Malawian Memories

I have Malawi in my mind, a country I visited several years ago. As a public health consultant, I had visited an official at an international development agency in New York and had left his office in total frustration. Although the man I met there was very pleasant, I couldn’t see how this meeting could lead me anywhere professionally. I was wrong.

Two weeks later, I received a call from another official at the same agency. He offered me the opportunity to be part of a mission to evaluate the health status of Mozambican refugees in Malawi, a country I had some difficulty placing on the map. When I asked him who had told him about me, he said it was the official I had initially met there. Although I had never been to Africa before, I eagerly accepted.

On arriving to Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city, I found out that my only piece of luggage had been lost in transit. Since I like to travel light, I only had with me a satchel with some toiletries, a book and the clothes I had on. To say that I was annoyed is an understatement, since I couldn’t see how I would manage the four weeks’ mission in these conditions. I was wrong again. I managed well.

I washed my underwear every night at the hotel, bought another pair of pants and was relieved not to have to carry my heavy luggage every time we visited the interior of the country. My colleagues looked at me with envy every time we had to move. Never before had I been so happy to have so few things.

On one of the trips to the interior we passed through beautiful tea plantations that had as a backdrop a wonderful view of Mount Mulanje. Shortly afterward, our hosts wanted us to visit a vocational school, mainly for adult Malawians. I was very interested in the visit, because my wife has been involved in adult education for several years.

At the school, we went through several rooms where we saw people, mostly women learning different skills -young women learning to weave on looms, another group learning how to make wooden furniture, and a third group working on basic reading and writing in English. In this last group, I became fascinated at how adults of different ages went through the rudiments of language, despite the obvious difficulties that the tasks represented.

While I was entertained looking at the students in this group, my companions had gone to see another class. A short time afterward, I followed them but, since I had come late, I was unable to get close to the students and remained outside the room. Still, I was able to see that this was a music class and that the adults were singing to the visitors.

The song was a wonderful melody of how beautiful their country was, how powerful its rivers, how green its mountains and how plentiful their tea plantations. It was a song full of longing and appreciation of the beauties of their country. Their voices were so well attuned, and they carried the melody so well that it seemed obvious to me that they had been practicing that song for a long time.
When the song ended, and as my companions were leaving the entrance to the room I was finally able to see the singers. Only then did I realize that I had been listening to a choir of blind men.

César Chelala is an international public health consultant and a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.