19 September 2010

Being home now for a week, talking to people, casually, about my trip, and looking back over photos, I am aware that this is a journey that has left a distinct impression, and that I think will stay with me for some time. Reliving parts of my days in Malawi through the veil of memory necessarily sacrifices some of the immediate detail, but the impressions have had some time to simmer in the stew that is my head, and I still try to find some context and understanding.

There are the "simple" things - like the sights, sounds and smells of being in a completely different culture on the other side of the world. I thought maybe I’d touch on some of those, as they continue to bubble to the top of the stew.

But then there’s the deeper things - the experience of seeing so intimately into the lives of people so far outside of my own personal frame of reference. It feels odd, false but not really, to sit in my house where I have so much, and know that a world away there is a woman who goes to bed with the sun, because she has no electricity, in her one room, dirt floored hut on a reed mat for a bed with maybe a blanket, maybe only a couple of chitenjes for cover. She may have a husband, or she may be the sole caregiver for her grandchildren because her own children have passed away. She will get up when the sun rises and wash her clothes in the river and spread them to dry on the bushes. She will walk to the local water pump and fill her bucket with water which will have to last her the whole day - for cooking, for washing, for drinking - and carry it back to her hut on her head. She will gather wood for her fire, a large bundle of branches, or buy a supply of charcoal, and carry it back to her hut on her head. She will shave the maize and spread the kernels out to dry in the sun. And later grind it into the powder that will be the basis for the main staple of her one or two meals a day. While she is tending her cooking fire, or sweeping the dirt around her home, she may see a car drive down the narrow, rutted road that she walks to get to the market, to the water pump, to the river, to the village center. And in the back seat are women - white women, azungu - waving to her. And, as she smiles and waves back, what does she think about us?

So... not to wax rhapsodic about all of this, but I did run across a quote (unfortunately, I don’t know the source, so I cannot give proper credit). It helps me keep a bit of a handle on the struggle I have with my Malawi journey: "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."