Merry Christmas in Malawi (2009)

Christmas morning I planned on going to a local village on an hour long bike ride, but my traveling partner said that someone had died, so church was cancelled and I helped the new pastor move in instead.  He and his family are replacing the Chiwa family, my close neighbors and probably my best friends, who had to leave the area for health reasons.  After moving furniture, knick knacks in potato sacks, and thirty kilo bags of maize for an hour or so, I went to tend my garden.  Everyone tells me that I won’t be able to grow anything because I haven’t been buying fertilizer, but I want to see if you can grow without the prohibitively expensive dirt.  I also added some newly decomposing corn husks, banana peels, and coffee grinds from my kitchen to my growing compost pile.

Then I went to the funeral, which was held at a local person’s house because the elderly woman lived on a small plot of land and everyone who is in a village goes to every funeral.  I sat quietly looking at my feet for most of the time, but when the local chief arrived he sat down next to me and we talked about the few things that I can: my job and how life is going and how I spend my days.  He wants to know all about me, and I think that he also wants to help me in whatever it is that I will be doing in his village.  A new goal is to improve my language so that I can interview him, and write and publish for the community a short history of him and his village.  Unlike many of Malawians, he is specifically tied to a place, so he would be able to give me the greatest depth and bredth of the village’s past and where it might go in the future.

The woman was buried and a local woman’s group wearing white shirts and head scarves sang and tossed flowers on the grave, which were paid for by a local woman who I will be working with closely.

In the afternoon I walked back to my neighborhood and some friends of mine and I haggled with a butcher who had slaughtered a goat for Christmas day.  They bought some and I ate goat chitlins for lunch.  Intestines of both goat and pig are quite tasty, but the smell sticks to your face and does not leave until you scrub off a layer of skin.

I read under the overhang of my porch for a few hours, and my parents were calling at five so I walked to the one place in the village which is the only place I can get reception–a trashpit on the side of the road adjacent to a bar.  Many people were walking through the village since it was a holiday, so I had to interrupt my conversation more often than usual to say hello to people and politely tell the drunks to continue being drunk somewhere else.

I didn’t get back to my house till late (seven thirty in village time) and was wrapping up my day with some reading when I heard my name being called.  “Mr T?  Mr T?  Food for Christmas?”  I thought that someone was asking for some sort of church collection and I hustled out to the side of the house to meet them.  It was my next door neighbor, carrying chicken and nsima dishes for me.  “You eat.  Food.  Merry Christmas.”