Village Life
Apologies – it’s proving difficult to find time to put everything on here that I’d like and keep up with the day job. Somehow a month has slipped by since I came home from Malawi and yet the realities of everyday life there are still very fresh in my memory, perhaps because they are just so incredibly different from life here.
Although in the towns and cities they have many of the amenities that we have – electricity, piped water, fridges, supermarkets, television, internet - once you are away into the rural areas, you are also away from all of these amenities. Life then follows the natural rhythm of the day and many of the day’s activities are concerned with the basic necessities of life.
Houses are built either of mud and thatch or, for wealthier people, of brick with a corrugated iron roof. Either way, there is a compound out the back with further buildings, usually all of mud and thatch, including a kitchen, housing for animals, storerooms and latrine. There is also a screened washing area. The compound is fenced to prevent hyaenas taking animals at night.
Most people seemed to get up around 5.30 a.m., as it was getting light. I had been rather concerned about my ability to get up at this time, especially as I managed to drop and break my alarm clock on our first day after arriving in Dedza and I didn’t want to use my phone and run the battery down. However, in reality it was not a problem – probably because I was going to bed so early. The cockerels also helped! As it was quite cool in the early mornings, it being winter, it was a lovely time of day. Around 6.15 a.m. I was usually summoned to my first “bath” of the day – a huge can of very hot water in the washing area. The washing area had grass screens around an arrangement of stones on which to stand. A plastic mug was used to “shower” yourself and there was a drainage system leading away from the stones to remove the dirty water. Various hooks and rails were provided for towels, clothes etc and there was even a small mirror – it all worked really well. After my bath was breakfast and then, on schooldays, I headed off to school.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family got on with the business of living. Water had to be fetched daily from the borehole about 200m away and this was mainly the responsibility of my sister and sometimes my mother. The containers they collected it in, carried on the head of course, were huge and several return trips were needed to fill all the water jars in the compound. I tried, with a very small container, one day and it’s not easy. Operating the pump is quite hard work and inevitably it’s uphill on the way home with the full container. Still, I was proud that I didn’t spill any! I can imagine it’s a very hard job in the very hot weather they have for most of the year.
Most of the food consumed is home-grown. Crops aren’t actually grown in the compound, but each family has a “garden” somewhere where they have small fields to grow maize, groundnuts, beans, potatoes, cabbages, rape, sugar cane and other crops. Near our village, Save the Children had an irrigation project – lots of little canals to bring water to the fields which means that crops can be grown all the year round. The time that I was there, in July, is usually just after the main harvest. However, my host father, whose garden had these canals, had maize at various stages of development and will hopefully be harvesting maize at different times throughout the year in future. This is an amazing project and I hope that it is widely extended. (One day while I was walking through the village, a motorbike screeched to a halt beside me and the driver introduced himself as Alfred, the manager of this irrigation project. He wanted to know about me, but I also found out quite a lot about irrigation.) Cultivation of crops is all done manually using a hoe – an implement rather more substantial than the hoes we are used to – to break up the ground. Having seen this in progress, I can only describe it as back-breaking and, although there seem to be some significant efforts towards equality in Malawi, it is almost always the women that do it. Once the crops are planted, by hand, they are also manually tended, and if you are not part of the irrigation scheme, all the water for the crops also has to be carried. Finally the crops are also harvested by hand, and then the cycle starts again.
The staple food, maize, needs to be threshed and milled before it can be cooked. The teenage boys in my family threshed the maize by putting it in a sack and hitting it with a stick to make the kernels come off. Afterwards, any kernels still sticking to the cobs were prised off by hand. Traditionally, the maize is then milled by pounding it in a mortar and pestle – ground nuts are also milled this way. Nowadays, there are some diesel-powered mills and my family owned one of these where members of the village could mill their maize.
Families also keep animals for food – my families had chickens, ducks, pigeons and goats. Chickens and goats were very common and some people also had guinea fowl and a few had cows. In some villages I saw pigs, but there were none in mine as it was predominantly Muslim. Fish came from the local rivers, although some enterprising people travel to the Lake (Lake Malawi) about 30 km away to fish and bring back their catch. Each week, there was a small market by the sports field in the village where people sold excess crops and bought what else they needed. There were also small shops that sold dry goods: tea, sugar, soap and of course, Coke, Fanta and other luminous sugary liquids.
Cooking took place in the kitchen behind the main house in the compound. Most cooking was over an open fire which was arranged between 3 stones on which the pot rested. I never did find out what the wood was that was burned – I think some people earned money by going to forest about 10 km away to collect wood and sell it. Whatever it was, it was very smoky and I could never stay in there for very long. Even cooking was physically demanding – I tried stirring the nsima one day and succeeded in knocking the pot off the fire. Fortunately it was so stiff, none of it fell out! Most families also seemed to have a small charcoal burner on which they could cook smaller dishes.
Doing the laundry required another trip to the borehole, although in many villages the nearest river was used. Next to the pump had been built a washing area consisting off two deep sinks – the plugs for the drain holes were maize cobs – an interesting example of re-using things. Water was pumped and poured into the sink, the clothes were soaked in the water then spread out on the rocks and scrubbed with a bar of soap. My bottle of liquid travel soap caused no end of interest and I think they thought my efforts were pretty poor since I didn’t end up elbow-deep in suds. They were probably right – my clothes certainly didn’t end up as sparklingly clean as theirs did. We had a washing line (and pegs!) at our house to hang the clothes to dry but many people hung their clothes on bushes or spread them on rocks. Once dry, I left my ironing to the experts – the iron was filled with glowing-hot embers from the fire and used immediately. If the embers cooled too much, it could be swung about in an alarming manner to make them burn up again – certainly worth keeping out of the way while that was happening!
Cleaning the house was another important part of the days activities, to remove the dust which got everywhere and to keep the ants at bay. The small brushes used for this made it another back-breaking task for me at least.
Despite the large amount of physical work required just to keep daily life going, everyone was very sociable. Perhaps because the weather is so hot, they take frequent rests and always stop to chat when someone comes by, which is often. My journies to and from the school, in the morning, at lunchtime, and back again in the evening, were a progression of greetings to all the people sitting on the steps in front of their houses. Taking time to stop and greet people and to enquire after their families and health is a big part of Malawian culture. So is going visiting – many people came to the house to meet me and I was also taken to many people’s houses to meet them. Always, a mat was laid out, we sat down to talk and refreshments were offered – their generosity and friendliness was amazing to a European used to people rushing about and hardly having time to exchange two words.
It got dark between 5.30 and 6.00 p.m. and most people stayed at home after this. It was around this time that I got my second “bath” of the day – no difficulty keeping clean here! My family kept quite late hours compared to most people – we didn’t have our evening meal until about 7.30 p.m. and often didn’t go to bed until about 8.30 p.m. In contrast, most other people seemd to eat at about 6.00 p.m. and go to bed between 7.00 and 7.30 p.m. The family had a paraffin lamp and we had some candles too and we spent the evenings listening to the radio and playing games – draughts (home made), bawo (a local game I still don’t understand), various card games, dominoes and pick-up sticks. With my entourage of teenage boys, some part of the family and others their friends, evenings were pretty lively. The early nights, by my standards, were certainly a welcome change from home and I was feeling very well rested and healthy by the time I left to go back to Dedza.
It was about half way through my stay that I discovered that the name of the school, Mlozi Primary School, and the name of the village, Mitawa, were different. I don’t know why this was – some villages and schools had the same name, sometimes there was a village and school with the same name but in different places. Apparently, sometimes whole villages up sticks and move somewhere else but the school stays where it is. Another curiosity in a very different culture.
