Next door to Our Lady of Lourdes is a large estate. It is acres and acres. (All the cultivated land in the Google maps image is the estate.)
It is owned by "the Greeks," who have been in Malawi for generations, live in one of the cities, and own several estates. The main crop is tobacco. Now in the rainy season the big bushy plants are beautiful.
It is an impressive operation. Along with the tobacco, they raise layer chickens in huge barns, and manage a large swath of eucalyptus woods that fuel the tobacco drying barns.
The estate is my favorite place to walk, and I wander over its trails and roads at least several times a week. The woods are particularly peaceful, and with the rains, have had a varied array of flowers spring up in succession. A variety of animals also find a patch of wilderness there to call home.
There are a number of rustic bridges, but my favorite is this one.
It crosses the biggest of the creeks, and has rock banks. It is a local washing and swimming spot, even when the water is brown with mud from the rains. The monkeys also like it here, and I've seen troups in the twenties in the trees.
This last Saturday I organized a class trip for Form 3, and along with the Agriculture teacher, we went for a tour of the drying barns and fields. It is a time and labor intensive crop. The tobacco is all harvested by hand and takes about a week to dry. It is then sold at auction at big tobacco auctions in Blantyre or Lilongwe. Hundreds of the people around Namwera work here.
Looking around the estate, one of the girls turned to me and said that they were learning about how trees store carbon, and were the trees grown on the plantation to capture carbon? I said, "No, they are for fueling the drying barns." She became so indignant. "What! They are cutting down our forests!" I had to explain that the plantation had planted the trees and managed the woods. She still wasn't happy about it, but accepted it. It was so cute!