"food, death, and primary school."

the bad picture is an interior hallway of a secondary school dorm which is empty due to school being out. i've been trying to get a feel for this place before i start taking pictures of it, so you'll have to excuse (or not) the quality of the photography up to this point.

NB: what follows is long (i would say verbose), probably has too many typos, and could use a good round (or two) of editing. Take it for what it is: marco's unprocessed thoughts on the things he's seeing, hearing and learning as he's seeing them, hearing them and learning them.

Food (in southern Malawi)

Before I came here I was really curious as to what the food would be like. Well, it didn't take long to figure it out.

A normal meal has two parts, one is filling and one tastes good (the two things are mutually exclusive). The filling half is either nsima, a paste of ground up mais a lot like polenta, or rice. The tasty part is, the vast majority of the time, a small serving of whatever vegetables are in season. In the few days I've been here I've had spinach, okra, pumpkin leaves (delicious), cabbage and potatoes. The few times it's not vegetables it'll be meat or dried fish instead of the vegetables. If there's meat it'll most likely be chicken, but it could be beef or maybe goat. If there's fish it'll be from Lake Malawi and then dried out so that it can be transported to other places in the country in the back of, unrefrigerated, trucks. They boil the dried fish and serve it hot, by the time it's on your plate it looks nothing like fish, but has all the annoying bones you'd normally find in fish. Fortunately with the broth they cook it in it's quite tasty. Sometimes eggs will also be served since they are tastier than nsima, cheaper than meat and chickens are easy to keep (there are a number of them running around on the grounds of the school for example).

Unless you're rich or someone special that's all you'll eat. The girls at the school here, who are well feed, will have nsima with boiled green vegetables for lunch and dinner 6 days a week. Twice a week they'll have some meat or fish with rice. Not a lot of variety and, according to what little I've heard, nutritious enough to keep you healthy, but just barely.

Death in Malawi

If I didn't know better I would think that this part of the earth is fighting a war against mankind, and it's winning. Other than the "normal" killers like car wrecks or work-related accidents, which are common enough here, you have to add in a huge number of deadly diseases. For example: At the Providence School, which between teachers, students and other workers is a large but not huge community of people, has had three deaths in as many months. Yesterday one of the most senior teachers died of meningitis, a month ago a young boy choked to death (I don't know how exactly), and 2 months ago a student died of malaria (here at the school).

The student's story shows how simple it is to just "end up dead". When she first got sick she just thought it was the flu, she had a little fever but it passed quickly, without testing this could have been malaria, any number of other diseases, or nothing at all. After another week, on a Sunday, she got a bad head ache and went to the matron (a kind of RA for the boarding school) who asked her if she had any of the other symptoms of malaria, she said she didn't. The matron gave her some medicine for the head-ache and told her to come back if she felt worse, but she never went back. On Wednesday, 3 days after she'd told someone at the school she didn't feel well, some of her friends went to the deputy head master and told him that she, the student, was very ill. At this point it was pretty obvious she had malaria and the deputy gave her a slip to go back home where her mother, who's a nurse, could look after her. While she was waiting outside the school gates for a bus to take her home the head mistress arrived by and, not knowing the deputy had OK'd her departure, thought that one of her students was trying to cut class. Normally the deputy would have telephoned the head mistress letting her know that he'd let one of the students leave the grounds of the school, this time he forgot to call her. So the head mistress, not knowing what's already been decided, doesn't let the student leave, after a while she's finally convinced that this girl really is sick but decides to send her directly to the hospital. The head mistress called for a car from the local education ministry's office, since the school doesn't have a vehicle of its own. It was on its way and would have arrived in a few hours, unfortunately the girl died in her room an hour later (I did not know malaria could degenerate that quickly, apparently it can). For what it's worth the hospital is only a 20 minute drive away.

There were a number of factors which contributed to this story ending the way it did: first off malaria is common and easily treatable, so it wasn't considered that big of a deal at first, not even the student ever took it seriously until she was too sick to help herself; secondly if the school let every student who said that they had malaria leave the grounds and go home, or if they rushed them all off to the hospital, the school would be empty; thirdly the school simply can't afford its own car to use in situations like this, so they rely on others to provide transportation in emergencies; finally there's no way the school could afford to treat, or even just test for, malaria on site, especially since there's a hospital 20 minutes (driving quickly) away. At least now a days they have cell phones and can call for an ambulance immediately, just a few years ago it'd take a few hours just to let the hospital know you need help.

The teacher, Mr. ???, went in to the hospital this past Friday thinking he had malaria. I do not know if it was mis-diagnosed or just mis-treated, but he didn't have malaria and by the time they tried to cure his meningitis it was too late. Since this happened while I was here I got the opportunity to see first hand what happens when someone dies (an experience I would have happily done without). In Malawi you are buried where you were from, and your employer pays the costs of transporting your body from wherever you lived to where you were from. In fact I was reading a report on Malawi's educational system and noticed that, for schools at least, there's an item in some budgets for these transportation costs and the condolences (small sums paid to the widow and orphans after a death). The day after he died, when the body was to be brought from the morgue to his home, everyone in the community gathered outside his house (I'd guess there were between 50 and 75 people). Condolences were given to the widow and the children, then the women sat on one side and the men on the other and waited in silence for the truck with the coffin to arrive. As soon as the truck arrived some people, the family and friends of the deceased who would be traveling with the body to the funeral and wake, crammed onto the truck which began its long slow journey back to his home town where he'll be buried and he'll get a proper wake. Most of the time there would have been speeches and more loud crying and screaming, but it was hot and the body hadn't been treated so they needed to get it buried quickly.

One of the things that most strikes me about the deadly diseases here is that there's not much you can do to protect yourself. I know that, in Italy or Germany, if I look twice before crossing the street, and don't eat shit I find on the street, the odds are pretty good I won't die tomorrow. In Malawi that's just not the case. Old or young, fit or weak, an accountant or a miner, timid or reckless, the odds of getting malaria, tuberculosis, yellow fever, meningitis, rabies, cholera, or any of the other diseases which exist here, are the same (and on top of that there's always the chance a poorly maintained 20 year old mini-bus going 90 km/hour will swerve off the road and kill you while you're buying fruit). This is because all the safe guards we have in Europe and the US just don't exist here, things like 100% vaccination, water sanitation, access to advanced medical treatment, hygiene/sanitation education and infrastructure, a culture of public/worker safety, etc. all these things either don't exist at all or just aren't strong enough. So you end up with 15 year old students dying of malaria and 40 year old teachers dying of meninigitis.

First visit to the Providence Girls' Primary School

This evening I walked around the primary part of the boarding school (it's also part of the Providence Girls' School). Primary school would be grades 1 through 8, so the students are between 6 and 13 years old. Like the secondary school there are a ton of students (a couple hundred at least) and a handful of teachers (i think 8). I meet some of these students and we got to talking to a bit, very interesting stuff, they even gave me some of their nsima which was actually tastier than what I'd had at lunch. I'm sorry but the rest of the details will have to wait until tomorrow, it's late and I'm tired. For now I'll just repeat Ben's comment on the place: "fucking lord of the flies man"

this picture was published on tuesday, april 14 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a on a dmc-lz8. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 5.2 mm; shutter speed: 1/200; iso: 100. this image has the following tags: malawi.