smellin' of roses

Visit 1: Pastor Anthony Mainje lives in the village and has a bump on his head the size of a hamster. Wears a big smile and sometimes less-than-immaculate white lab coat. If you’re lucky, a cowboy hat that says USA on it. Last time I visited him, we chatted (and by we, I mean George and Pastor), visited a house he’d apparently found for me to live in, and then ate nsima together. The nsima was good, and the house he’d found looked great. It was on a little homestead with a family. It was really tiny, with mud bricks and a thatched roof, but remote and close to the forest. Nice. The people who lived there weren’t 100% sure that it would be cool for me to live there, but Pastor assured me that it would most definitely be available to me.

Visit 2: Um, right.

Out at the place again, this time w/o Pastor around, we’re talking to an old dude in the living room of the largest home in the homestead. Old dude is 81. Clean shirt. Says What? That house ain’t available! There’s people and bags of corn living in there! (It’s true.)

I go, “Riiiiight. I’ve heard this crap before. Someone’s got a reason why they don’t want me to live there, and they’re not coughing up the real reason, but some bullshit.” I’m mad. That house looked golden to me. Visions of Sugar Plums. Dancing. So much for that. I press the issue. Old dude says, “Yeah? You think I’m lying? You wanna see the bags of corn and the place where they sleep?” Oh. Okay. He’s serious. So why the heck did Pastor “find” this house for me to stay in? Is he really a Pastor, by the way?

Old dude has the answer: Pastor has two wives. And he doesn’t want us to know that he does. When he first “found” a house for me, he was forgetting that it was located on the same property as where his second wife lives. So in a pinch, he just took us to see some other house that he figured might work. See, this is what ya do in Malawi. When we’d visited it the first time, only the women were around, and they didn’t have decision-making power. So they just served us vomit-flavored drinks (not kidding) and nodded and smiled. Hence, here we are.

Can’t we just tell Pastor we don’t mind that he has two wives, and check out the house he really wanted us to see?

Oh, Adam. Silly boy. Have you learned nothing about Malawian culture?

See, if there’s something embarrassing afoot, the last thing you’d do is actually talk about it. Just make stuff up! Telling Pastor would be completely faux-pas. So when we visit Pastor later that afternoon, we smile, shake hands, and change the subject. In Malawi, so it seems, when the faucet’s leakin’, one should paint the ceilin’. It does SO rhyme.

Anyway, crap. That all stinks. We leave and start walking back towards town, old dude with us for a stretch. Then he goes, “Oh, I have a lot of land, by the way, d’ya wanna just build a new hut?”

Uh, yes.

“Okay. Where do you want it to go?” He shows me about 12 different options. So now, it looks as if I will be helping to build a new house/hut from the ground up. It’ll be really small, but I chose a nice spot under a mango tree overlooking the forest. HAH! Y’all wanna be me but you can’t because you’re FAT. And, after I leave, the house will be put to use by one of old dude's sons. Yes and yes.

Stay tuned for more. Pastor Anthony likely has some more shiznit he’s going to try and pull. I have photos I’m gonna try and post soon. I also hiked up Mulanje Mountain over the weekend. Y’know.