Blackout. Writing by candlelight, which is cool and soothing after a hot day. The blackouts are government issued power cuts that happen every week right after dark. There’s only one electric company, ESCOM (Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi), and it’s government run…so because ESCOM can’t produce enough electricity to go around, there’s escaping the blackouts.
This morning we went Limbe- a bustling, commercial area with extensive outdoor markets where you can buy anything from shoe polish to roast goat (mbuzi) - to check on the progress of the new branch office there.
On the way back to the head office we heard sirens and Gerald, who was driving, pulled over to let a convoy of hummers, and black Mercedes’ pass. Camo-ed soldiers with AK-47s shouted out of the windows for everyone to get out of the way. Bingu is in town! The president roared to his Presidential Palace past blind widows and heaps of burning trash. The irony is absurd- probably would have laughed if I’d seen it in a movie.
The blatant poverty in this country is unreal. The number of children running around abandoned by parents too poor to feed them anymore, or orphaned by HIV and AIDS or malaria, which kills 1 million people per year in Malawi, most of them children. Idle people sit along the street: day laborers (waganyu) roam about looking for piecework, women sit together nursing babies and selling bananas and roasted peanuts to passersby, and the old, crippled and homeless merely lie around. The need is overwhelming.
Choking on the dust from Bingu’s convoy, I had to think: this is why I’m here.
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