Leaving Malawi, Part II
Posted By Sika on September 7, 2009
If I said there aren’t some things I’ll be happy to leave, I’d be lying. Mostly things like stone babies and the way many men feel they own my body because I’m a woman, and being called azungu azungu all the time, and feeling like I live in a fishbowl—the only way to escape it being to surround myself with a careful selection of friends behind brick walls. Escaping Malawi then somehow feels like I am failing—but I can’t survive without going places and being places where I am not treated like every child’s, drunkard’s, and bored person’s personal freak show. I know, because I’ve been told, that I will some day miss the freak show. It also makes you famous—everything you do is fascinating and important, and people miss that. I know this, I can understand that it is probably true, but I don’t yet believe it. Sometimes it seems every day of my life here has been a failing attempt at becoming more integrated and less newsworthy. I can’t really imagine feeling any differently about it.
The stuff I won’t miss though, is not what I think of first or last. What I think about the most is the things I will miss. I keep remembering that although I will take lots of pictures when my mom comes, I don’t have enough of other seasons. That I may never see a woman cracking sugar cane over her knee again. That I won’t have impossibly sweet and creamy avocados melt on my tongue. That chickens won’t wake me at 4:30am. That I’ll have to go out in search of places with little enough light pollution that the sky can be black black and freckled with abundant stars, or where I can walk home by the light of the full moon without even a torch, playing with the reflected shadows. That people won’t walk by my windows, speaking the now familiar sounds and rhythms of Chichewa, laughing, and singing. That I won’t hear the shh shh of dirt-sweeping in the mornings, or the call to prayer of the muezzin. That I won’t be able to listen to the music of a wedding celebration throughout the day, then the drums beating the wee hours of the morning, then the PA system crackling in the morning with more Lucius Banda and Bujo Mojo. That I won’t watch the earth change from sere red-brown and cracked to abundant with green. That I will inevitably lose contact with most of my Malawian friends, who have been my rocks in the last two years.
While I am absolutely ready to move on to whatever’s next in my life, I am also greatly saddened that this new phase requires leaving the last one behind.
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