I am sitting in my porch after Mass with a sweater around my shoulders, drinking coffee, and listening to the rain fall on my tin roof. It is getting heavier as it goes on. It is a cozy feeling.
The rains really change life when they come. It is like a different place. Everything has turned lush and green.
While people will literally be out dancing in the rain when it first comes, it us not all joy. There is a proverb: walira mvula, walira matope. "He who cried for the rains, cries for the mud as well." Or as Fr. Constantine put it, "The rains bring their own problems."
Flooding is one of the larger problems.
Another proverb: madzi saiwala khawa means that it is difficult to change old habits, but literally means that water does not forget its way. The gushing drainage ditches and rivulets of the rainy season are the image for this.
And sometimes those ways are insufficient and the road washes out. Our perhaps, the water knows it's way and the road tried to get in the way.
Yet, it is the rain that brings life and allows food to grow, so even when it floods and houses fall down and entire fields are drowned and crops wrecked, and power lines topple, people dance.
I got to experience a little of the tenuous relationship between the people of Malawi and the rain, when I spent the first week of Christmas break at Utawaleza Farm -- the Bishop's attempt to lead by example in promoting sustainable agriculture.
My first day there. I spent all morning just sitting in the office as the rains pounded down. Everyone was just sitting in the office. There was nothing that could be done.
That afternoon, we went out to plant maize. We tramped through ankle deep water to a field. In the field, the women and I sank to our knees in mud. After, planting a few rows, the foreman called it off. The seed would just rot. We moved to a drier field that needed replanting. It had been planted earlier and due to irregular rain, much had not germinated, so we filled in the spaces in the rows. The pictures below are from the drier field.
Along with mostly organic maize, the farm grows papaya to sell to the lake shore resorts, ginger as a cash crop, and produces organic fertilizer and manure for sale. The bishop has also started a tree nursery in response to "Laudato Si," and has plans for growing turmeric as another cash crop and has dairy and beef cows.
Another highlight of the trip was a lizard friend who freaked me out when I heard a scurry and splash in the bathroom as she lept into the toilet and disappeared down the tube. She reappeared the next day sleeping in the toilet bowl, and that evening crawled in the window and scrambled yo the curtain. She was an ng'az. I just got around to googling what an ng'az is. A monitor lizard! Albeit a very young one I am grateful that they live by the lake and not in the mountains.
