by James Best
Sam was also playing up. He was cranky that he couldn’t use the computer and pestered me about it constantly. Sleep deprived and frayed around the edges, I handled it badly. Finally, I exploded: ‘Just go away! Just go away and leave me alone! Go to reception!’ I flailed my arms at him. ‘Go!’
Sam retreated to the reception area and played his DS. I slept for ninety minutes and awoke full of guilt. Sam was tired too. I shouldn’t have taken it out on him. I apologised. Sam shrugged nonchalantly.
I tried to reframe our situation: we were on a beautiful island on a beautiful lake in the middle of Africa, and I was cranky about not having a computer? Stupido. This would be a chance to have a break from the grind of schoolwork, writing and blogging. We could focus on neuroplasticity activities. By now he was becoming adept at most of the challenges. I was struggling to keep up with him at chess. His boxing now contained an excellent combination of punches and kicks, knocking me back on my feet at times as the mitts took his blows, and he could play handball about as well as any other fourteen-year-old boy.
It was also an opportunity to indulge in commodities we hadn’t had before: space and time. To think, read, reflect, slow down.
If Nkhata Bay resembled a village in the Caribbean, Likomo looked like it belonged in the South Pacific, except with baobabs. Distant islands were serene silhouettes on the horizon while zephyrs ruffled the translucent waters into a sparkling dance. The distant shore of Malawi was sometimes visible through the haze, sometimes not.
Villagers placed racks of drying mbuna, Malawian rockfish, on the beach. Fishermen sutured nets. Women in patterned dresses and orange and blue bandanas ambled along the shore. It was like they all walked at the same slow but steady rate—an African chronometer. Firewood, fish and fruit; sack, tray and bowl, all balanced on the head.
The next day I ran into a young German woman, Sabrina, we’d met back in Cape Town. ‘Hey, James,’ she said, ‘you know, I think Sam is talking so much better.’
I smiled. ‘Really, you think?’
‘Oh yes. You can really tell the difference.’
I felt like doing a jig. I had thought so myself, but couldn’t convince myself I was seeing past my inherent observer bias. Observer bias, in scientific terms, occurs when a researcher knows the goals of the study and allows this knowledge to influence what they observe. I suppose Sabrina may have been susceptible to observer bias herself. You see what you want to see, and everyone wanted what we were doing to work. Still, it was uplifting to hear her impression.
The next day we attempted to walk to a cathedral. Likomo apparently boasted an impressive and disproportionally grand cathedral, which was allegedly ‘just over the hill’. Forty-five minutes later, in the heat of the day, with no water, we were still scrambling up the trail, increasingly overwrought.
Halfway up the hill I realised Sam was wearing his long pants. Great parenting, James. Covered in sweat, he plonked himself down on the hot sand and refused to budge. I pushed, harassed, cajoled, bribed and threatened. Nope, he’d had enough. I sat ten yards away and took a few big slow breaths. What was more important: seeing a cathedral or avoiding another argument? ‘Stuff this. Let’s head back, find some shade and have a cold drink,’ I said.
‘Yay! Thanks, Dad.’
I congratulated myself on the decision as we headed back down the hill. I was learning to go with the flow, to be flexible, nimble. Sam wasn’t the only one learning the art of letting go. We played some chess on the verandah and boxed on the sand as the sun set behind the distant islands.
The next day we visited the preschool in the village next to Mango Drift. Sam didn’t want to get too close to the small children; I think he was worried about their snotty noses and wet coughs. They sat on the verandah of the school in apple-green uniforms, eating their morning porridge. Chickens flicked between them, trying to steal a beakful, and being shooed away.
Sam took umbrage at this. He was back on his anti-animal-cruelty crusade. He bolted around the school trying to protect the chickens. The rambunctious children were fascinated by this lanky teenager running around their school and thought it was a game. The next thing I knew, Sam was the Pied Piper with a slipstream of squealing three- and four-year-olds running after him. As he ran he shouted, ‘I don’t like African children, Dad!’
‘Well, they seem to like you,’ I yelled back, laughing.
