Wherein I trick you with a clever title and a silly beginning only to pull a bait and switch
Posted By Sika on February 1, 2008
Derek has been teasing me because when I got back from the U.S. I told him I was expecting rain but not the incessant cloudiness, continuous bursts of drizzling, and general dreariness. Specifically, I said, “Dammit, why is it acting like Seattle?”
So, after the umpteen billionth time Derek teased me about how wrong I was, I punched him in the arm and told him that my charming naïveté was solely due to volunteers like him telling me that the rains come fast, furiously, and fleetingly, soaking the earth daily, but not interfering with life too much. I was even told that some years, it only rains at night.
Uh huh.
Not so much, this year. We can go days without seeing much of the sun. Drizzle, flash storm, overcast heat, drizzle again, until streams and rivers are created where there were none the day before. When I walk from my school to the hospital, I have to pick my footsteps carefully and still end up with mud splashed to my knees.
There’s global weirding for you.
So, for an idea of what our energy consumption byproducts are doing to Malawi, the rainy season this year is worse than what the Malawians are used to. Large parts of Africa, from Tanzania to South Africa, are flooding.
Moses thinks that the reason almost none of what we planted has sprouted is because the poor little seeds have drowned in all the rain. We’ll try again after the middle of February, when the rains should start lightening up.
The maize is tall and green and amazingly beautiful, but the fruits are small and sometimes rotting because there isn’t enough sun for them to ripen instead. Maize is the staple crop of Malawi, and the possibility exists that even though the crops look bountiful, the actual harvest will be meager. And that means people here starve and that Malawi racks up more debt that will either cripple the country or need to be forgiven later.
Fertilizer, probably overused and definitely hard fought for*, runs into the rivers and streams and poisons already depleted fish stocks. Fish used to be the primary and preferred source of protein for Malawians. Now they think Lake Malawi will be out of food fish in the matter of a couple of decades. Poisoning the lake and encouraging the growth of the wrong kinds of life forms doesn’t help any.
People without electricity either cook over a three-stone fire, using small wedges of wood, or over a charcoal burner, using charcoal made from the trees on Zomba Plateau. Between the rain and the deforestation, the roads on the plateau are washing out. So just maybe, the possibility flickers into being that more someones will make the connection between deforestation and washed out roads and actually start to replant some of the trees they cut down. So maybe some good can come out of this too-rainy season after all.
*Malawians, seeing the immediate effects of fertilizer-fueled bumper crops and not believing the long term effects on already depleted soil—and why should they, they look at our farming methods, how we destroy the soil today without regard for what that might mean for the future, and they think we are lying or want them to have poor crops when we ask them to end their fertilizer dependence—have declined to cease fertilizer subsidies. Of course, those fertilizer subsidy coupons are subject to huge corruption scandals as the village headmen decide who gets them based on who they like the best and anyway ADMARC on occasion runs out of the fertilizer those coupons are supposed to subsidize.
No comments yet.