Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  And they did. Sam finally got into the swing of things again. There was no table tennis at Mabuya, but there was a pool table so I taught him the rules. Once again Sam applied himself well, despite his gross-motor limitations. He also understood the concept of the game already as he’d played an electronic version on a Nintendo Wii.

  At reception, the co-owner of Mabuya overheard my conversation about trying to organise bus tickets north to Mzuzu the next day. She came over to help out. ‘Your best option is the AXA Executive bus which leaves at midday from City Mall, which is quite a way away. You should get over there today and book because it does fill up.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll book a cab,’ I said.

  She waved her hand downwards. ‘Oh, look my car is here, I’ll get our tour manager to drive you guys over.’

  It was just that sort of place.

  Later in the lounge, we got chatting with a few of the staff and some of their friends. James, a pony-tailed English editor, sailor and raconteur, had a great talent for kicking along a conversation. Posh accent, wide grin stretching under an aquiline nose, and an open posture that seemed to necessitate him having a wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he was instantly likeable. I wished Sam would pick up a few tips from him on social engagement, but he was too distracted by James’ ponytail.

  ‘Are you a woman?’ Sam asked.

  It was patently obvious James was not a woman. Sam just wanted to make the point that a man shouldn’t have a ponytail.

  The conversation drifted to annoying and unpleasant people in general. A young woman in the group mentioned ‘tobacco wives’.

  ‘They’re kind of like Malawi’s equivalent of WAGs,’ she explained. ‘Pretty young women, usually blonde, partnered up with rich tobacco farmers, who think they’re better than everyone else because they have a big boat on the lake.’

  Matt complained about the goats on the roads at this time of year. ‘They’re everywhere. I have a theory it’s because it’s maize season, and all the kids who normally look after the goats are off helping in the fields, so the goats just wander about.’ He joked he was trying to keep his ‘goat kill count’ down to single figures when he went for a drive at night. Well, I think he was joking.

  The two big stories in Malawi were who was going to take over as coach of the Malawi Flames, the national football team, and Cashgate, a corruption scandal involving civil servants and high-ranking officials in the ruling party and tens of millions of dollars. The story became public in 2013 after a civil servant was shot and nearly killed outside his house supposedly in relation to widespread looting of government funds. There were also allegations some of the funds were being used to finance ministers election campaigns. All in one of the world’s poorest countries.

  The next day we hit the road again on the AXA Executive bus. The bus was late, and then made even later by the presidential motorcade. The entire city seemed to be shut down to allow the long line of shiny black limousines through. There were more passengers than seats on the bus, and while I scrambled to ensure Sam got a seat, I missed out myself, along with three Africans. My best option for the six-hour trip was to sit up near the driver on a step next to his seat, facing backwards. I was trying to read my Kindle but every time he braked I would career backwards towards the dash. Executive bus, my aunt! About halfway through the trip I was seriously getting the shits when a few people disembarked and I got a seat.

  We were heading to the north of Malawi, rising up through young and volcanic mountain ranges. Umber parched grass fields were flecked with patches of curry-coloured and withering winter corn, their stalks standing in the fields redolent of ragged prisoners on parade. Mango and citrus, cane and banana. Off in the distance, plumes of cyanosed smoke hazed the hills and horizon.

  The busy road was filled with packed minibuses, bikes and open trucks, slow, beaten and bashed, carting sagging grain sacks, building materials, or humanity, sometimes all three. We passed a wooden truck brimming with nuns and schoolchildren. Two yoked donkeys looked bored while a man filled their cart with straw. An old man operated a foot-pedal sewing machine on a verandah outside a rendered white building. Goats, bikes, children, a man in a suit.

  The heavy sun lowered into the haze and became a giant vermillion beacon as we careered up through the mountains. Round, jagged or conical, like blankets drawn up by pinched fingers, the slopes now covered in forest or pine plantations. Wispy mauve clouds danced across the treetops.