Sometime after midnight, I awoke with a start. The night was completely silent. Where were the waves? Apart from the careful footsteps of a chicken on the leaves surrounding the hut and the distant faint static of crickets, there was no noise. I crunched across the forty metres of coarse sand to the lake’s edge. The water was eerily still, a vast looking glass for the galaxy to gaze upon herself. Livingstone had described Lake Malawi as ‘the lake of stars’. Perfect.
I stepped into the lake up to my ankles and had a bit of a God moment. ‘And the moon and the stars and the world,’ in the words of writer Charles Bukowski. I brushed the surface with my hand. After a few seconds, a few metres, the ripples vanished, absorbed again into the deep dark stillness.
Sometime before dawn, I awoke again for a much less poetic reason: the sound of a mosquito buzzing near my ear. A self-administered slap to the face gave me a minute or two of unilateral tinnitus. Then I lay awake.
A rooster crowed intermittently, setting off his competitors across the villages. I was ruminating. Round and round, like the roosters, my thoughts competed for attention. This time and space had helped. We had been active: boxing, throwing and catching, drawing, playing cards—this time the game of Five Hundred, which is similar to bridge—and then chess, checkers, snooker. I had also started teaching Sam how to draw cartoons, which he struggled with at first but eventually got into the swing of things when he realised he could draw characters associated with some of his obsessions, such as The Simpsons or Pokemon.
The lack of contact with the outside world, however, was messing with me. I had managed to buy some prepaid mobile phone data shortly after we arrived on Likomo, but before I realised it Sam had snuck off with my phone and tried to download a game, immediately using it all before I could even check my emails. Grr. A pilot staying at Mango Drift was flying to the mainland from the small airstrip on the other side of the island and kindly agreed to buy me some prepaid mobile phone data while he was there, so I was eventually able to check emails and let Benison know we hadn’t been eaten by crocodiles, not yet.
I tried to get Sam to go snorkelling. Lake Malawi has more fish species than any other lake in the world. It’s full of nearly a thousand species of cichlids—small brightly coloured fish—the majority of which are endemic to the lake. But Sam didn’t like the idea of swimming with fish. (I didn’t even mention the remote risk there might be hippos and crocs. I mean, it was a remote risk.)
‘I don’t want to go near the fish,’ he whinged.
‘Sam, they’ll be scared of you,’ I explained. ‘You’re much bigger than them. They’ll swim away from you.’
I managed to get him to the water’s edge in flippers and goggles and he sat down in the water, but that was it. His piscatorial phobia was too great. Still, it was an improvement. I gave him a ‘pass’, which Sam was happy with as it meant he didn’t have to pursue the task any longer. He bolted up the beach to the hut.
So I went off for a snorkel alone, trying to not think about crocodiles myself. Cracks and cavities between the muddy moss-covered rocks were home to finger-sized cichlids of all colours: black, brown, green, blue, black- and white-striped, gold- and lime-striped. My favourite was an inky blue with a strip of amethyst along its spine.
Late in the afternoon fishermen from the village trawled for fish from the beach. All the men, young and old, heaved on long lines, dragging in the catch. After dozens of them had toiled for an hour, the booty was one bucket of mbuna.
The fishermen, however, weren’t finished. Two long dugout canoes, four men apiece, set out as the sun danced on the horizon, lighting the t
ips of the waves on the windswept lake. We watched as the men, silhouetted against the sparkling sea, used nets and noise and a great deal of skill to corral their catch. They landed a sixty-centimetre kampango—a predatory catfish endemic to Lake Malawi. The fisherman in the canoes hollered and splashed their oars on the water, delighted with their catch. One hoisted the fish up to show those on shore, and the villagers on the beach echoed the celebration, singing and dancing.
As the light waned I got talking to a group of four male English medical students doing an internship at a clinic on the other side of Likomo. They had visited Mango Drift to indulge in a much-needed drink. When they found out I was a family doctor they immediately wanted to pick my brains about all of the clinical dilemmas they were facing.
