about keeping valuables out of checked luggage and “Bon Voyage!  Yendani bwino!  Make Malawi Your next investment.”  There are some billboards in town with giant pictures of the president and anti-corruption slogan.  I wonder what they do with all the dictator pictures when the dictator dies or leaves office like Daniel T Arap Moi in Kenya?

    Recording what happened yesterday may be the most important thing I do in this journal  It would have been so much better if we could have brought a few more people from church to ask questions and to participate in all we did yesterday.  The pictures are so inadequate to the experience.  You can’t bring out a camera in a hospital full of suffering people or at the crazy marketplace for African art.

    We woke early yesterday.  I went for a very quick walk and took a few photographs with Melia of the Malawi country side.  We enjoyed our breakfast, the same cereal, yogurt, eggs, ham, sausage, toast that we’ve had every day of our journey.  It is enough for us to last until supper.

    Sister Gertrude is a nun living in a community of two.  She ahs worked a great deal in hospitals and is the area coordinator for GAIA in the central region of the country.  She wore an elegant black and gold African dress.  I should have taken more photographs of her in it.  We drove in a four-door Toyota pick-up truck out from Kumbali to our first daycare  center.  Because children with AIDS need to take medicine with food and many do not have food, this is a place where they can receive both.  Most of the children there do not have AIDS but many have parents who have died of the disease.  Rather than raising the children in a dedicated orphanage, these children stay with relatives and then spend mornings at this school.

    We met Richard who was wearing a boldly printed shirt that says he is HIV positive and that there is no need to be ashamed.  On the outside hall of the tiny office building a sign in Chechewa and English says “Stigma and Discrimination are Evil.”  Another sign on the wall reminds visitors how important it is to take care of orphans.  The children wear nothing but tattered and dirty clothing.  They swarmed around us and were fascinated by our children.  At first Micah hovered very near to us as we heard Richard’s explanation of his work.  Melia was outside with her beloved Africans.  She wants to be near children all the time.  Melia saw a child crying and went over to comfort her.  Jennifer, one of the non-English speaking volunteers saw Melia with a crying child she immediately assumed that Melia made her cry.  Jennifer scolded her severely jerked her away by the arm yelling in Chechewa.  Iit is pretty hard to imagine any new child just arriving, surrounded by forty children radically different from herself then going out of her way to deliberately harm someone she didn’t know in the first ten minutes she was there.  Melia’s tendency to want to help often confuses adults, who don’t know her good nature.  She isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but often she is too good to be true like her mother.

    Jennifer showed us the home health kits that go out with the volunteers visiting people who have AIDS.  They have bandages medicines, etc.  Richard interpreted for her.  As Richard spoke to us about the various programs, our children ventured back outside.  Micah played soccer with the boys and Melia helped the bigger girls take care of the smaller children.

    

    We saw many faces.  We felt very sorry to leave.  Richard and one of the teachers jumped in the back of the truck.  In retrospect I really wish I had joined them.  Richard’s charisma is a gift that Gertrude also mentioned.  He would be a good friend and that was my opportunity to get to know him better.  He reminds me very much of my friend James from college.  They have the same height, coloring, and commitment to helping others.  They both are self-effacing, kind, and put you at ease.  As Richard spoke I kept trying to see all of this from his perspective – he works with local volunteers (and probably has limited choice in who steps forward to help).  He’s got an overwhelming number of children in his charge.  He doesn’t own the land that the daycare is on, because it costs $10,000 it is something we could conceivably buy for him.  Anyway he was only mildly nervous, less so at least than I would be under these circumstances.  I hope I asked the right questions – there just was an incredible amount to learn about him.

    I was glad that Heidi delivered all the pounds and pounds of soccer jerseys at the first daycare.  Richard was so happy to see them since the children here have almost no clothing – nothing new or not torn and dirty.

 

 

    We’re landing in Lusaka, Zambia right now flying over large scale agricultural operations that make Malawi look primitive.  Huge pie-shaped fields, low green trees, green houses, meandering creeks, the same red-dirt roads and paths between villages, ag-burning, distant mountains, local rain – I wish we could stay here awhile as the rain streams down the windows.  This is a monsoon.  My seatmate has returned home after twenty years away.  I pray for him on this homecoming.  The rest of us watch the soggy baggage…  I have never seen rain like this.

 

 

Our next visit yesterday took us to a community-based daycare.  The local chief set aside land and the community built a school.  When we arrived the children were packed into that one room, sitting on the floor singing the alphabet.  The dark, gray brick building has a straw roof and a large open window.  I didn’t think it has a door.

I forgot to bring an audio recorder otherwise I could play these songs for you.  Heidi inspired by the call and response singing had our family teach the children a Hawaiian blessing that participants in the church Bishop’s Ranch retreats have also sung with us.

We also visited a chicken farm that GAIA supports that is run by local people from the village.  We had to dip our shoe bottoms in a chemical solution to kill germs that might harm the chickens.  The barn is about the size of the church nursery with scores of chickens running around behind a wooden barrier.

