Disclaimer: The contents of this blog are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.
A lot of the reason that the amount of my blog posts has decreased over the past year is because I’ve become accustomed to most things here. Things which would have shocked me upon first arriving do not shock me anymore and it seems trivial to write about them. It is difficult to imagine how people in the US who have never left would react to similar situations. Sometimes I immediately think “this is Malawi” but often, a few days after a given situation, I reflect and think, “wait, that never would have happened in the states.” I have tried my best to think of some situations like this and present a collection of short anecdotes about them here, things that showcase both the good, the bad, and the in-between of Malawi, which all countries have.
The School’s Flour
After I got to school this morning, I was surprised to find a truck loaded with a ton of students on it, out of their uniforms. My neighbor, the agriculture teacher found me and told me, “Ma blackout ativuta” (These blackouts have troubled us).
Recently, ESCOM (The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi, ranked by most newspapers and every Malawian I’ve ever spoken with as the most corrupt parastatal entity in the country) added a connection to a Zambian power facility to help with blackouts. When I first came to the country, blackouts were awful. Power was supposed to go out for 9-12 hours at a time, but I remember it often being out for much longer amounts of time, the longest of which I experienced was 2 days, but some of my friends have experienced longer. Blackouts have definitely improved over the course of my time here, but they still exist. At the beginning of the year, it seemed like there would be power every day except Sundays and that it would be more questionable on Mondays.
However, about a week or two go, a message began circulating that people have been throwing too much trash into the rivers (Outside of the cities, Malawi has no real waste management system, so people just throw their trash wherever), and since almost all of the power which is generated by ESCOM is hydroelectric, it caused problems for their system. The message said there would be more loadshedding while they fixed the problem. Many of the people in my village were skeptical about whether this was true or just an excuse for ESCOM, since they didn’t have enough power or money to keep running things.
Whatever the case, blackouts did increase. Whenever there are blackouts maize mills cannot operate, especially when the blackouts last for a full 24 hours (as they have been doing lately). Maize mills produce flour to make nsima (the main dish of Malawi) for large amounts of people, such as the amount of people that need to be fed at a boarding school, like mine. Because of the blackouts, the local maize mill hadn’t been able to produce enough flour, which meant we didn’t have enough flour to make enough nsima for all of the students. So today, after seeing the power was on, the agriculture teacher decided to take a group of students on the back of the truck so they could all help grind a lot of flour before the power went back off again, so that they would have enough food to eat.
Asking People on Dates
This actually happened a long time ago, during training, but I never posted it on my blog. People here are very indirect. They will almost never tell you when you’re offending them, and if you have an issue with someone, you should tell a third party to go and communicate to them on your behalf. This indirectness extends to relationships. In rural areas, people often send someone else to ask a person to be their girlfriend (usually a guy does this, not a girl).
So one particular night during training I’m sitting with my host sister and we’re cooking rice, getting ready for dinner, and this boy comes by and whispers to her and then really quickly runs away like he’s afraid. So I ask her what he said and she just starts giggling. Then she told me he wants to ask Yolanda (my sister’s cousin and our neighbor) to be his girlfriend. So I ask, “Why did he tell you?” She says, “I don’t know,” but after a bit more of back and forth, I realize he wanted her to ask Yolanda on his behalf. So about 10 minutes later, who should show up in our yard but Yolanda herself, and my host mom and sister just start laughing really hard and then they tell me to be the one to tell her what’s happened, and ask her if she wants to date this guy, whose name I don’t even know. I don’t know how one is even supposed to go about asking someone out on someone else’s behalf, but eventually I do, and she says “Noooooo, I don’t want.”
The thing is, Malawians are also really indirect when it comes to accepting relationship offers. Traditionally here, women are supposed to refuse a few times when a man initially proposes to her, even for marriage (not just a relationship). If she immediately says yes, she will be seen as loose. I have asked a lot of people how a person can know whether the woman is saying no just to not seem loose or if she’s saying no because she genuinely doesn’t want it. I have gotten a different answer from almost every person I have asked this question, both male and female. Since Malawians are even indirect with this too, since often people will say no even though they want to say yes, and just act really bashful. I wasn’t sure if that’s what Yolanda was doing, but my host sister just goes “bodza!” (liar!) over and over and they make me continuously ask her over and over if she wants to date this guy, even though she keeps saying no. At some point, I started making jokes about it and pretended to be a radio announcer and was reporting on the news of where Yolanda stood on dating this boy, and she and my sister both started laughing so much that we changed the subject. I still don’t know if she decided to date him or not.
