Africa Off the Beaten Track

I confess, I love Africa. I have no idea why this affection attached itself to Africa and not, say, the Amazon basin or Alaska or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But I have been interested in Africa since I was old enough to know what Africa is. Four years ago my wife Sharon and I accompanied a group from our church, Belmont United Methodist in Hillsboro Village, to Zimbabwe, where we worked at an orphanage and at Africa University.

It was a great trip, but one thing irritated me: people kept telling me that it was "The trip of a lifetime."

"No it isn't," I'd say. "I'm going back to Africa a lot of times."

So this June was Africa trip number two. When I stepped off the Air Malawi flight onto the tarmac in the capital city of Lilongwe, it hit my senses all at once: the washed-out but beautiful clear blue of the sky, the smells of unfamiliar flowers and wood smoke in the air, the intense colors of the women's skirts.

Twenty-four hours on a succession of planes had brought us from our beds in Nashville to a place where a great deal of the population still lives in huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs. Three weeks in off-the-beaten-track Africa seemed like an ideal way to get out of the rhythms of daily routine.

Malawi is a small, very poor, landlocked country in central Africa, bordered by Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique. The life expectancy is 38 years, the HIV infection rate is about 25 percent, and per capita income shows Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Our group of Nashvillians had been invited by the United Methodist Church of Malawi to participate in the first Volunteers in Mission trip to that country.

There were 22 of us on this trip, again most from Nashville's Belmont United Methodist. Volunteers in Mission (VIM) is a program of the United Methodist Church that sends short-term volunteers all over the world to meet and work side-by-side with hosts from local, usually Third World, countries.

The leader and organizer of this trip was the Rev. Herb Mather, who has traveled there numerous times and, as he puts it, "The people of Malawi touched my heart."

It's easy to see that the feeling is mutual. Because of the affection with which Herb is held among Malawian Methodists, we were met at the airport by a group of Malawi church members who grabbed our bags, hugged us in welcome, and quickly formed a circle in the parking lot to sing to us, their loud clear voices lifting into the crisp air. (It is near the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, and highs are in the 60s and lows in the 40s.) We spent the next day, Sunday, as honored guests in various rural churches, and then our 22 member team divided into three work groups, and the eight-member team Sharon and I were assigned to travel north to the town of Mzuzu.

More than a tourist

To travel by road in Malawi is to encounter periodic roadblocks staffed by boy-soldiers casually handling automatic weapons and languidly sweeping their eyes over each person in the vehicle. Why in the world it is necessary to have roadblocks every few miles is a mystery that even the Malawians with us couldn't really explain, but I never got used to seeing M-16s in the hands of young bored men.

The 300 miles from Lilongwe to Mzuzu passed through an arid land swathed in red dust, the kind of dust that creates a fine grit on your clothes, your face, your camera—everything. Goats scamper out of the road as our bus rolls along, and seldom are we out of sight of people walking along the road, residents of villages off in the nearby bush.

David Jarvis, a Nashville physician and one of our team members, never got over how the electric wires that parallel the indifferently maintained two-lane highway pass right by village after village. On this road after dark there was the occasional glow of a kerosene lamp from inside a hut or people sitting around a fire outside. But electricity seems a far away dream for many people, even if the wires pass by within sight of the hut doorway.

Our nominal task for our days of work here is to repair a run-down parsonage occupied by the Methodist minister assigned to this area, the Rev. Copeland C. M. Nkhata and his family. This is, of course, ridiculous. There are plenty of Malawians who know perfectly well how to repair a porch ceiling, paint a house, or replace a hot water heater. We brought with us some money to buy supplies and two of our team members, Ray and Ruth Randolph, own and maintain real estate, so they have some relevant expertise, but basically the work is an excuse for us—Americans and Malawians—to work on a common task side-by-side, to get to know each other, and to have a sense of mutual accomplishment as our time together goes on.

Here's why I love VIM trips: the ability to see another society as something other than a tourist. You don't stop being an outsider, but neither are you only staying in hotels and eating in restaurants, interacting only with people who are paid to put up with you. We were frequently in the homes of Malawians, enjoying their hospitality, playing with their children, sitting around talking.