We went to a nursery.  To get there we passed through a regional center larger than a village but too small to describe as a town.  Both sides of this main road had shops, barber shops, a tiny lumberyard with workers using a w man hand saw to cut the wood into planks.  One would stand in a pit and the other up above.  Heavily laden bicycles rolled by past tiny shops selling tin buckets, etc.

We really had nothing to do with upper class Malawians but now we came to our first middle class neighborhood (maybe on second thought this was the upper class neighborhood since the former president lived in a house we passed by).  These neighborhoods have ten foot high brick walls with broken glass on the top to deter intruders.  We visited Gertrude’s house.  A 24 hour guard opened the gate for us.  Her place used to have man more nuns there.  It has a very institutional feel with few decorations and dark rooms.  Maize grows high in rows in the center courtyard.  We Saw the library and the chapel and the kitchen and now feel like we have a better sense for what Gertrude’s life is like.

The nursery has babies, tons of infants.  This was Heidi’s favorite place to visit.  The house looked in many respects like an ordinary place to visit with bedrooms full of baby cribs – perhaps as many as 12 babies in a room.  They also have those clear bassinets that one finds in hospital for new borns.  Heidi held a tiny baby named Stella whose mother had died of AIDS.  I befriended or rather was befriended by a little two year old who took me by the hand and showed me his little brother in a crib in the corner of the house.

We sat and talked with the director of the program in a room at the center of the house – where the living room would be in a typical suburban ranch house.  About half the room had a cloth covered wrestling mat that had a big damp spot on it.  Melia sat on a little stool holding a small girl who kept pulling Melia’s hair.

This really is an orphanage – these tiny babies have no one to care for them and simply cannot get the love and attention they really need from the over-stretched staff. These women also are mostly volunteers.  The land is owned by the church.  The work that they do is essential.  As Richard had emphatically explained earlier, although many groups may help at some time or other, GAIA’s support is constant and reliable.  By working with local people as partners their aid goes further and makes more of a difference.  Heidi probably wanted to stay with the babies but we still had much more to see.

We stopped in front of the Lilongwe Post Office to see the vendors of African art there.  Heidi is looking for material that she can use as a wrap.  Gertrude told her that what they had there was significantly over-priced (and incidentally was all from Tanzania, our next stop).  We saw absolutely everything with a herd of vendors constantly hovering.  This didn’t seem to bother them at all.  Ten men saying, “Don’t you like this?  Ask your father to get if for you.”  We bought Melia a tiny chair carved out of wood with “Malawi” on it for her stuffed animal bear “Chocolate.”  Micah bought a Noah’s ark set.  Heidi got bracelets as gifts for her friends.

We visited the lower hospital next.  It had been built during colonial times for the local population, and is completely coming apart.  I’ve seen pictures of it from the GAIA people but really being here gave me a much stronger sense of this place.  Sister Gertrude had worked there for a year often delivering as many as 30 babies in a day.  Rusty old medical equipment clutters the halls.  The rooms of patients waiting for treatment are cluttered and dirty and over-crowded.  There is not enough medicine for the people here and we saw a lot of suffering.

Because the children were not allowed inside Heidi and I took turns and left the children outside under the eaves of the building because of the strong rain falling.  Being sick and vulnerable – the people had a hopeless look in their faces which I cannot adequately describe.  In the villages, merely driving along on the roads, one cannot see this.  This place was like a window into another life of despair.  Still I was sorry to leave those dark, crowded hallways and the desperation we found there.  I wanted to make some kind of connection but there it eluded me.

We also visited fabric/clothing shop, a lot like places I’ve been to in Kenya (where I bought Khangas that I turned into pants).  We passed through a narrow counter into the cage behind it.  I think the little children’s outfits from all around the world caught my attention the most.  All of the clothing was second hand and the material wasn’t special.  Still this visit to the busy market of the city gave us a new sense of this place.  We were again blessed by what we saw and felt new energy.  Melia pointed out a large mosque towering overhead nearby – how does she know that this is of special interest to me?  The old storefronts all opened onto a decrepit road.  We took that road home with many memories of an extraordinary day.

We will never forget what we saw.  I wish I could convey what we saw and felt, and what this day means to us.  I wish we could linger here awhile to learn more about the stories of the people we saw.  There is a kind of photographic experience and an experience that seeks what is behind the things that we see.  One acquire the first in an instant.  The second takes time.  It requires patience and the ability to listen and to see the world through the eyes of another person.

Our one failure here in Malawi was our inability to find Vincent Banda, the child that Alan Sarles supports from back home at church in California.  We did find the World Vision offices in Lilongwe, but by the time we did we were too late and their working day was over.

 

 

    Two hours and twenty-five minutes to Nairobi then off to Zanzibar.  I am now sitting next to a muslim saying 1:00 p.m. prayers in a white hat and a white cassock.  I wonder what prayers we share in our travels together.  Goodbye Zambia!  We are all of into the clouds with patches of farms appearing periodically below.

 

 

    Here we are back in Kenya.  Somehow I didn’t imagine what our return would be like.  We traveled from Lilongwe, Malawi to Lusaka, Zambia and now here on our way to Zanzibar.  When we checked in at Malawi the ticket agent wouldn’t give us a ticket for the last leg of our journey.  She said we had to go to the transfer desk.  At the time we didn’t fully understand what bad news this was.

