Friday, October 15, 1993

Score: 20-0 as of last night [me against the cockroaches]. 9:30 AM and Reality is eating my chair. She's an OK dog, but she's sometimes over-affectionate.


We had our chess club at school yesterday - we only had 3 boards and enough pieces for 2, so we gave a board to the girls and Mr. Jeke and I took another board. We had a fun game and I barely managed to beat him.


I went to the Zomba Music Society last night with Ron and his friend John who teaches math at some school. It was an interesting evening, with a lot of good players and just as many bad ones. Ron did two duets with Mitch on the clarinet - Ron's not too bad, but Mitch is really good. A Malawian wearing a groovy green outfit did a duet with Ricardo Garcia, the guitarist. I was introduced to him after the show since he was a painter like me. 


This makes the third day of my headache - I wake up feeling really lousy in the mornings. I hope it doesn't persist throughout the weekend. 


I'll be leaving for Dedza at 3:30 this afternoon with Gary. He wanted to take the bus with Jason and Janine but has a class which ends after the last bus leaves, so I agreed to go along with him, mainly because I wouldn't want him going alone his first time hitching and I want to experience hitching myself. I'm sure it will be "different" as Jason would say.


Postscript 2010: Mr. Jeke was a kind man who taught a range of subjects including home economics, which was unusual for a man. He was gentle, the kind of guy who always had a smile on his face. One day he came by my place and I asked him to listen to a song which was popular in some circles back in Canada - by a group called Deep Forest. It was sung in a language unknown to me, but since my arrival in Malawi, I recognized "bwana, mzungu" - roughly "boss white man." The singer was basically telling the white man to go home and to leave him alone.


Rereading this post, I cannot for the life of me believe I wrote "groovy" to describe someone's attire. I do remember that artist. He did eventually come by my place and we talked for a while, but when he set his eyes upon my cheap Sears toolkit he couldn't let it go, utterly fascinated with its ratchets, drivers and hex keys. He pleaded to borrow it, which I took to assume to be a permanent transfer of ownership. He creeped me out enough so I did not invite him over again. 


Hitching a ride by the side of the road was something I never learned to fully appreciate (nor master). Many volunteers from the previous years insisted that hitching was the way to go. Walk out by the side of the road, pat your hand down as though you're patting a giant dog, and poof, a car stops for you. Wasn't all that easy for me and Gary. We took turns hiding away from the road, hoping that drivers would be more likely to stop for one hitchhiker rather than two (then the other guy would jump out of the bushes and hop in. Clever!). After about an hour or so, we were fortunate enough to have two men in a Land Rover stop and pick us up. The driver was a man of Indian descent born and raised in Malawi, who was raw in his anger at being mistreated by Malawians. He had no Malawian citizenship and he and his family were banished from their home in the 1970s and forced to move to one of the designated urban areas, a move enforced by the president at the time, His Excellency the Life President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. more on that guy and why he banned a Simon and Garfunkel song another time.