Will You Marry Me?
For some reason, this indirectness doesn’t seem to extend to white women, who many men here see as loose. I was once travelling on a minibus with several other PCVs. The male PCV in the group was pushed to sit in the front seat. I could hear the driver was trying to make polite chit-chat (or so I thought), when he randomly said, “I want to marry your sister.” My friend said don’t have a sister, and when he told the driver this, he inquired about the marital status of the seven other women he was traveling with. He told them they didn’t want a husband and the driver said “How do you know? You haven’t asked them.”
This is typical here. Not all men here are like this of course, but the problem is exacerbated in marketplaces and with the men who work around the minibuses. Think about the stereotype of construction workers whistling at women, but it happening every time you pass by a certain place and often involves things like “Marry me!” or “Darling!” Stories about female friends being touched by a random man passing by them on the path are common when PCVs get together. When my friend turned around to confront him, he just laughed because he thought it was funny. I should emphasize that this isn’t something that just happens to Americans. It happens to Malawian women as well. It’s not that these things don’t happen in the States. It’s just that they’re not as blatant or generally accepted by society. In America things like that would often happen in private or in secret, but here they can happen in broad daylight, in front of a ton of people.
Spaghetti and Rice (2 small stories on the same theme)
I stopped eating nsima every day a while ago. It’s taken me quite some time to convince people that I really don’t eat it, and even longer to convince people that I actually like nsima, I just hate eating it every day. Our school cooks for us every day, which is wonderful, but most of those days are nsima (rice is more expensive). Last year, nsima was Monday, Wednesday, Friday, while rice was Tuesday and Thursday. However, there was a rice shortage at one point and we had nsima every day for about two months. I had been eating nsima most days for nearly a year at that point, and I was very tired of it, so I told the cooks, as respectfully as I could, that I didn’t want nsima anymore and I could bring my own lunch on MWF. So they stopped cooking me nsima. But they didn’t stop cooking me lunch. They kept bringin me boiled eggs. Every time, I would tell them, as respectfully as I could, that I could bring my own lunch. This did not work. I still got boiled eggs. Of course, it’s rude to reject food here, which is why I waited so long to do this. But for them, it was rude not to give me any food, even though I had asked not to be given food.
There’s this whole culture of hospitality here which is wonderful and kind and sweet, but also incredibly uncomfortable for an American. I have to let other people do things for me instead of doing it myself, knowing that they are just being polite, whereas for me the polite thing would be to refuse and try to do it myself. Here that’s rude. After a year of living in Nkula, I hired someone to do my laundry for me, after doing it by hand myself. It’s my most hated chore. I only wanted her to do my laundry, but it wasn’t long before she began doing other tasks without me asking him to. She began getting me water at the borehole, washing my dishes, and after a little while longer planting flowers outside my house. Sometimes I would go to the borehole to get my own water and find her there. She would immediately grab the bucket from me and make me and draw the water herself and then carry it back to my house. To her , it’s an insult for me to try to do it instead of her—it’s like I’m implying she’s not good at her job. But to me, as an American, it feels like I’m insulting her by having her doing it instead of just doing it myself, or helping her. It’s the same at the school when students want to carry my things. If I tell them I can carry it myself, it’s an insult to them.
Everyone Should Count On Makhala
When there are blackouts, people typically cook over a charcoal stove. A meme was once sent in a WhatsApp group chat I was in, with a person wearing an ESCOM T-Shirt, but instead of Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi, below it read: Everyone Should Count on Makhala (charcoal).
