Mangos

As you drive east, past Salima towards the lakeshore, buckets of yellow and green mangos begin to appear on either side of the road as though they are rising from the land, another sign of the approaching shore just as the red earth gives way to sand. Looking a few hundred yards from the road you see the women who attend these buckets, sitting in the shade of the mango trees, and groups of barefooted children playing, screaming, holding half eaten golden fruits, juice dripping from chins and elbows. For less than a dollar you can buy about 30lbs of mangos. For me this is as good as it gets. I’ve been eating mangos at every meal and you have to keep up the pace because it is such a shame to lose even a single mango to rot. I went to the lakeshore yesterday, the third time since I’ve been in Malawi, but as I headed out the door Dr. Kaponda forbid me to buy any more mangos. She had just returned the day before with a rainbow colored carload.

Unfortunately, for those selling the mangos, mangos are not a special coveted treat but the primary food source during this season. Adults and children of Salima eat mangos morning and night. The result of such a nutritionally limited diet is clearly evident in the distended bellies of joyful children swimming and playing in the water. I was told that in times of famine the mango season is short because people no longer have fruit to sell, they are eating everything, even the unripe mangos are boiled and eaten once soft. I was told that in a few weeks we will no longer see the buckets by the roadside.

On this trip I took Clement, two of his classmates and my friend Esther, the clerk at Bottom. The day was great. Even though desperation runs up to the end of the land, there is something very reassuring and calming about meeting the water. Seeing the light brown sand lapped gently by fresh water waves and the deep dark blue that extends to the horizon, provides the mind with a corner of the infinite. The image of sky and water extending without boundaries or markers gives space to release compressed thoughts, and a sense of freedom that comes with the realization that we are small and that this life is not about us as individuals. After hours mixed with dozing in the shade and floating in the rolling waves, we ate and headed back full and alive to Lilongwe. Despite our best attempt to leave early, when the sun set we still had almost an hour of driving ahead but everyone was awake and the conversation distracted me from my fear of driving the narrow dangerous roads in the black.

The nights here are black. There is no blue emanating from a distant city, giving the odd glow to the horizon or scattered fallen stars created by people reading or eating dinner in small towns. There is just the moon and the stars on a clear night, just your own headlights on a dark one, and an occasional forest fire. (Actually the forests may be more occasional than the fires.) On the way home we talked about magic – the beliefs here are strong – everyone had stories to share about flying fires in the night that don’t burn anything and witches who fly across the country or the globe in an instant. These are common stories, which many people believe to some degree, but are often reticent to discuss.

As we passed a large maize mill, a lone industrial giant lit by a few red lights humming deeply in the night, someone said that at one point US believed it was a nuclear power plant and sent inspectors. Looking at the out-of-place monstrosity it is not hard to see how someone, seeing the world through eyes of fear - with a proclivity for building walls and bombing - could make such an assumption, but the assumption was both absurd and somehow heartbreaking. We all laughed morbidly at the thought of the US bombing this maize mill in one of the poorest countries in the world only to later realize the mistake and attempting to compensate by donating maize to the already starving population.

Just before reaching home we shared our personal highlights of the day and only then did I find out that yesterday was Fatsani’s first time to the lake and only his second swim ever (his first swim at age 5 ended in his near drowning, and was followed by a severe beating). That instantly became my personal highlight, not finding out about the beating, but realizing that in such a simple way I had had the opportunity to make a positive and memorable lifetime event possible for someone.

Of course on the way home we still managed to fill the trunk with mangoes for Esther, Clement, Fatsani, and Sunshine. So as I dropped them in their homes each of them left the car with bags, buckets, and arms loaded with mangos – the makings of rich piles to share with family and friends, tangible sweet memories to extend the beauty of the day.