Snapshots from my drives

Children are laughing and playing excitedly in a mountain of waste paper spilled by a truck accident. At first glance, it looks like they are playing in snow: sliding down the slippery slope, picking up armfulls to throw at each other, rolling around and being buried, all the while with shining smiles lighting up their faces. Christmas for them came in April.

I am driving with Nelson the taxi driver to the boat that will take me to Liwonde National Park, we are listening to West Life (an Irish boy band) blasting on the radio - Nelson's choice. When I tell him I know the cousin of one of the boys, he is not impressed - in Malawi everyone knows everyone and he assumes it is the same in the US. We whip past a chameleon crossing the road at a snail's speed, and well camouflaged speckled black and white to match the tar. The Malawians are superstitious of these strange animals so no one will move him off the road. This was definitely a situation where camouflage was not an advantage.

I’ve seen absolutely anything and everything transported by bicycle. I've seen three people on one bike. I've seen people riding with 25 sugar canes (10 ft long) stacked around them. I've seen people riding with cut firewood stacked between vertical poles on the back of the bike to height of 8 foot. I've even seen a bicycle carrying bicycles on the seat carrier. But the prize goes to the bicycle carrying a double bed precariously perched on the back.

A sign reads, “Love your family, get a vasectomy”. The sign belongs to a local NGO, but I wander who sent them the message.

A busy open air market spreads across the main road from Lilongwe (the political capital) to Blantyre (the financial capital - don't picture New York). Market women are busy selling their beautiful big red tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, and even the odd carrot (all non-indigenous vegetables with much lower nutritional value than the traditional varieties which are now considered inferior). Busy shoppers walk back and forth across the road spending their few Kwatcha on tonight's dinner. They are completely unconcerned that as they cross the road, they cross an international border from Malawi to Mozambique. I wander if they figured out how to capture this market in international trade figures?

The highest prize of all goes to the 'Grory to Jesus restaurant' (L's and R's are pronounced the same in the local language, Chicewa).