They were enthusiastic, but they’d certainly been thrown into the deep end. The clinic didn’t normally have a doctor but a local medic—a health worker with basic training—who was apparently very good, and did the best he could under the circumstances. The clinic was funded by a charity and was not so much short of equipment as clinical expertise and sound management. During their short stay the students had already seen multiple preventable deaths. An ultrasound machine lay idle, never used. The lads asked a nurse for a thermometer and were told the hospital didn’t have any, yet they found a box of them in the pharmacy. A patient admitted for dysentery had died two days later of dehydration, despite drips and fluids being available. Their experiences were a stark reminder of Malawi’s poor world ranking in health care.
Our stay in Likomo came to a close. On the return journey we jumped into the longboats on the beach that would take us out to the Ilala. When requested, I paid the guy standing next to the boat the five-hundred kwacha fare for the five of us. But once we’d taken off, the man in charge of the boat asked for our fares. ‘We’ve already paid,’ I replied, pointing at the guy, who was still standing on the beach, smiling.
The boat master shook his head. ‘No, that guy has nothing to do with the boat.’
We’d been ripped off. Andy wanted to argue the point but I reminded him we were talking about the equivalent of thirty cents each, and it would be easy for them to accidentally-on-purpose drop one of our packs to the bottom of the lake. We paid again.
During dinner on the ferry, I couldn’t help but contrast Sam’s behaviour with what it had been on the ferry ride out here: he ate his meal without fuss, and then had a fantastic one-hour conversation with all of us. Andy, Malee and Margaret picked his brains about Pixar movies, computers and games, even moving on to a discussion of World War II and the Cold War. Andy was startled to find out how much Sam knew about the latter, even if he couldn’t remember Khrushchev’s or JFK’s names.
It was Sam’s best ever conversation. They were clearly entertained by him. On his own turf, he is seriously knowledgeable and often funny. Proud. As. Punch.
CHAPTER 21
Ten out of ten
Back in Nkhata Bay I pick up the greatly missed computer charger. From here we would travel for a few days back to Lilongwe. We had rushed a little through northern Malawi in order to get back to the capital to meet my twenty-one-year-old niece, Juliette, who had spontaneously decided to travel with us for a few weeks.
I was looking forward to seeing her. Even though we’d been meeting people everywhere we went, I was still feeling lonely. There’s a difference between the transient contact you have with people you meet on the road and being with people you know and love. Juliette was family.
She had, however, very little experience of travelling in the developing world and had never been to Africa. She was also meeting up with us for possibly the hardest part of our journey: from southern Malawi to northern Mozambique. I knew her parents, my sister and brother-in-law, would be fretting. Still, I thought it would be good for her and good for Sam and me.
It was also great timing for another reason. On the way back from the island, the video camera suffered a stroke and died shortly thereafter. This was not good, to say the least. Apart from needing it to record documentary footage, it was also essential for the university study. But it was also not surprising. I’d been as careful as I could, but it had been lugged, thrown, dropped, knocked, exposed to moisture, sand, dust, dirt and goodness knows what else.
Juliette could now bring a camera from Australia. With only twelve hours to go before Jules left for the airport, I was able to get a message to Heiress Films asking them to deliver a new camera to her. And I could only get the message through because, although there was blackout that day, the hostel in Nkhata Bay had a back-up generator.
On our last afternoon in Nkhata Bay we passed a parked bus on a stroll around town. From the man sitting in the bus, presumably an employee, I found out that this was the bus for Lilongwe and it left at 6.30 a.m. After Sam and I had watched a local football game, we walked past the parked bus again and I thought I would double check. The man’s English hadn’t been the best.
‘Are you sure it leaves at six-thirty?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, six.’
‘Wait. Six or six-thirty?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, I mean is it six or six-thirty?’
‘Yes.’
A woman sitting nearby stepped in to help. After what seemed like a ten-minute conversation with him, she turned to me. ‘Six.’
I nodded to her. ‘Thank you.’
We arrived at 5.30 a.m., just in case. The bus left at 5.45 a.m.
