The Hard Road

Currently, I am residing in Likuni, seven or eight kms out of Lilongwe. I ride into Lilongwe on weekdays to get to the CPAR field office. The proud owner of a brand new, all-steel Humber bicycle, I intend to ride this metallic beast to the ground.

The road connecting Likuni to Lilongwe is paved with many ups and downs, populated with pedestrians on both sides of the road, sometimes walking loads of sugarcane or giant barrels on bicycles and other times carrying loads upon their heads. Others walk to get to where they need while some wait for the minibus.

Sharing the side of the road with the pedestrians are the cyclists. Again, some people ride with large top-heavy loads of goods or maybe a basket of chickens while others ride to get to where they need to go. Regardless, it’s a very crowded area with two lanes of automobile traffic zipping by in the middle.

The motorists consist of motorbikes, cars, trucks and minibuses. The minibuses aren’t the bright yellow buses with Charterways written on the side that used to take me to and from grade school. They are old Toyota vans that would have long been retired in Canada, but are now supersaturated with 4 or 5 rows of 5 people, riding hard on its axels, often sporting cracks on the windshield and sputtering out clouds of black smoke. In my first week of work, that was my mode of transportation, but now I ride my bicycle. Riding a bicycle is slower than taking the minibus, but in that first week I never took note of the beautiful fields on either sides of the road, the villages in those fields and the rivers running under the road out into those fields.

Two things struck me on the way to work yesterday (no, not motorists). The first was a broken down truck on the side of the road. This truck was a large truck, much bigger than the Ford F-450 Super-Duty, with a 20-foot flat bed filled with a load. There were people under the truck working to investigate and fix the problem, and among the three people under the truck, one was a woman as I could see a chitenge (women often wear chitenges and wrap them around their waists like dresses). What stood out in this picture was the persistence of the people when faced with the broken down truck: to get out and fix it so that they can get the load to where it needs to go and to move on with their day.

I am very lacking in the art of analogies, but this seems to be a characteristic of all Malawians that I have seen in my two weeks here so far, their persistence in the face of adversity and trouble. One thing I did not yet mention about my bike ride into Lilongwe was that I also noticed a coffin-making business. This wasn’t the first that I had seen, and it had reminded me of a statistic that I read while at work last week, that AIDS prevalence in Malawi is estimated at 14%. Countless people in Malawi have been affected by HIV/AIDS, either by contracting it themselves or losing a loved one who has contracted it, yet they carry on. Along the ride, I passed a few markets where farmers and merchants had mats spread out on which they displayed their goods for sale. Some of these goods were fresh vegetables or perishable food items, and I came to realize the volatility of that market as a source of income. Should the conditions not be favourable for growth, should there be a shortage of labour to tend the field due to illness, should any factor go wrong – their goods for sale diminish significantly. And for the little income they receive for their tremendous troubles, they carry on.

The second thing that struck me was how friendly people are. Although I hate to say this and risk damaging the reputation of the metallic beast, the chain has already fallen off countless times, and has gotten jammed between the gear and the bike frame. And even though I’ve only ridden to work three times now, people have stopped to help me out on two separate occasions already. Yesterday in particular, a man pulled out some tools and after about 20 minutes, the chain problem was fixed. After I thanked him, he asked me where I was going, and I asked where he was going. He pointed to a place about 3 kms off in the field, and then I saw his bike, with a load of firewood at least 7 feet high.

My chain has not fallen off since.