Around the World & Right Here

We met a lone traveler in a remote mountain hut. Though young like us, he looked rough and grizzled, his clothing frayed, hair unkempt, scruff grown to an uneven beard. The soles of his boots were worn, the uppers lumpy.

He’d reached this corner of Malawi at random, he said, a stop on a trip around the world. The idea stirred a moment of awe in me: three months into a two-year hitch, I suddenly felt stifled. Me and my climbing companion, a fellow named Smith, would start teaching here in a few weeks, our appearance normed to conservative culture.

The adventurer said, sounding wise, “I haven’t seen enough of the world to know where I want to be.” Then he added his plan to go on for another year, maybe more. My regret evaporated on the exhausting futility of the enterprise.

Our shelter for the night, a cedar hut, squatted in the shadow of Chambe, one of many peaks on Malawi’s Mulanje massif. A great stone fireplace warmed the main room, outfitted with a rough-hewn table and matching benches. We unfurled our sleeping bags on tiered wood racks in the sack room. The aroma of fresh-sawed cedar and wood smoke filled the hut.

A caretaker lived out back. Smith and I called him bambo, which meant father. We asked for madzi and he brought water. We said zikomo to thank him. He brought in wood and built us a great fire: moto.

Observing this, the adventurer asked for a few words in the local language. I was no linguist, I told him. It wasn’t me delivering the speech in Chichewa before the US Ambassador and Malawi’s Minister of Education at our Peace Corps swearing in.

I did my best to oblige his request, anyway, eager to share my months of language and cultural training, happy to help this wandering pilgrim. I dove into the simple construction of sentences, how to break the language down, how to multiply his understanding by learning a few roots and simple conjugations.

Soon his eyes glazed over. He wasn’t listening, I gathered. I figured he wouldn’t be seeing, either. He would travel with his eyes fixed on the horizon, a distant, unattainable object, moments and experiences occurring on the periphery. Not listening, not seeing.

Going.

In his mind, I supposed, he’d already left Malawi, gone up along the lake to Tanzania; crossed the western frontier into Zambia, then Zimbabwe (Chichewa could have helped him there, too). Maybe he was in Mozambique to the south and east, drinking from coconuts on the Indian Ocean.

To my side, I’d taken up residence across the plain from the hut on the remote mountain plateau. The school had provided me a hilltop home with a view of the clouds skirting and veiling Mulanje, shadows playing on Chambe’s granite face, the waterfall gushing off the main plateau in a noisy white cascade.

Even after three months I remained an infant in the country, eyes barely open. Yet I, too, pictured a horizon. I saw two years in the distance, a schedule of classes teaching English to students in blue and white uniforms or leading the Wildlife Club on field trips to the lower Shire. I had whiffle balls and a bat to teach my students a childhood game. I would receive guests, both traveling Volunteers and random strangers met on the road. I would greet my parents at the airport and introduce them to the land I had come to know, roles reversed—them the babes, me opening their eyes.

I would visit corners of this strange land not unlike my hometown: unknown and invisible to the world, no place of pride on any map, unsung in the guide books. Places nobody came from and nobody went to, villages and farms for corn and tobacco like the corn and tobacco in my hometown.

I had a long stretch ahead learning to translate my surroundings, the acrid smell of cook fires, the sound of water against metal pails, the chatter of village women lined up at the pump, the whump of hoes against soft earth, the intense heat, the weight of humidity, the monsoon-strength downpours, mud bogging down vehicles on unpassable roads, the chilly blowing chiperoni fog and the socked-in mood of close-clouded days, fog and mist rolling into and out of open classroom windows, the students shivering.

There was a world out there but we were not part of it. The world narrowed to here, to this point of earth. Concentrated. Solitary. Alone. These things populated the two years ahead.

The adventurer had departed by morning – cold and dewy. In the warming sun Smith and I summited Chambe, daring scrambles in places, and looked over the landscape below. Shadows played across the tea plantations encircling the mountain’s base and the corn and cassava fields on the red earth of the Great Rift Valley.

Home.

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