There wasn't much time or opportunity to blog while we were in Malawi. The resort where many of were staying did have some limited web access in their office, but there wasn't much time or opportunity to write.
Now that we are back, we hope to begin sharing our stories. Malawi travelers can add their comments to this posting as an easy way to begin telling their stories.
Phil
Monday, August 27, 2007
Reflections After Our Return
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Bathing in Paradise
I awake to children laughing outside by the Lake of Flames, the Lake of the Stars, a sound startling in its simplicity after many years of early morning siren and helicopter sounds in my neighborhood near Washington, DC.
Elaine calls me out for a morning swim. I quickly don my “swimming costume” and follow her out under the awning and across the sand toward the monumental stones by the lake to the north of Masankho’s sister’s house. A few smiling boys watch as we tiptoe gingerly over the lakeshore rocks into the water and out onto the sand in the bright early morning sunlight. The lake is glassy-calm and we can see bright-colored fish swimming around our legs. We wade and swim out to the rock where we had seen small boys jumping into the lake the day before, and the boys there now steer us to the safest footholds for climbing up. We perch atop the small rock island and look down to the bottom, but aren’t quite brave enough to follow one tall youth in a dive between the rocks to the water below. We climb back down and follow some of the boys swimming out farther, out, out, out, until our feet touch the bottom again some hundred or more meters from shore. The lake shimmers in the morning sun, and a slender youth pulls up nearby in a dugout canoe.
It feels as though we have been transported to Paradise.
That is the “essence of Malawi” moment I return to in my mind as I sit here at my desk, still a bit jet-lagged and looking out on a gray day at row upon row of windows in the hotels and office buildings across the way. At least I have my own window now, after many years in a windowless gray government office, but my heart longs for the color and connection and shimmer and dance of Malawi—the land, the lake, and most especially the people.
It seems only now I am beginning to think of how we might have befriended Malawi—and how I might befriend my own life—differently.
I had a long conversation with a wise young American woman on one of the many bus rides in Malawi. She was reflecting on how it seems we all—she included—had made some mistakes in our entry into Malawi. We did our American (and Australian?) thing. We led with our material stuff.
We brought stuff—notebooks and pens and books, often with white-faced children in them, and toothbrushes and American-style tampons and pills and thousands of colored pencils. And money. We paraded our stuff. We were proud of our stuff and we didn’t hesitate to let Malawians know it.
And we bought stuff—some of it silly stuff, I suppose, by local standards—chotchkes and knickknacks, paintings we may never frame, painted t-shirts some at home will not understand, games we will forget how to play, wooden bowls and low-slung chairs, salad servers, keychains, fabrics we may never use and dresses we may seldom have an occasion to wear, drums we may forget to play. Some of it we will cherish and use, some give away, some lose or discard or spend time dusting. We spent more money on nonessential stuff than many Malawians will see in a lifetime, and they watched us, seemingly transfixed.
It’s hard to know what they were thinking. Were they wondering what sort of creatures these are who are so eager for stuff and so oblivious about people’s lives and what it takes to feed and house and provide beds and hot showers if possible for 43 Americans and Australians (half of whom are coughing) for some ten days in a row? That doesn’t seem quite the right appraisal, now that I think about it. They didn’t seem resentful, just curious.
In fact, they seemed positively open and joyous and welcoming and engaging and loving. They must have been tired and tired of us sometimes, but if they were, they hardly showed it. They fed us generously and smiled gamely at our response to lake fly patties. They danced and drummed, they smiled and laughed and talked with us, played games and a Malawian version of pattycake (some little girls did, teaching us their own mischievous words) and they befriended us mightily.
We had brought with us this wonderful tool for processing, for befriending, called InterPlay. And we didn’t use it as much as I had thought or hoped we would. We danced some, and could have danced more. But we did need rest too, and we rested.
Sometimes they asked for our addresses, for gifts, for school fees and we didn’t know just how to respond so we did all kinds of things, some of them no doubt unhelpful. We were full of ideas for fixing things, having been in Malawi for a full week or more. And some of us revised the ideas and revised them again and went back to just thinking about it. It seems they have been living this way for a long time and we’ve been here such a short time. Maybe, just maybe, there is more we need to know. Could we dance our questions? Can we make them into big body stories? Can we live them?
I started to make connections. I met three teenage girls who wanted me to send them the pictures I snapped of them. I met a young man who said he was an Extension worker, another young man carrying a long board who had to drop out of school when his father died, and a young woman named Tina who remembered my name from church. I met three young American Peace Corps workers and one young American pediatrician. I met the wonderful and wonderfully patient Banda family, extended to include all the aunties of like mind, and I felt for Masankho as he was immersed in family concerns while dealing with the needs of 43 Americans and Australians.
All too soon we packed up all our stuff and climbed back on the buses. Our new friends waved goodbye with sad eyes that betrayed real feeling. One little boy snapped pictures with a camera made of clay and a shy smile.
And so my Malawi-warmed heart is working on me to take in the people around me here, to connect more, to bring more color into the environment of my office, to “stay in my own body” and let what might have pulled me out to negativity just fly away like lake flies in the sunlight. To rest in the “warm heart of Africa.” To be caressed by bathing in the Lake of the Stars. To let go of stuff and live fully, to hope, to care, to befriend, to love.
There is so much—there are so many—to befriend.
Kathryn Tobias
August 23, 2007
Gostei muito desse post e seu blog é muito interessante, vou passar por aqui sempre =) Depois dá uma passada lá no meu site, que é sobre o CresceNet, espero que goste. O endereço dele é http://www.provedorcrescenet.com . Um abraço.
Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my blog, it is about the Notebook, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://notebooks-brasil.blogspot.com. A hug.
Post a Comment