The Battle of the Senses

I’ve officially reached that point in time with which many travelers are familiar, where things in Malawi are no longer distractingly new, but aren’t yet familiar and comfortable. This uneasy middle ground, combined with my current, tedious daily tasks of post-survey data cleaning and field note organizing, has given me a lot of time to think…and to become homesick. Now don’t get all sympathetic for me while you’re reading this! In my experience, homesickness is just another part of traveling, and I have learned several coping strategies so that I’m not totally debilitated by it. One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with bouts of homesickness is to seek out the familiar in my new environment. For example, eating Snickers bars (which taste exactly the same all over the world…a small shout out to globalization), smelling my laundry detergent (it’s both useful and comforting to travel with a baggie of Tide), picking out parts of the landscape that look similar to home (this was especially easy in Kazakhstan, where the vast expanses of steppe looked remarkably like the vast expanses of prairie in Montana!), wearing my favorite comfortable clothes (that I always make sure to pack for long trips), and listening to music (Hootie and the Blowfish always make me feel better. I love those guys.). In other words, I will often rely on sense memories of home to help me feel more comfortable on long adventures.

In the past, this technique has worked very well to dull the sharp pang of homesickness while simultaneously helping me stay engaged with my new surroundings. The tricky thing about Malawi, however, is that it’s just so different from anywhere I’ve ever been that it’s hard to relate my sense memories of home to the new things I’m experiencing here. It’s like a battle…a battle of the senses. My comforting, homey, warm and fuzzy sense memories are being effectively crowded out by a barrage of new, unfamiliar, and sometimes unwelcome sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical experiences.

Africa has invaded my senses.

Here are some vivid examples (and a few related photographs) to help you better understand the things I’ve been experiencing in Malawi so far:

          

The taste of dust that rises from my footsteps and lands on my lips as I walk through the village; of nsima¹, gritty and bland; of Fanta and Coca Cola made with real cane sugar instead of artificial sweeteners; of sugarcane itself, so sweet and refreshing; of spice and fire from the Nali² I use to enliven my meals; of fresh papaya straight from the tree outside my window.

The smell of burning—burning fields, burning garbage, burning maize kernels as they’re roasted for a crunchy snack; of people who live their lives in close quarters and are totally removed from the perfumed and fragranced potions with which I am so accustomed; of that indescribable ”village smell” that sticks to my hair and chitenge³; of my heat-drenched arms and shoulders after spending a day under the equatorial sunshine.

The sight of kids running after our truck through clouds of dust, waving frantically as we pass; of maize fields, barren after harvest; of mud homes with grass thatch roofs, windows and doorways molded into the mud; of bare African legs and feet that are stained a dull gray with years of dust and exposure; of the net overhead as I drift off to sleep, my safe haven from the few lingering dry-season mosquitoes that plague my sleep; of big brown eyes always on me—going wide and fixating on the whiteness of my skin; of red dirt, the reddest soils I have ever seen.

The sound of goats bleating and sneezing; of people shouting ”Muzungu!” (White person!) as I pass; of palm fronds rattling in the wind and sounding just like rain on a rooftop (but it’s the dry season now…); of soft and round Chichewa⁴ words as they babble over my head and escape my comprehension; of African crows, doves, and chickens chattering and calling out in the morning, always too early for my liking.

The feel of the small hand of the only brave boy who would dare to place his in my own and escort me through his village⁵; of goats that huddle against my legs as they try desperately to escape an unexpected dry season cloudburst; the tangle of the unfamiliar chitenge as it wraps around my legs, tripping me as I walk; the imaginary pain in my neck as I try to empathize with the women who carry impossible loads atop their heads; the warm and pleasant fluidity of Lake Malawi’s waters as I swim amongst hundreds of neon colored cichlid fish⁶.

With all of these new experiences laying siege to my senses, you can see why my old strategy for staving off homesickness isn’t working! My new strategy to cope with homesickness is this: seek out as many new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical experiences as I can in my remaining time here. My sense memories have already lost this battle, so I may as well take in as many new things as possible while I have this wonderful opportunity. Here’s to the adventure!

[1] Nsima is the traditional staple food of Malawi—a pliable, semi-firm corn-based mash that’s eaten with the hands and served alongside beans/meat and cooked greens

[2] Nali is a Malawian brand of chili sauce that’s like a fire in your mouth and tastes delicious on pretty much anything—eggs, beans, meat, you name it.

[3] A chitenge is a 2x2 meter piece of colorful fabric that Malawian women wear as skirts, use to strap their babies to their backs, and use for almost anything you can imagine. It’s the norm for women to wear chitenges  in the villages of Malawi (if you look at the pictures I’ve posted, you can see that all of us ladies are wearing them all the time).

[4] Chichewa is one of the many languages spoken in Malawi, and the predominant language of the Central region (home of the Chewa tribe), where I’m spending the summer. All secondary schools in Malawi are run in English, so many people here also speak excellent English (especially in cities, but in villages it’s far less common to meet an English speaker), which makes life here a little more convenient for someone like me, who only knows about a dozen words in Chichewa. As Chichewa is the first language of most Central region Malawians, it is often the language used in conversation.

[5] Most village children here are dumbfounded by me, as many of them have only seen a muzungu a few times in their lives (if at all). It’s common for children is to point and stare at me and follow me around the village in little packs (while keeping a safe distance from me), and I’ve even had a few children run away from me or start crying in fear as I come near them (for someone who loves children, that’s a real feelings-hurter). Only a few times have I met a child who was bold enough to touch me—once was smiling toddler who didn’t yet know that he should be afraid of the white lady, once was a little girl who insisted on poking me every time my back was turned and then giggling and running away when I caught her in the act, and once was a little boy of about 3 who, without hesitation, took my hand and escorted me through the village.

