Where is Home?
[Just landed back in London]
I don't even remember eating breakfast. My brain has completely hidden from me the last bowl of maize porridge, so that there is no end. Did I add honey, or did I just let it be as it is?
Lucy and Linda came to the Visitors' Lodge on Saturday morning just as we were doing final packing. A moment to video a "tour" of the now tidy space (we did rather spread out!) so others can see where they might spend 10 days next year. Lucy plays the guide, and we improvise a running commentary that includes the comfortable mattresses, the taps that spin (the tap itself, not the bit that you wind to let the water out), the electric hot shower that works because Phil figured out this morning what was wrong with it, the electric shower that would work if it was actually there, the three out of four toilets that flush, and the veranda that has hosted so many end-of-day reflections and happy encounters with staff and children.
The children - where are they? They are up on the mountain slopes collecting deadwood: fuel for little brick-built stoves - tiny towers that conjour a sustained blaze from scraps of bark, and twigs you might have left behind as too small. (When you meet Ruth, ask her how they work.) We're going to leave without having to make and break contact with all those young eyes, after all.
It's OK. The party was our farewell. Linda says that when she visited children in their houses in the morning, she saw most had assiduously drunk only half their bottle of soda. (They each had a whole little metal-capped glass bottle to themselves. Fanta, in flavours you'd recognise.) The rest is saved for today and who knows how much longer. Linda tells us too that not only was the whole Village there (if you want Home of Hope captured in one word, "Village" comes closest), but our neighbours from across the road ate, too. They saw and heard the chickens arrive in the afternoon, and took the aroma drifting across the early evening as their invitation. Cooked meat is for sharing here. It reaches out to all, and all are welcome. The dogs stole in later to find their share in the dance-trampled grass.
Nearly 10am. Rev Chipeta and his wife join us to say thank you for our safe coming, and to ask for our safe going. I ask to be be reminded of the Chichewa for "See you soon".
There is plenty to distract on the road. A straggling convoy of charcoal importers on two wheels make us slow and pass, slow and pass. The bundles are huge, yet the bicycles sail along straight and true. You'd suspect a Photoshop job if I showed you. Somewhere in Mozambique is a place where recently there were trees and now there are charcoal-burning mounds, black-hearted and empty. The soldiers at the many checkpoints don't challenge these traders any more, Lucy tells us. "They say, 'At least it's not happening in Malawi' [the felling], and, 'Why shouldn't people show some enterprise and help themselves?'" Soon the traded carbon will reach Lilongwe, and the atmosphere.
We've come to "Woodlands " - a large restaurant set in a small nature reserve, and the best bit of Malawian's seedling tourist industry I've yet encountered. Lucy has chosen it as the place to meet former students from Home of Hope now at university or working, among other friends now living in Lilongwe. We have a large room to ourselves. It's perfect.
Ruth and Phil pop to the craft market outside and are soon back. "Close your eyes and put out your hands," we're told. Something heavy is balanced across mine, and I know what it is without looking. The Secondary School Head Teacher, Edgar, wants to get boardgame playing going after the school day, and mentioned the traditional Malawian game "Bawo" when he gave us his time for an interview. I recognised it as a sophisticated cousin of Nigeria's "Ayo", or "Awari" - depending on your region. I worked at a church in Lagos for six months many years ago and still enjoy the game: a delightfully tactile battle, fought by picking up and distributing handfuls of large seeds from hollows scooped in a wooden board. Lifting seeds from your opponents line of hollows is "eating"; spreading the seeds along the line is "sowing".
The Bawo set Ruth has bought is like mine for Ayo, the board split in the middle and hinged so that it folds to form a case for the seeds. And like mine it is beautifully carved on the outside faces when folded - wild animals of Malawi - and the hollows are polished and pleasing, as if worn down and burnished by decades of play.
We decide it's not for taking out of the country. It's for Edgar's office - the beginning of a boardgame bonanza!
A child I support at a school in Lilongwe is there with her mother Vero - a friend and former Home of Hope administrator before family illness meant a move. The little one teaches me Bawo basics - not so little now actually! 12, and triumphantly taller than her mum. Whenever I get ahead (dumb luck!) she menaces with a sotto twinkle 'You're going down!" I start to imitate the way she places the final seed of her turn, making it tchick! against the wood and grinding it in like a pestle in a mortar.
We ask Faith and Christopher if there is any advice they'd give this girl who wants to be a nurse - or a doctor - or a surgeon, from their lofty vantage point as uni students.
"Don't let anything put you off working hard."
"Don't neglect God.He's for you, and he'll help."
Tama is bright as a Bawo seed, and seems already to have made these points part of her way. One to watch.
Tama beats Carla at Bawo, twice. I know the feeling from direct experience! Lucy sends some of us to the car for Carla's sewing machine. It's a proper cast-iron Singer - brand new in its packing, and complete with table and treadle. A proper little business is born. We celebrate. Ruth's Emerald Stitcher enterprise has fruited another.
Conscious that our guests have a distance to travel before it's too late, Lucy calls time and offers to drop them off for the bus. We're not spared these goodbyes, but this feels OK. "End of July is soon", says Lucy, and the perspective clicks with me. It's OK.
Lots of hugs.
While Linda waits with us for Lucy to return, we start thrashing out in detail a scheme to overcome the problem of financial security in old age for those with non-government jobs. It's all written down, but this is not the page for it. Right now Phil, Ruth and I are in 31 D, E and F on a Boeing Dreamliner not long out of Nairobi, heading for London, each of us dealing with leaving home and heading home in our own way.
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Thanks for reading! We reach home on Sunday evening, and during the coming weeks I aim to post the interviews mentioned above.
If you’re interested in visiting Home of Hope as part of the team planned for August 2023, please email hello@friendsofhomeofhope.org and I’ll invite you to an online meeting, 7pm Monday Oct 3rd.
Comments, questions? Want to contribute to Home of Hope in some way? Do get in touch.
Alex
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