Azungu Bo!

Airtel has been running a 100 Free Texts promotion for the past few weeks. You send a certain amount of texts and you get 100 free ones. I don’t have Airtel, but Flamboyant does. And so, three, four, more times a week I get random texts filtering through Mwazisi’s shoddy network containing critical messages such as “Azungu Bo!” or “Flash SoCo!” Though annoying it is nice to hear from friends; it gets quite lonely some days in the village. More importantly I didn’t stop him because I have TNM, the AirTel promotion does not apply to me, so he gets charged for each text he sends me. Perhaps I’m an awful person, but Flamboyant is a close friend and very frugal. Cheap is a better word. Cheap to a point of frustrating and this is my lesson to him.

I visited him last week, for the first time, to conduct business training in his village. We met in Kusungu BOMA and caught a matola to his village. He made sure to specifically open his backpack and show me a plastic bag from People’s. “See I bought you meat, and not just any meat: sausage,” he said proudly. The pack of economy sausage had ruptured on the corner and ground mush oozed into the bag. “Oh damn it. Whatever.” It was his way of thanking me for doing the training. I laughed thanking him for the gesture, though told him I was ok with anything, even bread and peanut butter. For Flamboyant, this was a great leap in expenditures, even SoCo doesn’t get meat, and I appreciated his sincerity.

The training went well, I hope. His community is wonderful and his Forestry department is probably the only extension office that does any work in all of Malawi. His favorite neighbor, Olive, spent the previous week learning and practicing my name, which she executed perfectly in our first encounter. She was an amazing woman with an adorable crew of children. Flamboyant is virtually fluent in Chichewa and I stood gaping in awe as he conversed gaily with Olive and everyone in his village. After spending the night in his well furnished house, we went to a nearby tea room for breakfast. I was fighting off a three week cold and coughing out a lung, but somehow managed to finish the all day business training. Flamboyant’s counterpart translated and while a majority probably won’t really use these skills, at least four or five of the attendees really got it. They grasped the material and asked thoughtful questions.

That was it actually. Not sure where I was going with this. Nothing very exciting or profound, like Flamboyant's texts.