My house was wired for electricity back in October along with the houses of my two neighbors, one of whom is my Head Teacher. ESCOM said they were coming as soon as possible to install electricity. It is now March and I still do not have electricity in my house. I had heard from a few other volunteers that they just went to the ESCOM office a few times and got electricity fairly quickly, so about a month and a half ago, I decided to do the same thing.
I went to ESCOM and saw a line overflowing around the whole building. Long lines are such a part of life here. ATMs, supermarkets, any government office. And people cut in lines all the time. I was dreading having to stand in this line for 2 hours. Luckily, as it turned out, I needed to talk with someone who was in a different office, which had no line. I told the woman there the situation, and she told me, “The one you need to talk to is in this office.” So I went to the office, which was in another room. The door was locked. Someone told me he wasn’t there. So I went back to the woman there and told her he wasn’t there and she said, “Oh you have to come back Monday,” and I said I couldn’t come back Monday since I have class and she said “Send someone else” and I told her we had been sending people for five months and nothing had happened (which was true). So she gave me the phone number for her boss. I called him and he answered. I explained the situation and he said “Sorry, we have been busy repairing faults” (for five months, apparently), and then promised to come install our electricity before the end of February.
On March 1st, since we still had no electricity, I went back to ESCOM and told them the reason that I was there was because they had told me they would be there before the end of February and they weren’t. At this point they made me wait in a line (still not the super long one, which I had by now figured out was for people who didn’t have bank accounts to pay their bills). Every time I went to ESCOM, I didn’t speak Chichewa at all. This was what I was advised by every Malawian to do. It was better if they thought I only knew English, although I didn’t quite understand why at the time. Anyway, this allowed me to understand everything all the people around me were saying without them realizing it, since they thought I couldn’t understand them. The man I met with was someone whose job it seemed like was just to listen to people’s complaints. I told him the situation and he just repeated, “Sorry, so sorry, very sorry.” But I could tell, both from his smile, and what he told his colleague in Chichewa that he was about to give me very empty promises. So after he told me, “we will do our best to fix it,” I told him, “Okay, I will see you next week.” At this, his smile drained and he seemed surprised. “Next week?” I just said, as calmly as I could, “Yes, I’ll just keep coming until you all come, so that you don’t forget about us.”
I didn’t know it at the time, because I went on vacation for a few days after this, but apparently ESCOM came to our houses the very next day to make a quotation. I laughed and felt bad all at the same time. This is whatever you want to call it, but I think white privilege is a fitting name for why this happened. I wasn’t the first person to go to ESCOM. We have 20 teachers at my school and nearly half of them have been sent by the Head Teacher to complain to them and yet nothing had happened. The difference? ESCOM kept asking for bribes from them. When I went the Head Teacher told me it was a good idea, because ESCOM wouldn’t try to ask me for a bribe, since I’m white. It was true. They didn’t. My Head Teacher’s wife summarized it later, “they care more for foreigners than they do their own citizens.” It’s ironic in a way, since being a foreigner gets me overcharged in most places. But in government offices, it actually prevents bribes.
I went back to ESCOM 6 days later since they said they would have the quotation done that week. They didn’t. And when I showed up that Friday, they told me their system had been down, so they hadn’t done it. “For six days?” I asked. They told me yes, and although I didn’t quite understand how something like naming the price for something (which they had already determined) required internet, nor how the very entity which is supposed to repair these faults, I simply accepted what they said, and they told me “Come back Monday.” Which I did. On Monday, I told them they had told me to come back Monday. It took about 45 minutes for them to find the documents, which they still hadn’t done, so I sat for 2 and a half hours and read a book while they did it. At the end, I finally got the quotation, which seemed reasonable (no bribes, just as everyone had predicted). We’re going to go pay them next week. Well, I say, we, but I really mean I, because the Head Teacher wants me to take the money and go so that they think it’s my money, because he says if they know it’s the school’s money they will take a long time and try to get bribes from the school in order to speed up the process, but if I go, they’ll do it fast from the beginning because they’ll know they can’t get any bribes from me so they’re just wasting time.