For breakfast we ate peanuts, boiled eggs and donuts bought through the bus windows at roadside stops. Lunch was bread rolls, bananas and hot chips. Three fish hung from a railing behind the driver. A squawking chicken took Sam by surprise as he got back onto the bus after a police check; the woman holding the chicken realised and simply compressed the bird’s throat until Sam had passed by.
It was an old clapper of a bus, and a trip which should have taken five or six hours took an achingly long twelve. The engine was really struggling up the hills by the end. I think I can, I think I can.
We cruised into Mabuya Camp and caught up again with our friends there. I had started to delegate more responsibility to Sam for day-to-day chores. As I watched him order our lunch by himself, I chatted to an affable English rugby coach in Malawi doing voluntary work. He asked what the story was with Sam. ‘That’s fucking mad!’ he said, when I told him what we were doing. ‘In a good way, I mean. Good luck to you both.’ He shook his head and smiled. ‘That’s fucking mad!’
The next day we picked up a jet-lagged Juliette. It was good to see someone from home. Sam was very excited that she was here. ‘Juliette is in Africa!’
Jules is a charmer. A super-fit sports nut, she was up for adventure with a verve and vigour that was infectious. Her gumption would bolster Sam and me.
At the hostel, a young Englishwoman called Kiki joined us for a game of pool. She was working in a local orphanage as a volunteer, and mentioned her boss was a fellow compatriot called Harri. My ears pricked up. ‘Does she have short hair and ride a motorbike?’ It transpired that she was indeed talking about Harri, whom we’d met back at Mushroom Farm. We arranged to visit the orphanage. Sam was thrilled. ‘We are going to meet Harriet Potter again!’
The orphanage was home to thirty-four girls, ranging in age from two to sixteen years. There was an impressive vibrancy and joy about the place. Harri was surprised and pleased to see us, and keen to show us around. She and Kiki were good eggs, doing the right stuff for the right reasons. There are so many unsung heroes in Africa. Kiki gave us, including Sam, a rundown on how the orphanage operated. As Kiki spoke Sam wandered off from the group and around the yard of the orphanage, ending up at a chicken coop near the back fence. He smiled as the chickens pecked the ground and then scattered as he approached them. He ignored the girls despite their attempts to talk to him, instead shying away and retreating to the chickens. I listened to Kiki but followed Sam around filming him with the video camera, and wondered if he was listening or not.
On Jule
s’ first full day in Africa—and our last in Lilongwe—we visited a market down by the river. It was an ants’ nest of wooden and tin stalls, all mud-grey, with dirt floors and alleyways. The market was packed to the brim with vendors, punters, dogs and chickens. Men stood in long lines at the entrances to the stalls, holding a single piece of clothing for display to the passing shoppers. That must be an achingly slow day of work: a job as a coathanger.
Jules had worn shorts, and this was causing quite a stir, provoking concerned looks from both women and men. Malawi is quite a conservative society. It’s illegal for women to wear dresses that do not completely cover the knees, or to wear trousers at all. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
The next morning we headed south to the lakeside village of Cape Maclear. We made an early start and got down to the minibus station in good time, but then we had a ninety-minute wait for the bus to fill up. As we waited, Jules bought some headphones through the bus window and I bought some mandarins.
Jules started getting twitchy, but Sam and I were used to this. In Africa, waiting is just part of the deal.
‘When do we leave?’ Jules asked me.
‘When the bus is full.’
She looked around the bus station. ‘Do you think there is a toilet here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘How long do you think the trip will take?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘A few hours, maybe?’
‘You don’t know much, Uncle James, do you?’
‘Jules, This Is Africa.’
Once we were on the way, some excellent reggae Afro-pop helped pass the time, as the trip stretched further with multiple police and army checks, of registration, licences and whatever else they wanted. Jules noticed the slung machine guns. I hadn’t, another thing I was now well used to.
As we cleared the city, the clouds also cleared from the sky. Soon the road started to climb between bulbous granite mountains, looking like giant domes tossed across the plains by some ancient giant. After passing the dusty dirty range, the bus headed back down towards Lake Malawi. Baobabs started to appear amid the sugar cane and banana. The earth became sandier, and a more tropical feel permeated the villages as our bus rolled into Cape Maclear.
