Week 8 - Malawi: the realities of life

Malawi is a very beautiful, scenic country - you ride up the edge of Lake Malawi as you head north and you see the small fishing villages, the canoes out on the lake on one side of you and the freshly planted fields on the other. Every village you pass through is a hive of activity, people hustling and bustling,  on the roads there seems to be a constant stream of people, walking or cycling, moving somewhere, often carrying the ubiquitous hoe used to prepare the ground for planting. Everywhere the people wave and smile at you, the very young and the not so young  -I would say the old but you see so few of them, 1 or 2 a day out of thousands,  the legacy of both Aids and impact of childhood malnutrition on life expectancy.

And the lack of old people is when you start thinking about the reality of life here - it is tough in a way that it is hard for me as a middle income westerner to even imagine let alone describe. All I can do is to record a few snippets of information I have gleaned over the last few weeks:
- Malawi is officially the poorest country in the world with an average per capita income of US $ 250 per annum.
- The country currently has one of the highest premature and early childhood death rates in the world,  caused by a mix of malnutrition and minimal available health care
- Inflation is running at 25% per year at present and interest rates are slightly higher.
- Thirty years ago the Malawian Kwacha value was roughly par with the US dollar - now you need 650 of them (and has fallen from 450 in mid 2015).
- Health and education systems are minimal and have virtually collapsed under the weight of numbers and long term under funding.

I'm writing this at a campsite at Chitimba right on the shore of the lake, it's idyllic, has security,  clean toilets and showers,  shady we'll maintained tent sites yet the reality is I'm the first and only tourist to stay during December  - giving them a monthly income of $8 or 5000 Kwacha.  The manager tells me he's pleased I've come because they can now pay for next months electricity.

The manager is an unpaid volunteer from a church group that owns and runs the site,  as I presume are the two or three others on site who appear to be maintaining the place. Talking to him I learn a little about his life.  He has 3 kids, 18,15 and 10 which is a small family by Malawian standards. (He is a Christian and so monogamous, but polygamy is commen in the country and talked of a friend with 22 children). He and his family survive by farming the 2 hectares of land he owns. Farming here is purely manual, it means hand hoeing, planting, weeding, harvesting;  no machinery of any sort to help them - other than on the foriegn owned tea plantations in the south of the country I have not seen one tractor or piece of mechanised farming equipment in the country, everything is done with the hoe, a wheel barrow (for moving everything) and finally the bicycle for taking things to market. And these 2 hectares are not one big plot, rather they are dozen or more scattered around the locality, the result of plots being broken down and scattered as sons are given part of their parents land on marriage and then new land having to be found further afield.  Neither are many of them easy to access or farm, many hanging on seemingly impossible to cultivate slopes or squeezed into pocket handkerchief size corners at the sides of roads.

Sorry for the slightly unstructured nature of this week's post but I wanted to get some of the facts down before I forgot them. Thinking about these things makes me begin to appreciate how privileged my life is and how lucky I am.

And now a few photos to lighten things a bit.

Campsite Kuti Game Park - a small park, but because there are no predators there you can just wander around it which was really nice. 

and this is what you saw (plus lots of antelope but I didn't get any photos of them)

And when you roll up your tent in the morning this is what you find under the ground sheet - one slightly irate scorpion. 

My 5000 Kwacha piece of paradise on the shoes of Lake Malawi. After here I headed inland and up into the hills to see some more of rural Malawi 

Fertiliser aid being distributed to farmers

And the farmers receiving it. 

A rural road after some rain.  Forty kilometres of this eventually...

...leads to this.

Storekeeper half way along the mud road

With his kids

The source of water for most Malawians

Its usually the kids job to fetch the water  - and it can be many kilometres

My destination Livingstonia - a missionary settlement featuring a rather grand church for what is a small village

The man himself

But they also built schools

And a hospital (and it helped me get another perspective on religion after the Israel experience)

Main Street- pretty in the sun, a quagmire after rain

After Livingstonia I headed back down to the lakes edge and a brush with fame - using a same campsite as was used by Charlie and Ewan in a Long Way Down

Not a bad view for my last night in Malawi.