January 1994: letters from home and the volunteers publish another Buku

The cover of the January 1994 Buku

A different entry this time. Rather than take a page from my journal (I'm almost at the end of myfirst of five journals from Malawi), I thought I would go straight into a "Postscript 2010" voice and look back at two items I recently dug up that brought me back to my life all those years ago.

The first is what the WUSC volunteers called the Buku, or "book" in Chichewa. Buku was a collection of newspaper clippings from Malawi and back home. In each edition were also recipes, The Far Side cartoons,  and the occasional section with practical tips, like how to rid your home of cockroaches. Buku was published every few months.

The January 1994 edition (see photo for the cover) had plenty of interesting articles, and receiving a Buku was just as good as getting a letter from home. Keep in mind that the Malawi of 1994 had no Internet, no TV, no good bookstores, and no reliable telephone service. Come to think of it, things haven't changed much for most people since then. Some of our Buku articles that month were:

• Trudeau tells all especially about Maggie
• Quebec prepares for battle [in 1995 there was a referendum to separate from Canada]
• Canadians to reassess foreign relations
• AIDS in Malawi: Shaking Cultural Foundations
• Ozone Slayers: How the world waited too long to rescue the shield that protects Earth from the sun's dangerous UV rays
• Challenge to formulate new strategies without expats
• Africans losing decades-long war against deadly malaria
• Great expectations: World Bank looks for success in South Africa [the article was about structural adjustment programs]

Recipes to spare us from the nsima
and beans were a necessity

The last few pages of the Buku - after the article telling the reader how to get rid or cockroaches - were dedicated to an assortment of recipes. The page pictured here has three recipes: macadamia rissoles, lentil fritters, and tomato and bread pudding. For a more dazzling presentation of culinary delights, I suggest you visit my friend Joe's website, who was probably one of the Buku contributors for this issue.

Another series of items I dug up were some of the many letters I'd forgotten about: letters I had written to my friends, letters I received from them, and letters from my family. Throughout my two years in Malawi, my mother was easily the most diligent write among all of them, but my brother surprised me by writing frequently as well. To be honest, it was quite unexpected. Throughout our teenage years we kept a distance from each other, and I'd never thought of him as the type who would sit down and write a letter (and almost all of his letters were handwritten). But he did spend many hours writing to me. When I was fortunate enough to receive letters from both my mother and my brother at the same time (excerpts from each are in the photo), I would be kept updated on which neighbour's cars did not start because of the cold or when my mother would go bowling or attend a variety show with her group of widows. And I'd be reassured by my brother that my mother was fine, that she panicked over the usual things, and how, despite being an avid sports fan, he made his way to her home to clean her driveway on Super Sunday.

Letters from home