The Miracle of Starburst
This story didn’t actually happen to me, but a friend who said I could put it here. Malawi police often block the roads, to try to catch for overloading (which is pretty ubiquitous). If they catch someone who is overloading, they seldom arrest that person or make the extra people get out. In fact, I’ve never seen that happen. They just ask for money. Whether that money is a bribe or a fine depends on your perspective. The police here are underpaid, so that contributes to this. The bribe, from what I’ve always seen, is currently about 500 kwacha, unless the driver or conductor does something egregious to tick off the police officer or has something else wrong besides just overloading.
So my friend’s brother had come to visit and rented a car. They decided they wanted to go to the lake and invited some friends. Their car could hold 5 people, but they had 6 people in it. They got pulled over on the way to the lake. The police officer asked them, “How many people are supposed to be in this car?” They said, “6?” The police officer told them, “No, it’s supposed to be 5.” They apologized, saying “Oh, we haven’t been in Malawi very long, we’re sorry, we didn’t know.” If you combined the amount of time they had all been in Malawi, it was about 8 years. “Well” the cop said, “you broke the law, so you have to pay the fine.” They agreed and said asked what the fine was. “100,000 kwacha,” the officer said. 100,000 kwacha is about $72. Compare this with the actual bribe/fine, 500 kwacha, which is less than $1. All 6 of them burst out laughing, which completely blew their cover, and the cop immediately was suspicious that they knew more about Malawi than they had let on. From laughter, one of the people in the backseat asked “How about we give you 1,000 kwacha and one Starburst?” The cop refused. “You have to pay the fine.” They responded, “Okay, how about 1,200 kwacha and two Starbursts?” In the end, the cop let them go for 2,000 kwacha and five Starbursts. This is the only time I’ve ever heard of bribing a cop with candy actually working.
Spirits of the Dead
I live in an area which is one of the traditional homes of the Nyau, a sort of cult of the Chewa tribe, whose members periodically dress up in full costume with props and go to various events and dance (especially funerals of chiefs, welcome ceremonies, etc.). The dance is called Gule Wamkulu (The Big Dance). If you’ve seen The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind on Netflix, that’s what the people are at the beginning and end of the movie. The people in these costumes are supposed to represent spirits of deceased ancestors and deceased chiefs. In fact, I really shouldn’t be saying that members of the cult dress up as spirits, but I really should say they are spirits. The time of the long school break, from the end of July to mid-September (late cold season and early summer) coincides with their initiation time. Since I live in one of the most traditional Nyau areas in the country, I see them constantly during this time.
One day during the break in 2018, I was riding my bike in an area near my village, when 2 Nyau spirits saw me. I saw them, sighed, and got off my bike as they ran up to me and started babbling in their spirit language, which I couldn’t understand (it’s very high-pitched and squeaky, but it’s intentionally made not to sound just like Chichewa). They were dancing around me and surrounding my bike so that I couldn’t move. They had their hands out. The Nyau beg for money frequently and they’ll often annoy you until you give some to them. This is a remnant from Chewa traditional religion, which has largely been replaced by Christianity these days, although this practice remains. In traditional religion here, the ancestors were believed to stay behind after death and annoy their descendants. The living had to do whatever the ancestors said so that they would stop bothering them. Since the Nyau represent the ancestors, they want money, and you have to give it to them if you want them to leave you alone. So I fished out some 20 kwacha notes and gave them to them and they ran off. Later that same day, as I was coming back home with my bicycle, two Nyau emerged from the forest where I knew a graveyard was, with a young boy tied up with a rope. They were shouting in their spirit language, and yanking the boy along with the rope. I felt a small amount of concern (although I’m sure much less than I would have in the US had this happened there) until I saw the boy smile and realized this was part of initiation. The Nyau are supposed to live in the graveyard, since they’re the spirits of the deceased. No one else can go in the graveyard, or they’ll be seen as a witch.
The Return to Normalcy
All of these things seem normal to me now, but I know they wouldn’t have two years ago. These days, I dream about America a lot, because I’m so close to seeing it again for the first time in a long time. I wonder how I will react there, because what was normal to me there two years ago, probably won’t be when I go back. I know normal is not a static concept. It’s dynamic. Like this sign I once saw in a film plastered on a psychiatrist’s door: “Normal is just a setting on your dryer.”