[6] Cichlid fish are a little bigger than a goldfish, are vibrantly colored in (especially in blues and greens), and are endemic to Lake Malawi. The lake is home to more than 500 species of cichlids, which is much more than any other body of water in the world! This is one of the reasons that Lake Malawi has been deemed a World Heritage Site and is frequented by marine biologists from all over the world.

Mountains and rocky hills on the drive between Lilongwe and Dedza

A goat staying dry (there was also a baby goat standing right behind my legs, but he's hidden in this photo) 

A woman carrying a massive load of sugarcane 

Standard village home in Golomoti (despite the multitude of power lines in the background, neither this house nor the surrounding village was tapped into electricity) 

 Me in front of a giant baobab tree in Golomoti

A gaggle of children who ran away from school to follow me down the road for a while 

Beautiful Lake Malawi! 

Otter Point at Lake Malawi (there were hundreds and hundreds of cichlid fish in this area) 

Me with the smiling toddler (one of the brave ones)

Let's Talk

I love birthdays. I love baking cakes for my loved ones, I love hunting for the perfect gift for the birthday-girl or -boy, I love silly cards that make me laugh (or sappy ones from my mom that say the sweetest things), I love the excuse to get a whole bunch of great people together in one place. So naturally, I love my own birthday.  As this most recent birthday was my big 2-5 (meaning I’ve officially been alive for a quarter of a century!), my instinct was to go into it with high hopes. These high expectations manifested themselves in my desire to “dance with a bunch of African women” (you know, tribal-style with drums and firelight) on my birthday. Previous experience, however, has taught me that spending a birthday in a new place can be a crapshoot. When you’re in a new place on your birthday, and the people you’re with don’t know you very well, things can be slightly awkward at best, and terribly disappointing at worst. And upon arriving in Malawi and doing fieldwork in several villages, I discovered that bunches of African women don’t usually break out into spontaneous dancing to celebrate the birthdays of foreign muzungu (white people) who’re just passing through the area. In fact, a good number of rural Malawians have trouble remembering the year in which they were born, much less the month or the day. And even urban Malawians, many of whom do know their actual birthdays, don’t make a big fuss about the occasion. Thus, I tempered my birthday expectations.

As it turns out, I had a lovely birthday in Malawi! We conducted surveys during the day, Alex (my research partner here) and I did some survey evaluations in the evening, and then all of us (Alex, myself, and 5 of our Malawian survey enumerators/research assistants) went out to a nice dinner in Dedza, a town in central Malawi. Top this off with a Malawian-style cheesecake (Alex’s much appreciated contribution to the birthday meal) split 7 ways, and I had myself a durn good start to my 25^th year! The real reason that this day was special was not because of what we did, but because we were together, 7 people from very different places with very different perspectives, and we used this informal dinner to talk to one another about things other than work. You see, at the time of my birthday, we’d been in the field for about a week of long days and hard work. Almost from the moment I landed in Malawi, Alex, myself, and our research had been running: we edited the survey, pre-tested it, printed 350 copies of it, and immediately headed off to the villages. Our daily conversations were generally about how to accurately measure a farmer’s maize yield or how to gauge a farmer’s level of participation in a development project, so for a group of people who had spent a bit of time working together very closely, we really knew nothing about each other.

Thus it was that at my birthday dinner, we talked. We talked about social norms, about each other’s families and loved ones, about our college days, and about witchcraft in Malawi and politics in America, among other things. We told jokes and laughed together as if that night wasn’t our first informal gathering as friends. We figured out that we all had a lot in common, despite our obvious cultural differences. And I realized that in a relatively short amount of time, I had really bonded with these people. During my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan, it took me months and months to bond with my community in Saumalkol, mostly because of the language barrier. But here, thanks in part to Malawi’s English immersion secondary school curriculum, it was easy to bond with each other once we sat down together and dedicated some time to just talking.

Our research team L-R: Emmanuel, Meriam, Elian, Kondwani, Dziwani, Isaac; 

(me and Alex are the ones in front)

Since my birthday night, our group dynamic has shifted. We use our spare time to ask questions about each other’s culture and personal lives, we show each other photos, we laugh together and tease each other, and we help each other. My birthday was great because it was the turning point for our research team; it was the icebreaker that has helped me feel like I have a family here in Malawi. Since my arrival here, I’ve been constantly astounded at just how different this place is from anywhere I’ve ever been (more on that in a future blog), but one thing is the same: people are people all over the world, and we all long for connections with each other. For a birthday without gifts, candles, cards, or familiar faces, this one has topped the charts. 

Some more pictures of the enumerators teaching Alex and I the ways of Malawi: 

Dziwani, Elian, and Emmanuel teaching me the art of eating raw sugarcane (you have to strip off all of the husk with your teeth and then chew up-but don't swallow-the sweet fibers inside)...I really hope my dentist doesn't see this photo. 

Dziwani teaching Alex how to break open a baobab tree fruit with a big rock to get at the very strange inner parts--it's impossible to explain the texture of these fruits in your mouth, but they taste a little sour and leave an odd, almost numbing coating all over the inside of your mouth. Probably one of the strangest things I've ever eaten!

The edible innards of the baobab tree fruit (the white parts are what you suck on and what leaves the chalky residue in your mouth).