  Our driver seemed unhappy about driving along the darkening mountain road, but rather than slow he flung the bus forward, crunching gears and thrashing the clutch. Overladen timber trucks and oil tankers were passed on blind curves. White-knuckled, I seemed to be the only one noticing.

  Another day spent on buses came to a close as we pulled up to Mzuzu. In front of a crackling fire in the hostel’s lounge room sat an older South African man who had abandoned his quest to kayak around Lake Malawi after catching malaria five days earlier. He looked, to put it bluntly, like shit. Later that night, a mosquito snuck inside the net over my bed. At fifteen hundred metres altitude, Mzuzu winter nights are cold, but I was motivated enough to get out from underneath the blankets and swat the blighter.

  Mzuzu seemed to me to be an intimidating town; in the short time we were there I could not see its purported charms. I did, however, stumble across a FedEx office and was able to organise the transfer of more video footage back to Australia, which was a bonus.

  John, the hostel owner, was a British expat in his sixties who had lived in Australia and all over the world and had truly excellent taste in music. He had the indurated look and manner of expats who had spent a lot of time in Africa. While Sam and I were ordering lunch in the hostel dining room, out the window I saw three youths, one holding a machete, at the open front gate. John was sitting on the verandah and they were asking him something. John seemed unperturbed, continuing on with his crossword. As I walked out, he sent the three around the side of the house, saying the boss wasn’t there at the moment. But he was the boss.

  I sat down near him on the lounge. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Oh yes, they are just after some bamboo from the yard for some project they’re doing.’ I tried to see if his indifferent manner was bluster, but he remained inscrutable, applying all his attention to the puzzle. Why then lie?

  In the morning, as we waited for the cab to the minibus station, one of John’s friends from out of town joined him for coffee on the verandah.

  ‘What’s new?’ John asked him.

  The man shook his head. ‘A woman in our village killed by an elephant.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘It happens.’

  The minibus station was the usual topsy-turvy chaos on bumpy rutted dirt, and as our taxi driver told us which bus to get on, a young African starting gesticulated wildly at him. The youth had little or no speech and erratic behaviour, and I tried to perform a ten-second diagnosis. Schizophrenia? Autism? Developmental delay? Something else? When he realised we weren’t going to Lilongwe he left us alone.

  Our rattling minibus circled the bus station and the neighbouring market while the conductor shouted the destination out the window to potential punters. It took nearly an hour to fill up before we left the city. One man got on with two huge iceboxes; another joined us lugging two car tyres.

  I was never really certain what was going on. Were we actually leaving for our destination now, still filling up or just giving someone in town a lift somewhere? Actually, in general, I spent half my time in Africa unsure what was going on. I suppose it was even more so for Sam.

  One passenger carried a FedEx satchel. I hoped it wasn’t the video footage I had sent, as it would be going in the wrong direction. We arced north out of town. A friendly guy sitting next to Sam and me, who spoke good English but with a heavy accent, fired a thousand questions at me about Australia. He somehow knew blue gum trees came from Australia, but otherwise his knowledge was very patchy.

  ‘Is
Australia next to Germany?’

  ‘Do you have doctors in Australia?’

  ‘Do you have HIV in Australia?’

  As Mr Friendly continued to press me, Sam, who was sitting between us, became frustrated with me repeatedly telling him to not interrupt. Increasingly cross, he squeezed my face with his hands and growled. Mr Friendly stopped asking questions.

  Half an hour into the trip, the minibus pulled over in a village. A solidly built man of about forty got on and sat in front of me, while two wiry teenagers seemed to be harassing some passengers through the window. The well-built man scolded the youths in his deep voice. One of the teenagers reacted, pointing and yelling at him through the open sliding door. The man muttered at him under his breath, and the youth’s behaviour intensified to real aggression. I thought the now incandescent youth was about to leap into the van and start a brawl. It would have been ill advised; Mr Solid would have easily cleaned him up. But the door slammed shut and we pulled away as the youths punched and kicked the bus.

