Sept 15 - Elephants for breakfast

September 15

You know you live in Africa when you’ve only driven two hours from home and you’re sitting having a relaxed camping breakfast looking out over the dusty plains to a nearby river and a couple of elephants are lazily strolling by, munching leaves and branches as they saunter. A mere one hour later you’re floating down that river, centimeters off the water level in your dug out canoe, using nothing more than an ice-cream lid taped to a stick as a paddle, gazing at the most dangerous animals in the world, hippos (they kill more humans per year than any other animal), from no more than ten metres away. A surreal experience that certainly makes you feel like you’re alive… and yes, living in Africa.

Liwonde National Park is reputedly Malawi’s finest, and the Chinguni Hills lodge and campsite is nestled in a superb area of animal-rich parkland a few minutes inside the park gates, making a trip here for a single night from Blantyre an extremely easy undertaking – even if you do have a breakdown half way that means you’re delayed a few hours drinking one or two complimentary beers at an overly hospitable Indian’s swanky hotel awaiting a mechanic. To float down the Shire River in a canoe, hippos with their Jabba-the-Hut-calls all around you and birdlife circling gracefully overhead is an outing that you simply have to experience to appreciate. From the punting through swampy marshland out into the river proper, to the nerve-racking moments of navigating through the territorial stares of the beasts of the river and the stillness and beauty of the surrounds, this place is truly wonderful.

We made the trip with many others – as seems to be the trend going away for the weekend from Blantyre – and arrived late on the Saturday afternoon (several of the others had done the Cure fun run that morning, with Heth finishing a very respectable third in the women’s 10km, hence the late start), just in time to sit with a Green and watch the colours of an already hidden sun spill across the valley in front of us. Not a bad start to the night away. Then it was a braai (the South African term for barbeque) to cook up our meat-dominated dinner over the sizzling coals as we listened to music and chatted away the evening, the beers and red wine flowing rather too easily. Heth and I managed to slink off to bed at a semi-respectable time that had us rising the next morning with a little less of a headache than some.

Breakfast was enjoyed with a beautiful view out over the Shire Valley with elephants wandering by and antelope in the distance, not to mention the baboons that we needed to continually chase away from the leftovers of the previous night (stealing plates and all!) – although nothing a few well aimed rocks couldn’t fix. Then it was off on a canoe safari on the Shire River itself. We drove there through the national park passing herds of elephant, several bushbuck, impala and waterbuck, warthog and some guinea fowl just to name a few – very nice to see a few animals again after so many years since our last visit to Africa. The canoes were two or three per vessel, with a local guy paddling the whole way, so our job was to sit back, relax and spot various birds and animals with our provided binoculars. A truly relaxing experience that is very different to anything we’ve done yet, which made it all the more enjoyable. We saw countless hippos and heard many more, getting rather close (and a little too close for Heth’s liking) to these menacing creatures as we paddled through the waterways they patrolled. At one point we even stopped at the marshy bank to watch two beasts grazing, almost completely out of the water, white birds perched innocently on their hides, as they ploughed noisily through the shrub they were devouring. Other than this it was mostly birdlife, a few distant antelope and one rather impressive crocodile which came slinking by in the water right near the end of our rather luxurious and sun drenched two and a half hours on the water.

So a perfect night away that was in every way a truly African experience… and the best part of it all is that this is right on our back doorstep!

Sept 4 - That's witchcraft!

Mysterious Malawi

September 4

Dining at Anna & Cecilia’s house last night we learnt of the witchcraft laws in Malawi. And I should pretext this by saying that traditional beliefs, including the practice of witchcraft, pervade every single aspect of village life in Malawi, with an unshakable belief that cannot be fully understood by most azungu. This is to the point where the overwhelming majority of the patients we see in the paediatrics department at the hospital have already been to a witch doctor first. In saying this, not only is witchcraft in this country quite a recognized and publicly outlawed practice, but the government has actually got a formal written Witchcraft Act – admittedly penned in 1911, but they still use it!

