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.

There’s a book about Malawi—Well, more about Rhodesia than anything else, but Malawi makes an appearance. The memoir of Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, tells the story of her childhood during the Rhodesian war of the 1970s as the child of white farmers in Rhodesia. After the war, the family eventually moved to Malawi, settling in eastern Zomba district, not a great distance from where I currently am. I’m sharing an excerpt of the book about something that happened to her here when she was a teenager, because I think it, especially the ending, is pretty representative of a lot of the experiences of Westerners who happen to live here (Also, I recommend reading the whole book. Fuller’s style is really interesting and engaging and fun).

It’s a long time past lunch and I have been stuck at the north end of the Estate since mid-morning trying to persuade the Honda out of an abandoned well into which I fell while following the flight of a fish eagle. Now I am hurrying down the avenues, keeping half an eye on the tobacco crop, half an eye on the road, where chickens and children and dogs have settled in the shade cast by straw barns and mud huts. Suddenly, a child runs laugh-crying from a hut, arms outstretched, looking over his shoulder at his mother, who emerges just in time to see the child hit the motorbike side on. I am sent sprawling, the vehicle’s spinning wheels kicking up stinging sand into my eyes and face until it stalls. In the sudden, ringing silence, I scramble to my feet, spitting dirt from my mouth and wiping my eyes. I am dizzy with fright, but the child is still standing and unhurt. He is looking at me with astonishment, his arms still outstretched. His face trembles, his lip shakes, and then he starts to cry. His mother swoops upon us and scoops her son into her arms. She shifts a smaller sling of baby, a quiet bulge in a bright hammock of cloth, under her arm to make room for the bigger child. The baby bleats once and then is quiet again. I stand up and pull the motorbike up. ‘Are you okay?’

She shrugs and smiles. The boy nestles into the soft crease of her neck and calms himself with soft, diminishing sobs.

‘Pepani, pepani. I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t see him. Is he okay?’

The woman shrugs and smiles again and I realize that she does not speak English. I have only learned a few phrases of Chnyanja none of which (‘Thank you’, ‘How are you?’, ‘I am fine’, ‘What is the name of your father?’) seem appropriate for my current predicament.

I put my right hand to my heart and bob a curtsy, right knee tucked behind left knee, in the traditional way, to reinforce my apology. The woman looks uneasy; she pats her young son’s head almost as a reflex and glances, as if for help, into the shadows under the drying crop of tobacco hanging in a long, low shed next to her hut.

‘It’s no problem, madam,’ a man’s soft voice says from the shadows. I shade my eyes against the harsh, blanching sun. There, under the cool, damp leaves, on a reed mat, is a man lying almost naked, with a young boy of twelve or thirteen, also hardly clothed, by his side. For a moment I am too surprised to reply. The man, obviously the father of the toddler into whom I have just crashed, props himself up on one elbow and rubs his bare, pale-shining collar bone with the thick fingers of one hand. The boy at his side stirs, rolls over, and hangs an arm over the older man’s neck, his face stretched up in a grimace which is half-smile, half-yawn. The boy’s shorts have worn through at the crotch and his member is exposed, flaccid and long against his thigh.

The man begins to softly caress the boy’s arm, almost absent-mindedly, as if the arm draped around his neck were a pet snake. I am suddenly aware of how softly quiet the hot afternoon is: a slight buzzing of insects, a crackle of heat from the drying thatch that covers the barn and house, the distant cry of a cockerel clearing his throat to warn of the coming of mid-afternoon when work will resume. My stomach growls, empty-acid. I feel the sun burning the back of my neck, my eyes stinging, my muscles aching. I pull the motorbike up and have begun to climb back onto it when the man suddenly pulls himself off the mat, the child still hanging from his neck.

The man is smiling. I see now that he is much older than I had first thought. I also see that the boy around his neck is disabled; he is a combination of helplessness (his arms and legs are as thin as bones and devoid of muscles) and of uncontrollable, rigid spasms, which send him backwards against the softly restraining cradle of his father’s arms. His head rolls, his mouth sags open sideways, and saliva hangs to his chin. He makes soft, puppy noises. I have never seen this, an African child in this condition. It comes to me, in one sweep, that most children like this boy are probably allowed to die, or are unable to survive in the conditions into which they are born.

