Sometimes the village feels like a giant beehive: everyone is always buzzing around, busy busy, moving in and out of their homes. Life in Malawi is hard. Life in a rural village in Malawi means never ending chores no matter how old you are. It is very common to see seven-year-olds carrying backpack sized maize sacks of corn down to the maize mill to get it ground up and then they must bring it back up the mountain to their homes. Same with 12 liter buckets of water, giant rucksacks full of clothes to take down to the river to wash, or even sizeable loads of firewood (taken from the Mulanje forest that is over an hour walk through a river and up and down a mountain to find). Even four year olds are sent across the village on their own to buy tomatoes, donuts, soap, cooking oil, or whatever their mothers want them to get. Women are always sweeping, scrubbing dishes or clothes, cooking over fires, finding firewood, tending their gardens, washing their babies, fetching massive 45 liter buckets of water, “re-mudding” their porches, or preparing greens for cooking. Men come and go from the tea estates (where they work mostly as guards, tea pluckers, or drivers) or else they’re traveling to far-off markets to get wholesale piles of produce or beans to sell at the tuck shops out of their houses. People are always moving. The dirt road down to the main paved road is always crowded with people walking, people carrying things, people on their bikes, people with babies. People, people, people! I remember that being a popular comment by my parents when they were visiting; they were shocked by the sheer number of people moving about. And don't even get me started on the number of greetings that are spoken throughout the day. You can't walk anywhere without someone asking how you are, how your house is, where you're going, where you're coming from, or what you're doing. It can be maddening to try to carry on a conversation when walking through village -especially if you have a visitor or someone new with you because then everyone knows to know everything about your friend. Then there's also the issue of all the kids. They all want to say "BO!!" (This is an informal Chichewa greeting meaning something along the lines of 'what's up'). Because of all this hustle and bustle, sometimes leaving the safety and quiet of my house can be intimidating; like I don't have enough energy to deal with everything that awaits me outside. I'm still learning to get over this fear and just embrace the chaos.
All the kids sitting outside my house playing- taken out the window on one of those days when I couldn't handle walking out the front door and dealing with all that 🙈