We arrived here a long time ago or so it seems.  The line to the transfer desk stretched out a long way through the corridor.  We waited dutifully in line and then used the strategy that we learned in public university and sent Heidi ahead to make absolutely sure that this was the right line.  Ultimately at the desk a huge crowd of people simply flooded around the desk completely ignoring the line.  Heidi has felt sick to her stomach lately, probably from the all-pervasive cigarette smoke and carbon monoxide from our various forms of transportation.  So I was the one who pushed along with all the others to get to the front in order to get our boarding passes.  My height gave me a distinct advantage in approaching the desk.

Two women there wearing bui bui’s completely broke down because of the prospects of missing their flight (which only flew once a week).  In that press of people I kept thinking of my friend Nick who lives here.  Imagine always having your guard up, always trying to make the best of an unworkable situation, always fighting to get to the front of the Transfer Desk.  If people do not know how to form and maintain a line, what hope is there to run a complicated modern economy?  Do the UN’s Millennial Development Goals include this in their calculations?  Is this a variable in the massive model which predicts how much western investment will yield in terms of alleviating suffering in Africa?  How can the gifts we send as a church be received in a way that really helps people?

 

We had supper back at Kumbali Lodge after I took some photos in the last hour of sunlight.  The light was low and the pictures would have been impossibly blurry without the monopod.  After carrying it so many miles I am glad for the chance to use it.

We prayed together as a family before the meal.  We prayed for all of our new friends and for the people of Malawi who suffer so much but who also never seem to be lonely.  Our truck got stuck in a remote place and instantly twelve people were there to help push us out.  We prayed for all of our family and for our church.  Afterwards our waiter Orbit told us in such sincere terms that everything comes from our creator, that all life proceeds from God.  Our family finished this monumental day by candle light eating Yorkshire pudding, roast beef and lamb with mashed potatoes and vegetables.  We fell asleep quickly sorry to be leaving this place that felt like a kind of home for us.  We’ll miss Maureen and Guy who run Kumbali and Jessica their daughter, and Orbit and Lawrence and especially Gertrude and Richard and all the children.

 

 

    Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” is playing over the airport PA system here in Nairobi.  The airport in Malawi had hardly enough money for metal detectors , the rubber flooring is bubbling up but it is playing “We are the World” musak and other music from the seventies and eighties.  American music is everywhere we go – especially in public places, the malls, and airports of Africa.  American books are all in the bookstores too.  James Dobson’s influence is global.

As I wrote earlier we passed by a dozen stops run by airport and government functionaries.  My seatmate in to Zambia was a man returning home after 20 years.  On the way to Nairobi, I flew with Mohammed Aslam Ansari.

    We talked for a very long time.  He had never met an American before.  As I wrote earlier, he wore a white cap and cassock shirt like the Roman style Anglican cassock with buttons only it is white.

    On a side note, the real work of the church is not done by the priests, deacons and bishops.  Mostly all I do is to support people in the important work of the church, that is the lay ministry in neighborhoods, at work, on the playground, etc.  Because church is structured in this way I went from being a person with a large variety of different friends to someone who is close to associating exclusively with white, upper middle class Episcopalians.  I used to have friends of different races and ethnicities, now I am pretty much surrounded by people who look, think and act pretty much like me.  Perhaps part of the way God is reaching me on this trip is by bringin me into the lives of some very different people.

    My friend Mohammed was born into a Muslim family in India.  He now works as an accountant at an import/export business in Saudi Arabia.  This gives him the chance to visit Mecca frequently.  Mohammed said post-lunch prayers and continued praying as we took off, singing gently to himself.  He has a thin beard reaching down to his chest, a friendly smile and clear eyes.  At first I didn’t think we’d talk much because his responses to my questions were brief.  [Madonna’s music is now playing on the PA system.  I forgot to mention that she stayed at Kumbali Lodge during the last visit which caused such an international uproar when she adopted a child and the father later objected.  I probably have never stayed in a place that had such a famous fellow visitor.  There are simply no hotels in Malawi, so we’re all crowded into B & B’s.]

    Mohammed and I share a deep reverence for the creator (“who can hold us up in the air so far above the earth without a pillar”).  Mohammoed talked about his great fiath in the Last Judgment when he goes down into his grave Allah will ask him three questions (Allah, prophets, and Mohammed).  If God moves him to say yes to believing, he will instantly be transported into paradise.  We talked about my new friend’s discipline of prayer, we shared our mutual respect for the prophets of Israel.  He told me that after Hagar and Ishmael were expelled by Abraham they wandered in the desert near death until a fountain sprouted up.  It was Mecca and became his family’s home.  This family later produced the prophet Mohammed.

    My new friend Mohammed defined a prophet as someone who works to change people’s hearts.  I guess that is a part of every person’s vocation and God’s.  We’re still here in Africa watching how God is changing our hearts through so many people who are our new friends.

 

 

    Now we’re taking off in a 4 seat per row plane that has all the luggage up front.  I never flew Precision Air before.  So far I’ve killed three mosquitoes and we haven’t left the ground yet.