Ben East

What I could see of the countryside, driving from the airport, was an endless plain.

Flat to the horizon, the dry, withered landscape featured sparse yellow grass and crumbled dirt furrows. On the track beside the tarmac women and girls carried pails or bundled wood, old men and boys drove cattle with sticks, and men zipped past on sit-up bicycles. A pungent smoke filled the air.

As we approached the capital, I allowed myself hope of finding towers of glass and steel, crosswalks and traffic lights, people bustling in decent clothes from shop to shop. Not that I wanted shopping. But I felt a city offered hidden promise, an escape when needed from rustic suffocation.

As the small bus rolled along, the number of bamboo stalls increased and the road grew more crowded with cyclists and pedestrians. We moved through Lilongwe’s outskirts without any sign of buildings or monuments, nothing more than dusty concrete stoops and unlit cement hulks full of textiles and cheap Chinese goods. The road, the crowds, the dogs and chickens and children had no center but a single traffic light. Next thing we knew, the crowd was thinning again, open space returning, the shops all gone.

Like that we’d passed through the capital and continued toward the agricultural college for a week of language lessons, cultural training, and other forms of inoculation. Unfamiliar with the twenty passengers on the bus, a foreigner to everyone outside the windows, I felt a tightening in my throat. The journey from DC through Amsterdam and Joburg to Lilongwe had me tired, on the verge of tears.

At dusk we bumped off the tarmac onto a narrow dirt strip and plowed up dust as the bus slowed. A group of children chased the lead bus, more kids swarming my own, right outside the window. I felt a sudden urge to reach out to where they jumped and laughed and smacked the glass. I marveled that none were squashed beneath the tires.

The bus stopped on a patchy football field surrounded by long, low brick buildings. The volunteers stood, opened windows, leaned out to reach the children. The children were singing and laughing and shouting and the volunteers were crowding in the aisle and pushing to get off.  I joined them.

I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground outside as I stepped down off the bus and was surrounded by the crowd of children and adults, singing in a melodic rhythm under the dying pinks at the edge of the sky, and the Malawians were dancing and moving the volunteers to the center of a great circle, a mass of us in the center surrounded by people singing and shouting and sounding beautiful. The tightening in my throat became a lump and my eyes swelled and I couldn’t swallow so the emotion ran down my cheeks and I squeezed the liquid from my eyes there in the center of that great circle, chest and heart enormous and full in the looming dark.

Then the motion reversed. The Malawians moved themselves to the center, forced us back to the edges, bewildered, crying, laughing, lost in the new African night.

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