The man says, ‘Are you fine?’

I nod. ‘Thank you.’

He frowns and points at the sun with the flat of his hand, which also supports his son’s head, ‘You are out now? In this hot sun? You can see from the sun that it is time to rest.’

I nod again. ‘I was stuck.’ I point to the motorbike. ‘I fell in a well.’

‘Ah.’ The man laughs. ‘Yes, that is difficult.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say—I indicate the toddler, and then am embarrassed in case the man thinks I am apologizing for his older, disabled child. I quickly add, ‘I didn’t see your baby.’

‘Baby?’

‘Your small boy.’

‘Ah, yes. I see. We also have a baby, you see.’

‘Yes. Big family,’ I tell him.

‘Lowani, ’ says the man suddenly.

I grin and blink. ‘What? I don’t speak Chnyanja,’ I tell him.

‘Come inside,’ says the man in English. He speaks quickly to his wife in Chnyanja and she disappears into the hut. ‘Please, we have some food. You must take your lunch here.’

I hesitate, torn between lies (‘I’ve already eaten’, ‘They’ll be waiting for me at home’) and an impulse to please this man, to make up for the disruption and the accident. I nod and smile. ‘Thank you. I am hungry.’

And this is how I am almost fourteen years old before I am formally invited into the home of a black African to share food. This is not the same as coming uninvited into Africans’ homes, which I have done many times. As a much younger child, I would often eat with my exasperated nannies at the compound (permanently hungry and always demanding), and I had sometimes gone into the labourers’ huts with my mother if she was attending someone too sick to come to the house for treatment. I had ridden horses and bikes and motorbikes through the compounds of the places we had lived, snatching at the flashes of life that were revealed to me before doors were quickly closed, children hidden behind skirts, intimacy swallowed by cloth.

I am aware suddenly of watching my manners, of my filthy, oil-stained, and dust-covered skirt, of my dirty hands. I turn my dirty fingernails into the palms of my hands and duck out of the heat into the soft, dark, old-smoke-smelling hut. I blink for a few moments in the sudden dim light until shapes swim out of the greyness and form into four small stools crouched around a black pot on a ring of stones. The floor is fine dust, infinitely swept into pale powder. The father is pointing to a stool. ‘Khalani pansi, ’ he says. ‘Please, sit here.’

I sit on the small smoothly worn stool, my knees drawn up above my hips.

The father crouches at the far end of the hut and shouts an order, throwing his voice beyond me and into the hot afternoon; he is half-balancing, half-supporting the retarded boy on his knee, an elbow crooked to catch the youth’s head if it should suddenly lurch back. The boy appears to be grasping at the hanging silver particles of dust that jostle in the fine swords of sunlight slicing through the thinning grey thatch of the hut. The mother leans over the fire. She bends at the waist, gracious and limber. Her baby is suckling at an exposed breast. The woman pounds at the pot on the stones where hot nshima is bubbling and steaming, letting out burps of hot breath as it cooks. A smaller pot is emitting fiery gasps of greasy fish.

A girl child comes into the hut, tottering under the sloshing weight of the basin of water that she balances, clearly straining, on her head. She stops when she sees me and looks likely to drop her burden and run.

The father laughs and points to me.

The girl hesitates. The father encourages.

The girl lowers the basin from her head and holds it in front of me. I see that I am to wash my hands. I rinse my hands in the water, shake the drops at my feet and smile at the little girl, but still she stands there, the muscles in her thin, knobbly arms jumping under the pressure. Water and sweat have mixed on her face. Large drops quake on her eyebrow and threaten to spill at any moment.

‘Thank you.’ I smile again.

The whole family is watching me. ‘Zikomo kivambiri, ’ I try, smiling in general at everyone, for lack of knowing what else to do. The smell of the food and the heat it is giving off while cooking makes me sweat. I point at the little girl. ‘Your daughter, too?’

The father beams and nods.

‘How old?’

He tells me.

The mother hands me a plate (enamelled but rusted on the edges). She spoons food.

‘Thanks,’ I say when the plate is just covered, making a gesture of sufficiency, half ducking the plate out of reach.

Her large spoon hovers between her pot and my plate.

‘No, really,’ I say, ‘I had a late breakfast.’

