In the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy, I've been rereading and meditating on the flood in Genesis. The Bible that I have with me is a Knox translation. I like Ronald Knox as an author, and his rather different translation (which is not my favorite) frequently forces me to turn back to the Greek or Vulgate as I wonder, "why did he put it that way?" It shakes up my reading of passages that have otherwise become too familiar. In reading of the destruction of the flood, I could picture the villages that have "vanished from the earth," washed away and totally lost. Most houses here in Malawi are mud brick, either baked or simply sun dried. Such construction is beautifully natural, but after a few years crumbles in the face of the annual heavy rains, not to mention an abnormal cyclone.
At the same time that I saw videos of churning mud and houses collapasing on families, I was reading about the water cycle and listening to videos by Alan Savory.
While, I do not think that God visited Cyclone Freddy on the people of Malawi to punish them for some egregious sin, sometimes our actions and interactions with nature do make natural disasters worse than they would otherwise have been.
For instance, there is a "fluke" called schistosoma that is part of the life cycle of a snail in Lake Malawi. It is one if God's creatures, and I'm sure has a valuable role to play, part of which is serving as food for the famous cyclids (i.e. a type of fish) of the Lake. Well, there's been over fishing. The cyclid population decreased, and the schistosoma population rose, and beginning in the 90's the shallow waters along the lake became places where those delightful flukes burrowed into human skin and caused schistosomiasis/bilharzia, a debilitation condition that afflicts a large percentage of the population around the lake. (I learned this from a University of Pennsylvania article as I was researching to see if I could swim safely anywhere at the lake).
Back to the floods. There is massive deforestation, over grazing, and desertification in Malawi. This does not allow water to sink in and be absorbed as it is meant to. Instead it rushes off with the top soil. Positively, there does seem to be a real effort on the part of the Malawian government to remedy these issues. Malawi is largely an agricultural country, and hopeful articles like these appear with some regularity in the paper.
I was also delighted to see this shirt on a student. Her mom works for the forestry department.
Less positively, there is a huge reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. There is also an effort to form more mega farms.
While these government run mega farms may positively bolster the national economy, I do not see them benefiting the people of Malawi. The newly established mega farms along Lake Malawi also have me concerned about the consequences of the runoff (full of pesticides, here called medicine!, and fertilizers) into the Lake where rare tropical fish live and people bath, wash clothes, and get drinking water.
The simultaneous push for regeneration and reforestation along with the mega farms and chemicals is just another instance of the contradictions that are Malawi.