  Sam laughed. ‘They are fighting!’

  A very animated discussion on the bus followed. I asked Mr Friendly what the heck it was all about.

  ‘The young guy was harassing for money,’ he explained to me as the bus bounced along. ‘He is always doing that. He has a nickname, “Beating Drums”, because he is always making noise.’

  ‘What did the guy say to set him off?’

  ‘He said, “You are a stinking little thief. You should stop your ways and start a new direction in life.’’’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘No wonder he reacted!’ Mr Solid turned around to me and smiled. The bus continued to buzz with chat and laughter for the rest of the trip. Malawians are a friendly bunch.

  We climbed through tanned muscular hills lined with the stubble of miombo trees. The vermiform road joined the Kasitu River. The stream was lined with banana groves and vegetables grown on terraces on the steep slopes. The majestic Nyika Plateau towered above us on the left, and then we swung around a ridgeline to the right, to see the world’s third-largest freshwater lake, Lake Malawi.

  Apricot beaches stretched off to the south, separating the escarpment from the sheet of sparkling blue receding to the horizon. The bus swung down the bends, dodging traffic, forest debris and screeching monkeys on the road. Down at the shore, Sam and I were deposited on the side of the road, along with our bags, at a throng of tatty shops that sat at the base of a narrow track back up into the mountains. At the track’s base was a rare road sign, half-obscured by weeds: LIVINGSTONIA 15 KM.

  I’d been nervous that we’d have trouble finding transport up the track, which was four-wheel drive only. But as soon as we arrived a young boy escorted us straight to a group of four-wheel drive vehicles behind the shops there exactly for that purpose. The bad news was we didn’t leave for another three hours, the time it took for the car to fill up with passengers.

  While we waited, I bought some pork and cassava for me, and chips for Sam, from the smoking barbecues that lined the road in front of the shops. The car was surrounded by chickens, and drowsy male teenagers who all seemed to be high on something. I encouraged Sam to do some reading. Eventually the utility filled up and we bounced up the narrow winding track with its twenty hairpin bends, numbered in descending order as we ascended. At least the numbered turns occupied Sam’s attention.

  It soon became apparent this was a special place. The precipice towered over the lake, and the road clawed its way back and forth across the face. It reminded me of Sani Pass in South Africa. The horizon across the lake was no longer a line but a blurred transition zone of blues, ultramarine at the lake and the faintest of cobalts at the lower sky.

  We finally reached the turn-off and pitched out of the utility, backpacks hefted on shoulders, at a simple signpost pointing down a dirt track to Mushroom Farm.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mushroom-Farm style

  The ‘farm’ was a scatter of huts perched on a cliff edge towering over the escarpment, centred around a terraced bar and restaurant with a seriously impressive menu and staff who were keen to please. The view was breathtaking, sweeping across vast valleys folding below, forest, terrace and fields; a patchwork quilt tossed all the way to the softly arcing lines of beaches a dozen kilometres away.

  On arrival, Sam pointed at a man of European descent reading by himself at a table near reception. ‘You are a white man.’ I introduced ourselves to him and checked in, then Sam took off towards our hut. The ‘white man’ turned out to be from Poland. We were joined by four Americans and a Dane. They were all in their twenties and all fascinated by our trip, autism and, of course, Sam. As well, there was a motorbike-riding woman from London with cropped brown hair who introduced herself as Harri. I wondered what Sam would make of that.

  They had well and truly picked my brains about Sam and our situation before he rocked up to the dining table for dinner and proceeded to have one of the best reciprocal conversations I’ve seen him have. It would be hard for any fourteen-year-old boy to have a conversation with seven older strangers, especially young women, but Sam did really well. Harry Potter, school, Australia, Africa and our trip, it went on and on; I was so impressed. Were Sam’s social skills starting to thrive?