Laws of Malawi
Witchcraft
Chapter 7:02

An Act to deal with Trial by Ordeal,
Witchcraft & the use of Charms

Should you be found in question over acts of witchcraft you will be summonsed by the magistrate to attend a formal hearing. Here, all the completely circumstantial evidence of nothing more than hearsay will be heard by the magistrate himself, being judge, jury and executioner all in one (saves on employing too many staff I presume). And what would be the punishment for such ludicrous crimes with no factual basis whatsoever, heard by a single, not very impartial, person? How about ten years in prison. Yes, you get ten years of imprisonment if one person feels that you are indeed a witch! You can look on the bright side I guess… they used to burn you at the stake in medieval times… thankfully we’ve all moved on from that absurdity, hey!

“6. Any person who by his statements or actions represents himself to be a wizard of witch or as having or exercising the power of witchcraft shall be liable to a fine of £50 and to imprisonment for ten years.”

You would also be interested to know that witches in Malawi fly around in baskets, not the conventional broomsticks that are the more internationally recognized form of aerial transport. I guess you can get hold of a decent basket for 50 kwacha, whereas most brooms start at a hefty 150 kwacha. They do however obviously adopt the standard practice of boiling various things in their cauldrons, thus there is a rule within the Witchcraft Act that prohibits, and I kid you not, death by boiling.

“2. Trial by the ordeal of mwabvi or other poison, fire, boiling water, or by any ordeal which is likely directly or indirectly to result in death of or bodily injury to any person shall be and is hereby prohibited.”
“3. Any person who directs or controls or presides at any trial or ordeal which is prohibited by this Act shall be liable to imprisonment for 7 years.”

And the longer you stay in this loveable, but unfathomably bizarre country, the more you delve into the esoteric. Where else in the world would you find public safety posters pleading ‘do not jump onto moving vehicles,’ complete with cartoon picture of an unsuccessful attempt. Perhaps a place that doesn’t let learner drivers use their indicators because ‘that would confuse them.’ Or maybe one that turns its traffic lights off after dark… and even when they’re on they're merely suggestion anyway. So it wouldn’t surprise you that the same place has its own nationally aired soap opera that is filmed entirely on a home video camera, or that a hospital's answer to a major rat infestation was to pay the families 5 kwacha for every dead rat they could bring in, or as still to this day a minted coin worth all of AUD$0.00008. And the fun continues:


Or there’s the fabulous story of one of our good friends, Yaseen, who sacked one of his employees for stealing some nails from his factory. The employee turned up in front of his supervisor at work the following day with a forged note from Yaseen stating that he had been falsely retrenched, and that he could continue to work. Being more than a little suspicious, the supervisor sent the employee to Yaseen to verify the note. Not only did the guy have the audacity (or sheer lack of brains) to actually bring the note to Yaseen, but just as he was about to hand it over a spark must have gone off in his head as he realised his foolhardiness, so he promptly ate the note, right in front of Yaseen. Yes, he ate it.

Unfortunately not all of the quirks are that amusing. How about a government that reduces the number of nurses employed under them when an independent donor decides they will fund more nurses – the donor sees that the country doesn’t have anywhere near enough nursing staff (and rightly so), then the government decides that they can spend money elsewhere by saving on nursing because a donor is paying! Queens Hospital has just procured enough funding to build a new kangaroo care facility for newborn babies and their mothers to improve parenting skills, yet even before the ward has opened (i.e. the public don’t even have access here yet) no fewer than sixteen taps have been stolen from the place… because you can get a couple of hundred kwacha palming these off at the market! Laboratories crossing out blood test results in official reports after they have been released and not telling anyone they were in fact wrong. What about newspapers that publish articles about how doctors need to be held responsible for deaths from rabies when the government refuses to pay for or distribute the life saving vaccine given its high cost. Unfortunately the very hospital we work in provides us with an unending flow of frustrations.

Then there's the downright depressing. A six-year-old girl was admitted to our hospital with a diagnosis of pneumonia, one of the many she had suffered of late, presumably due to HIV infection. Her own mother managed to coerce her into admitting she was indeed a witch one night in hospital. The mother therefore absconded with the child the next morning to return to their village, so that the 'witch' could be given the punishment she deserves by the village chief. This sort of 'mob justice' is usually completely ill-informed, all to often violent and sometimes even results in death.