"getting to know Idah Savala"

this picture was taken a few weeks ago at a club in berlin, it has nothing at all to do with malawi.

Idah Savala

I finally got to meet Idah. In case you don't know Idah is, essentially, the reason this trip is happening.

She's a very smart, and more than a little shy, 15 year old Malawian girl. She has a talent for languages, well at least English, and Math. She's been given a scholarship by AGE, the organization which has helped put this whole trip together, to study at the Providence Girls' School, which is also where i'm staying during my time in Malawi.

She was born and raised in a small village near Makande (I'll get location tomorrow). Ben came with me this morning so that he could introduce me to Idah and her family. It took us about an hour to get from Blantyre to Idah's house. Malawi is dense enough that any village is at most an hour from what we'd call civilization, assuming you have a working car. The problem is that nobody has a car (nobody outside of the cities at least) so you rely on public transportation which may be cheap, especially if you do the math in euros, but it's not free. Going from Idah's village to the nearest market costs about 200 kwacha, assuming you walk or bike half of it yourself. After the harvest people have money and would be willing and able to pay this on a special occasion, during other times of the year 200 kwacha is a couple days worth of food (if not more), what this means is that for long periods of time nobody leaves the village. I asked Idah what happens when someone breaks a leg, she said that they'll drag you on a bicycle to the nearest clinic. Asked how far that was she replied that it wasn't too far, only 3 hours away.

While we were there I got the honor of having her show me around her village today (tomorrow I'm taking my camera, but as of now still no pictures). Idah doesn't really have a "house" in the way I have a "house", the place she calls home, where she spends time with her friends and family and eats her meals is a collection of buildings, stalls, a well and a small yard. She sleeps in a small, windowless, brick and mud one room hut she shares with 2 sisters and some goats, though the goats are on the other side of a 3/4 wall. Sometimes they, the goats, are loud during the night and wake her up, so she goes to the other side of the room and hits them until they shut up, then she tries to go back to sleep. To hear her tell it it sounded almost cute, I'm sure it'd stop being cute very quickly if I was the one involved. I thought about, but decided against, asking her if the goats fart a lot or not.

Afterwords she showed us the well, one of the fields where they grow their crops, the river where the bath and wash their dishes, and the church Idah goes to. While we were walking around I asked Idah a ton of questions, to be honest I've forgotten the answers to many of them, but one thing did stick with me: I (or maybe it was Ben) asked Idah what her friends thought about her going to school. She said they were jealous that she went to school, but at the same time they didn't like to go to school. She couldn't understand how the could be jealous of her and at the same time not want to do what it takes to have what she has.

Idah's family is Muslim but Idah herself is Catholic. I tried to figure out why she converted. She didn't really know, apparently nobody pushed her to do it, the school certainly doesn't care and her family would probably have been happier if she was Muslim (at the very least it'd make things more convenient). The only reason I got out of her was that she likes to sing and there's more singing at a church than at a mosque. That could very well be the only reason...

It's easy to get a little depressed reading what I'm writing here because it seems like everything you'd need to live is either broken, breaking, or never even existed. Ask Idah to show you around her village and tell you about what she does and you'll see that that's only part of the story. While I might use words like 'fragile' and 'brittle' to describe life here you won't hear a local talking about it that way, not even at 9 o'clock at night when they've just returned from their friend's funeral. Everyone I've talked to so far, from the sisters who run this school, to the elementary school students left to their own devices, to the engineer riding a mini-bus for 8 hours to go visit his mother, to Idah herself, was just generally happy. They call Malawi the warm heart of Africa, I have no idea if it's the heart or not, but it's people are most definitely warm. It would also make sense if the government was secretly putting MDMA in the water, but I doubt that's the reason.

ps - everything you've heard about how much kids in rural Africa like having their picture taken is true (at least in the parts of Malawi where tourists are still something of a novelty).

Water water everywhere

There's a hilarious story about how when we returned to the ex-garage where Ben and I are staying we found the place flooded, some plumbing problem or another, and we spent an hour or two trying to mop it up, but I'm too tired to tell it and make it funny. Suffice to say that I'm happy my backpack is as water resistant as it is, thank God for weather sealed cameras, and I won't be leaving any of my stuff on the floor anymore.

this picture was published on wednesday, april 15 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 35.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/60; iso: 6400. this image has the following tags: malawi.