Transitions

A lot has happened in the past two months!

Most notably, the school year ended and I have moved out of Salima to a permaculture demonstration center on the outskirts of Lilongwe: The Kusamala Institute for Agriculture and Ecology trading as Nature’s Gift Permaculture. It’s a mouthful, so we’ll just call it NGP. My new home is a room in a renovated horse stable, where I am living in a community with six other residential volunteers, as well as the Mgala family: Eston, Carol, and Kelvin. The center promotes sustainable systems and encourages self-reliance as a solution to the problem of dependence on scarce external resources. There’s an organic commercial garden, a permaculture demonstration residence, a thatched-roof classroom, composting toilets, chicken tractors, an outdoor kitchen with a mud oven and other energy efficient cooking options, and, soon, a diverse plot of staple foods.

I’ll be up here until I officially finish my Peace Corps service in November, designing and implementing a medicinal garden and trying to bring in more visits from school and community groups. The pace and tone of life here is idyllic and the days are flying. As daily chores, I’ve been caring for the chickens, worm composting, helping in the commercial garden, and tending the new jatropha nursery which will produce trees for biodiesel for the center’s truck. I’m enjoying it so much up here that I’ve begun to dread making the short journey into town that seems necessary at some point in the week for restocking and random business. I did make it into town last Saturday long enough to have my wallet nicked*, however. (*Living with a mishmash of Brits, South Africans, and Malawians, I am discovering my speech increasingly littered with their lingo, as happened when I lived in Japan and Australia. Things are “a bit hectic,” I find myself “reckoning,” sentences frequently end with “Is it?,” trash is “rubbish,” etc. But much of their influence is good; my tea intake, for example, has tripled since I arrived.)

This Thursday, I accompanied Alex and Eston to town for their weekly class at Kachere Juvenile Prison. As a group we toured the guards’ residential area to identify resources and think of ways they could be harnessed to work together. From an outsider’s perspective, the place was a dump; murky wastewater puddles among piles of rubble strewn with batteries, plastic, discarded shoes, old cans, weeds. But under Alex’s direction, the group managed to find some inspiration despite the bleak scene: the wastewater could be channeled toward plants, old cans used for potting seeds, some of the weeds were found to be edible, a khola could be built for the pecking chickens to roost and make manure to feed the hungry soil. The class was assigned to design a plan for remaking the area using the resources available. Afterward, we visited Peace Corps Education’s Camp SKY for a few hours. Eston talked to the kids about permaculture, then we split the group up to demonstrate composting and recycled paper briquette making. With a mix of crushed dried leaves and old paper soaked for a few days, you can make a pretty decent substitute for regular charcoal, which is a big contributor to Malawi’s deforestation problem. So, Alex and I walked the kids through the process of balling up the gooey soaked paper and drying it in the sun. By the end of the hour, we were surrounded by a mess of shredded paper, but the kids seemed to have fun and learned something.

As you may have read, the political situation in Malawi has been changing recently. People are frustrated by the lack of fuel, scarcity of forex, and inability to sell the big export tobacco. On July 20, demonstrators took to the streets in the major cities and things turned violent. I was traveling in the north at the time and, because of transport problems, ended up a little closer to Mzuzu than I would have liked to be that day. For the few days following the demonstrations, PCVs were told to stay put for a while, which, though it meant canceling our planned hike to Ruarwe, gave me a great excuse to site visit my friend Meg for a while and enjoy the lovely beaches of Chitimba. It was an uncertain time, with little news and lots of rumors. Things seemed to have calmed down in the last month, fortunately. The next planned demonstrations were postponed in order for talks to go forward between the President and civil society. We’ll see what happens.