Climb every mountain...gulp.

On a lighter note, I had a bit of an adventure last weekend that I thought I’d share with you. Livingstonia is village on top of a mountain by the lake, where the first missionaries settled and built a hospital and a church in 1898. Its beauty is legendary throughout Malawi, but its notoriously difficult to get to and ‘transport is a big problem’. I made a friend through my brother Julius with a man in our village that grew up there, and agreed to escort me if I wanted to go and see the place. His name is Horace, he’s 24 and one of the local football stars, and is now a close friend of mine. He helps his uncle run the maize mill at an estate down the road, and has 21 tenants that rent from them.
We had planned to set off early in the morning, but he was delayed because one of the tenants had stolen some things and run off. He was upset because this particular tenant had been a close friend, and he felt much betrayed by this, understandably so.
So it was a two hour minibus ride to the lake side, in a direction I hadn’t traveled yet, so I thoroughly enjoyed seeing more of the countryside. You must get tired of hearing about it, but the beauty of this country never ceases to enthrall me, and if I ever feel down, I just try and spend some time out drinking it in.

So the minibus dropped us at the end of a dirt road with a sign posted: Livingstonia 15km
Horace looked at me nervously and said, if we wait for transport it could be 3 o’clock before something comes. It was then 11am. I’m like, alright lets walk, we can do it! 10 minutes up the slow and steady incline I’m huffing and puffing like an overweight smoker and Horace is barely breaking a sweat. Holy embarrassing batman. He explains to me that there’s 21 bends in the road, but there’s a few shortcuts we can take as we reach bend 21 (they count down). I think I made it to bend 18 before needing to stop and rest, lol. The shortcuts were too steep for me to handle really, especially with the hot sun beating down so after the first couple we stuck to the bends.
The conversation was great though, we talked about all sorts of things (between my huffs and puffs) and got to know each other better. He explained to me many people make this treck up and down every day to buy and sell fish, or bread etc. The locals can even do it, taking all the rocky shortcuts, in the middle of the night!
Many short breaks later, we reached bend 5, and between bend 4 and 5 there’s this slightly hidden spring in the side of the mountain, with this amazingly cold water, and as we sat there collecting ourselves,(Horace was a little tired by this point) with the monkey’s playing in the trees overhead and the lake stretched out in front of us, I was so very grateful there had been no transport, or I would have missed that entire experience.
Before you actually get to Livingstonia there’s this amazing waterfall set back in the forest that drops over the side of the mountain into this valley that stretches out to the lake. Bloody breathtakingly beautiful.
Two and a half hours later we actually enter the village/town, and everyone is greeting Horace. Not only is this where most of his family lives, and he grew up, but he is well known throughout the area for his football talents, and his nickname is ‘Ironman’ for the way he runs so fast in his bear feet. We walk around the town, check out the church and the stone house the missionaries built, and grab some lunch, by this time it’s almost 3pm though, and there doesn’t look to be any transport going back down for the day. Not wanting to take the 2 hour treck back down that day only to have a two hour minibus ride back in the dark to mkombezi (not the safest thing), we decided to stay the night, which also meant Horace could play football with his friends and spend the night at his father’s house. I hung out watching the football, making some notes for work, we had dinner together at a local restaurant where we met some aid workers who were heading down the other side towards Rumphi the next day and offered to take us as far as they were going in their vehicle (sweet deal), and then he dropped me off at a resthouse.
The next morning we met the aid workers, who had a Canadian girl working with them through WUSC and students without borders from BC. It was pretty awesome chatting with someone from home again, and comparing experiences. They dropped us at the village where they were running a session on AIDS prevention and behavior change, and we continued on through the back roads and shortcuts that Horace knew to the next spot where we might find transport. It was awesome seeing some of the crops grown in this area, that I hadn’t seen before like coffee, bamboo, and macadamia nut trees. I never thought I could get so excited about agriculture, lol, but it’s actually really interesting to actually understand where your food comes from.
An hour later we’re hanging out at the nearest trading post, chatting, hoping and waiting for the next vehicle passing through that might get us home in time for the afternoon football match. As luck would have it, a safari vehicle with a white couple comes trucking through and stops for another volunteer just arriving, so we run up and ask if we can get a lift too. They have tons of crap in the back, so in order to fit I literally have to sit on top of Horace, but we’ll take it, who knows when the next vehicle will come. They’re a couple from Britain although the man’s originally from New Zealand, that have taken a year off work to drive through Africa tip to tail and back again, and the other volunteer is a peace core teacher here for 2 years with her husband, whose 7 months into the placement. Obviously, conversation was super interesting and left me really feeling like it’s completely possible to design your own future – especially when you’re white, well educated, and have money. Lol, I make a statement like that, and I immediately want to jump in to discussions about power, and privilege and feeling the responsibility of being in such a position to contribute to making positive change in the world, in whatever context possible. But I’ll refrain, I hate sounding preachy.
I’ll leave it at: they dropped us in Mkombezi, and it was good to be home again. It was great to feel like I’d made a solid friend in Horace, outside the family and neighbors, and to have had what could have been a bit of a let down as a tourist experience, as an absolutely unforgettable experience seeing this place through his eyes.

I’ll try to be a bit more regular about posting in the last month or so now. Again, any questions or topics you’d like me to comment on are welcome, its difficult to know what people are interested in hearing about, and sometimes I feel like I could talk forever, and other times I don’t know where to start. Hope you’re all well, take care, until next time ~m 