"It's Ugly Season"

It’s unusually hot today, a muggy lazy Sunday afternoon. Sunday’s here are dedicated to church and drinking. Morning is for God: CCAP, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or whatever your particular brand of Christianity. The afternoons for men revolve around the local bottle store, getting drunk off Chibuku and Carlsberg (usually for bwanas). Meanwhile, the women continue to slave away gathering fire wood, caring for the children, cooking, washing clothes, fetching water, grading tobacco, and putting up with their drunk spouses. For a pagan Hindu heathen like me, it’s laundry day. I quip; the community has been genuinely curious about my religion and is interested in learning about it. After all, in Malawi witchcraft is taken as seriously, if not more, as Christianity. While I do sometimes frequent the CCAP, because I enjoy listening to the songs which are sung beautifully, today the pile of dust that covered my pants (underwear) and trousers demanded my attention. So I washed clothes and read The Poisonwood Bible while Lucy tried to find a comfortable position to nap in while fighting of persistent files. The heat is stifling, but the morning and nights are freezing, cold enough to see your own breath. But the sky is blue, the sun shines and we all wait for the life green hills to wither and coat the entire area in a dull dead brown. The dry season, or as Destroyer says “it’s ugly season.”

Yesterday, I rode my bike down the road to Kamphenda, about 1 hour south of Mwazisi, my first long excursion on the bike. I went to visit Destroyer and buy some vegetables at market day in Kamphenda. It was a nice ride in the morning, the air was cool, met some nice people along the way, but it got pretty hot by 9am. The dirt road was hilly and some parts sandy, but the ride was decent. I overshot Destroyer’s house by a couple of kilometers, then backtracked after 2 primary school kids pointed out his house. He has a beautiful site, tucked away from the road, nestled in the hills. He had just returned to site and found his kitchen roof had collapsed due to termites. It was in shambles, a pile of thatch on the floor and the kitchen exposed. After dropping of my bike and waking him up, we made our way to the market. We stopped at a stall to have a couple of sodas and wait while people continued setting up their goods. Then we walked around and he introduced me to his friends in the area. I ran into Junior as well as some of the builders from EPA.

Kamphenda’s market day is on Saturday and it is one of the closest markets to Mwazisi. Market days are practically the only place you can buy vegetables and other necessary items such as clothes, oil, meat, buckets, pots, etc. without having to make an expensive trip to the boma. Vegetables are scarce in the villages, as are most other goods. The few that are available are usually very expensive as the seller has to transport them from the boma. So everyone from the areas all around Kamphenda will come to market day to buy the week’s groceries. There used to be a market day in Mwazisi, but the chiefs put an end to it a few years ago due to an increase is HIV/AIDs occurrence from prostitution.

At the market, I bought 2 large winnowing baskets, 4 eggplants (kw 20), 8 tomatoes (kw 100), 8 onions (kw 100), a bunch of mustard greens (kw 20), and 1 kg of rice (kw 200). The availability of vegetables will vary with seasons as all them are grown in the area and carried in. The prices are cheapest on market days as various vendors compete for business. To provide comparison, 1 tomato in Mwazisi costs 40 kwacha. We looked around at other goods as well, such as usipa for Lucy, which I had to wait on for next week, and the various clothes vendors. Walking by one clothes vendor I spotted a pair of used Gucci loafers, pretty recent models, just sitting on brick. I pointed them out to Destroyer who asked if it was authentic, and it was. The vendor said kw 3,500 (roughly $25) and we laughed and put them back.

The clothes vendors generally buy large bails of used and donated clothes in Tanzania for about kw 15,000. There are different grades of bails, some with higher quality and better condition clothes. These bails are transported in and different vendors will sell the items from the bails in the local market. Trousers and shoes are generally the most expensive items, while t-shirts generally sell for around kw 300. It’s fun to go through some of the things in the piles of clothes, occasionally finding a hilarious gem; amusing to know it traversed all over the world from its creation in China to purchase in the US and now in a local market Malawi. Some PCVs love going through the piles at markets and finding treasures of quirky clothes.

The heat by late morning was getting stifling. We had another soda at the stall, greeted some more people, and headed back to the house. Along the way we passed a hill by the road, which we had passed earlier, only this time it was on fire. The whole hill was ablaze, thick smoke filling the valley and the wind pushing the fire further. People were walking nonchalantly along the road, to and from the market, as if nothing was happening. Some kids were even relaxing under the shade of tree on the other side of the road watching the hill burn. We spoke to one of Destroyer’s friends and he said some kids were probably playing with fire, but this common. He said soon all the hills and mountains here will be lit on fire; he said people believe it helps the soil. We were flabbergasted, but there was nothing we could do. We thought about how in the states even the smallest inkling of a fire would prompt 3 fire trucks, a police car, and an ambulance to arrive within 5 minutes. The hill burned.

I got back just in time to have lunch and head over to the football pitch for the much anticipated face off between Mwazisi’s own GAM United and the Bolero Strikers. To recap, the last match in Kawaza, GAM lost 4-0 to Bolero because 6 of its top players were out. Wellesley and her fellow Bolero citizens poked fun and teased our poor performance. It was time for payback.

I’m fortunate enough to have been placed in a village with one of the, if not the, best teams North of Mzuzu. I never enjoyed watching football, much less any sport. I tried watching football matches on TV, I get bored; it’s not entertaining for to me to watch a bunch of people play a sport. But here in Mwazisi I caught football fever. It’s the most fun I have ever had watching a game. The players here are amazing to watch, more acrobats than football players, they are more entertaining than those on TV. Also, they play an entire game having only had one sip of water. Powered only by gator-nsima and a sip of water, they play in the dry heat of the afternoon, running up and down the field. I can’t think of how that is humanly possible, but they do. And they play fiercely.

Aside from the players themselves, the crowd is even more fun to watch. Between the drunk old man getting down down down on the pitch, to the impromptu community cheer squad that runs laps around the field singing and dancing, to the swarm of fans that fill the field for each goal made, to the unfortunate little kid on the sideline that gets whacked in the face by the ball, Mwazisi football is a blast. GAM is an awesome team, currently they’ve only lost one game this entire season. I can’t wait for the World Cup to start, this town is going to be a riot.