  Sam even managed Harri’s moniker without any dramas. Harri was sharp and incisive. She came across as a natural leader. Her curiosity had been kindled by the concept of our adventure, and she, Sam and I had several chats around the bar, just chilling back and taking it easy, Mushroom-Farm style. It was unplanned conversations like these I was starting to value more highly, and I began to realise my own ideas about autism, Sam and the intervention were being shaped and moulded by the people we met along the way.

  The next day Sam and I planned to walk to the nearby village of Livingstonia, which had been established by a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who named the settlement after his mentor, Livingstone. We took a shortcut that started at the back of the farm, and walked up a path through a forest of brachystegia and uapaca hovering over steel-grey granite covered in pale green lichen. Upon reaching the road we turned right and hiked through hills and subsistence farms—plots on which all the food grown went to feed the family who lived there—where small children would offer to be our guides for one hundred kwacha. ‘No, thanks; no, thanks.’

  On the way to Livingstonia we saw the impressive Manchewe Falls. At the gate to the waterfall’s national park, five young boys descended on us and attempted to guide us, no doubt for payment afterwards. Despite my attempts to shoo them away, they kept hanging around for which I eventually became grateful—the paths in the park turned out to be a bit of a warren. Africa doesn’t believe in safety barriers, and after descending a jungle-covered pathway near the river I suddenly realised Sam, who was ahead of me, was standing on a large rock at the top of a hundred-metre high waterfall, only a metre from the edge. He was fine, of course, but I gripped his arm and pulled him back.

  Our unsolicited guides escorted us down a steep path next to the falls to a cave which was used by locals as a place to hide from slave traders in the nineteenth century. It made me shiver to imagine what it must have been like to be so defenceless, unable to prevent your loved ones from being snatched away at any time. A dark cave for a dark time.

  As we left, our guides demanded their fees. I negotiated hard, and they seemed disgruntled. As we left the park the five of them were following us at a distance. Glancing over my shoulder I wondered whether Sam and I were in danger and picked up the pace. Eventually I glanced back again and they were gone.

  Livingstonia was a disappointment. I’d expected old stone buildings full of character, built by wide-eyed bearded missionaries. While there was a bit of that, it was mostly your standard African town, with wide dusty roads, ramshackle kiosks and a drowsy populace.

  We had been walking for three hours and Sam was over it. Actually, so was I. I tried to negotiate a lift back to Mushroom, but the price was exorbitant. We stopped for a drink in the ca
fe of the technical college, which donated all profits to the local orphanage.

  The Orphan Care Project was run by the David Gordon Memorial Hospital. The hospital had a catchment of ninety thousand people in the poorest area of one of the poorest countries on earth. In their catchment, they had 6,450 orphans; that is, seven per cent of the entire population were orphaned children.

  I spoke to the kind woman behind the counter in the cafe. ‘Is this because of HIV?’

  She answered without hesitation. ‘Yes.’

  Walking back through the town, we passed the aforementioned hospital. One of the local four-wheel drives, which functioned as minibuses in this neck of the woods, was parked outside the gates. We climbed into the tray of the duel-cabin utility.

  Over the next half hour, the tray and cabin slowly filled, and we watched loved ones saying goodbye to patients. A very sick and wasted young woman in a hospital gown, sweating, shaking and struggling to hold up her head, sat in a wheelchair pushed by one of the nurses. She had a marked bronchitic cough and was struggling to breathe. I guessed that she had end-stage HIV, complicated by pneumocystis pneumonia, but I suppose it could have been tuberculosis or cancer. She looked like she was not long for this world. Her elderly father said goodbye to her before climbing into the tray with Sam and me. Soon we were joined by others, including three breastfeeding women. Eventually there were eighteen people in the tray, eight in the cabin, a dozen or so bags and sacks, a car radiator and a chicken.

  Sam didn’t like the fact the chicken was being carried upside down by its bound feet. He pointed at the man holding the chicken. ‘Animal cruelty!’ Fortunately, the chicken holder had no idea what he was on about.