Mzuzu

It was a hellishly long flight down to Lilongwe, capital city of Malawi, a splinter of a country wedged between Zambia and Mozambique. At Lilongwe, the sun was shining and it was a brilliant afternoon: after a month of dull, grey skies and daily thunderstorms, it was such a welcome change. It took virtually no time to go through customs, but then there was a wait for the baggage, then the search through the baggage. (I just finished reading “Swahili for the Broken Hearted” by Peter Moore, who writes about how Malawi’s crusade against the corruption of Christian values once had immigration officers shaving men’s heads if their hair fell below their ears and saw women having to roll a Coke bottle down the leg of their jeans to prove they were loose fitting and morally acceptable.)

I paid $20 to take a taxi into town and chatted with Charles, the driver, about potential story ideas. He told me that violence against women had been in the headlines – one woman had her eyes gouged out, the other lost her hands to a jealous ex – and suggested I go to the tobacco auction floors to see how the buyers were ripping off sellers. Turns out he was a great editor: the tobacco sellers are now on strike.

He also convinced me to check into a more expensive hotel, since the cheaper ones were all full of prostitutes and couldn’t be guaranteed to be safe or secure. That’s how I ended up at the Korea Gardens, paying $40 for a room with a television. The Kenya Airways food was the reason I spent most of the day in bed, getting up periodically to change the channel.

The next morning I took advantage of the beautiful weather to check out a bit of dusty Lilongwe, which feels like a large town. I managed to get myself totally turned around, but finally arrived at the centre of Old Town, where I hit the post office and the ATM (where the machines kept blinking in and out of service), bought a phone card and wandered into the Shoprite, a South African chain that always makes my jaw drop. It’s got such selection, so I stocked up on M&Ms and bags of chips and went home to watch “SuperSize Me.”

The next day I met up with Toni, who had very kindly agreed to house me at her place in the north. We went out for dinner with her boyfriend and a British mechanic, a CFAO salesman and a senior buyer with Limbe leaf tobacco, who asked if I was married 15 seconds after we met. (I learned later he was loaded, loaded, loaded, having been a confirmed bachelor for years. He spent his money on properties in Spain, Dubai and Scotland and spent the down season in India and Brazil. Sigh. Such regrets.)

The next morning we went to the airport to pick up some social work students from Ryerson who were doing a placement up in Mzuzu and would be staying with Toni as well. We packed the back of the truck full of luggage and took off, passing grassy fields and tiny villages and huge craggy rocks.

Toni accomplishes more before breakfast than most people do all day, so my week in her care was a busy one: she had me full of story ideas and lined up with interviews before I could blink. But it was good to get moving again. I’ve gotten so lazy it’s embarrassing.




I decided I wanted to write about education and the Millennium Development Goal of free primary education. Over three days I visited five different schools, including one government school, two private primary schools and two primary secondary schools. One was run by a British guy and seemed a happy, healthy place to have children learning their ABCs and how to multiply fractions. The rest seemed like a good place to keep children dry while it’s raining. The primary school had 95 children in each class and they were doing their sums with bottlecaps spilled out on the floor. The secondary school had 127 teenagers in one class and when we visited they were doing nothing: it was pouring rain and their teacher was curled up in the lounge with a charcoal stove at his feet.

We managed to take a ride up into the mountains, bouncing around in the back of a Land Rover as Eric, a Rhodesian tobacco farmer, kicked the carbon out of the engine by pushing it through virgin forests, small pockets of rainforest and further and further up the grassy hills.

Mzuzu has decidedly British weather – cold, rainy and grey – so I hit the used clothing market, replaced my wardrobe and added two fleece sweaters to the ensemble. Apparently the climate is great for tobacco, and good for paprika peppers, which Toni’s boyfriend farms. I visited and watched dozens of African employees grade the peppers, deseed them and lay them out for drying. Lloyd’s farm is massive and it’s difficult to imagine that the world could ever consume so much of the fiery red spice.




Toni’s friend Janet called to say she was coming up north to review a hotel north of Mzuzu and Toni signed me up for the trip, which gave me a bit of a break from the bleak weather. It was strange to go from shivering and wearing a fleece to dipping my toes in the surf while surrounded by women wearing bikinis. The place was called Sangilo Sanctuary and it lived up to its name. It was filled with gorgeous carvings and had been very cleverly designed to give lakeviews from virtually every vantage point, even from the toilet. The beach was a small cove, completely isolated and surrounded by equally empty little inlets that guests had claimed as their own. We had a delicious, simple meal and went to bed around 8.30 to the sound of waves hitting the shore.

The next day we tootled back to Mzuzu and were on the road again at 8 a.m. the next morning, stopping first at the Swahili market (so named for the vendors who go to Dar to buy up goods shipped in from the Philippines, Hong Kong and Paris). We had to stop at another lodge in one of the forest reserves to make arrangements for Janet’s editor to enter the annual bike race and we bumped and swerved down a sandy lane before abandoning the enterprise for fear the car would fall apart. We drove another 15 kilometres and realized we’d been driving on the wrong turnoff. It was a lovely little spot, nestled next to a man-made lake, where hiking trails crisscross through the bush and kayaks scuttle around the pond.

We set out for Lilongwe, trying to make it before the sun set and the driving became treacherous, only to hear a loud scraping sound at about the halfway point. The rear right wheel had split, the tread worn completely bald, and the spare turned out to be soft as well. We enlisted the help of some locals, who came with a bicycle pump and a desire to impress. Within 25 minutes we were off again, but we had to drive for about an hour in the dark, dodging cattle carts and roadside bicycles and the occasional lumbering semi-truck with weak headlights.

Travelling with Janet meant that our room at Sangilo was free and our lunch at the lodge was free and keeping with our skint tradition, we decided to crash on the couch of a couple Canadians Janet had met on her way through Lilongwe. They were quite accommodating and I slept like a stone, despite their insane dog barking madly through most of the night.

Janet had a to-do list as long as my arm, so she hit the ground running while I sat in the garden of a nearby hotel, sipping a tea and plowing through the stories I’d worked on while up north. I stopped in at the bookstore, debated taking some money out at the bank, wandered the grocery store and ended up at the “mall,” where I sat on a bench reading a book. By 3.30, we had collected another friend and were heading into the hills leading to Blantyre. It was a rather sedate drive, broken up by a short stop at a huge pottery factory, where we sampled some cheesecake as the sun set in a fiery red ball.

Now I’m in Blantyre, at a backpackers lodge not far from town, but close enough to the bus station that guests are forbidden to leave after dark. I expect to be here a few days – I’ve got lots of AIDS stories and a few tobacco stories and an assassination attempt to write about. My birthday is next Friday, so maybe I’ll sneak off to the lake for a while.