The mother glances at her husband. He nods, barely, and she lets her spoon drop back into the pot. Carefully she covers the leftover food.

‘Isn’t anyone else going to eat?’

The father shakes his head. ‘No, please…Thank you.’

The nshima is surrounded by a grey sea of barbel and oil. ‘This smells very good.’

The children are watching me hungrily. The disabled youth has stopped patting dust fairies and is staring at me. A trembling, nervous cord of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth to his chin. The toddler has started to cry, weakly, plaintively, like a small goat. The mother absently pats the boy, nurses the baby, rocks and rocks, staring at me. The father swallows. ‘Eat,’ he says. He sounds desperate. I sense that it is only through the greatest exertion of will that my spectators don’t fall on the food on my plate in a frenzy of hunger.

‘It looks delicious.’

I make a ball of nshima with the fingers of my right hand, the way I had been taught to do as a small child by my nannies.

I insert my thumb into the ball, deep enough to make a dent in the dense hot yellow porridge. Onto the dent, as if onto a spoon, I scoop up a mouthful of the fish stew.

Almost before my mouth can close around the food, the young girl (who has not left my side and whose arms still strain at the ends of the bowl) offers me the water and I see that I must wash my hands again. I am conscious of the little girl’s breath-catching effort to hold the basin, and of the groaning, sometimes audible hunger pangs that ripple through the hut. The food, which is sharp and oily in my mouth, has been eagerly anticipated by everyone except for me. I know that I am eating part of a meal intended for (I glance up) five bellies.

There are bones in the fish, which I try to manoeuvre around to the front of my mouth. I spit the bones into my hand and carefully wipe them on the side of the plate. I stare at the food. A fish eye stares balefully back at me from the oily pool of gravy. I have a long meal ahead of me.

It is mid-afternoon by the time I wash my hands for a final time and swim backwards out of the hut, back into the mellowing heat of a yellowing afternoon, where light from the sun is sucked up and diffused by so many smoking fires over which fish are drying near the edge of Lake Chilwa. I pat my heart and bend one knee behind the other, lowering my eyes. ‘Thank you very much,’ I say, ‘Zikomo kwambiri. Zikomo, zikomo.’

The family watch as I kick the motorbike into life. I wave, and slowly drive away up the avenue of tenants’ houses which no longer feels like an anonymous, homogenous row of grass-fronted, mud-stiff huts.

That evening I return to the hut with a good proportion of my already meagre closet. I have plastic grocery bags hanging from the handlebars of my motorbike in which I have put shorts, T-shirts, skirts, a dress, one pair of shoes (worn through at the toe) and some outgrown toys and books. Mum has stopped me from taking towels and blankets. ‘We barely have enough for ourselves,’ she told me. But our faux-Spanish house, with its stucco walls and its long, cool stretches of linoleum and its vast veranda and its spacious garden seems, suddenly, exhaustingly, too much.

Mum shakes her head. She says, ‘I know, Bobo.’

‘But it’s so awful.’

‘It won’t go away.’ She is watching me stuff plastic bags with clothes. ‘You can’t make it go away.’

I sniff.

‘It was there before you noticed it.’

‘I know, but…’

She gets up with a sigh, dusts her knees. She says, ‘And it will be there after you leave.’

‘I know, but…’

Mum pauses at the door. ‘And bring back my plastic bags, we’re always short of those,’ she says.

At the hut, I feel suddenly self-conscious, aware of all the curious, maybe suspicious, eyes on me from all the other huts up and down the road. Children abandon their games and cluster around me. All are in worn-through clothes, most are swollen-bellied. I hand over the plastic bags to the mother of the child I knocked into earlier and I say, ‘Here.’ She looks at the bags, uncomprehending.

‘For you,’ I insist.

She looks embarrassed. ‘Thank you.’ She holds the bags against the round lump of sleeping baby in the hammock at her breast. ‘Zikomo, zikomo.’

I back away into the crowd of children who are now bouncing and dancing around the motorbike. ‘Miss Bob, Miss Bob, what have you brought for me?’

When I drive away the children run after me as long as they can keep up, shouting after me, ‘Miss Bob! Bob! What have you brought for me?’

–“Touching the Ground,” Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller