From A to B

Transportation in Malawi is an incredible game of chance. Most buses don’t run on a schedule, but leave whenever they are full. Given that, I almost never rush to catch a bus anymore, because it is so unlikely to matter that it isn’t worth the effort. I will sometimes rush to arrive at a bus depot before 7am, at 12 noon, or before 5pm – but those are mostly arbitrary deadlines I set: I have a vague feeling that buses are more likely to come through at these times, but I haven’t studied bus traffic trends enough to know whether this is actually true or not, so even then my rushing is usually half-hearted on the potential futility. And once I find a bus and sit on it, whether or not it’s moving, at what speed, or by what route is so far outside what I have any control over that I really can’t worry about it. The exception is if I know someone is waiting for me at the end of the trip – and then I feel bad but still know there isn’t anything I can do except apologize repeatedly.

Honestly, my travel stories are pretty minimal compared to others I know, never mind the “friend of a friend’s cousin” versions that float around and morph into folklore. So when

• I sit in a half full bus at the depot for 2 hours because I seem to have picked an unpopular time to travel south
• I need to stick one arm out the window to actually fit in as the fourth passenger in the row that happened to catch all of the people with shoulders and awkward elbows
• My minibus circles Blantyre for 1.5 hours looking for sufficient passengers, fuel, and/or luggage (at various points) to justify a trip down the highway (doubling the duration of the trip)
• We stop a few too many times to arrive home in Ntcheu by my 7pm “curfew.” Missing their 7pm bedtime means my host family apparently goes to sleep worrying that I’ve been in an accident and knock worriedly on my window at 4:30am (when they wake up to start the day) to see if I am indeed alive and home, and then spend two days telling me how worried they were and that I should have come faster while I apologize profusely
• I suddenly have a chicken or someone else’s baby stored on my lap for the trip
• It looks like I’ll be standing up (quite possibly on one leg given the lack of floor space) for the rest of a 3 hour bus ride
• The bus stalls in the middle of nowhere refusing to start again, and the driver and passengers debate whether the engine might have been destroyed by black market fuel contaminated with (diesel, water, cooking oil, parrafin…)
• The sliding side door I’m squished up against slides open while we’re cruising down the road

… I am almost unphased.

There are different words used to describe my reactions (transportation related or otherwise), some of which I like better than others – even keeled, stoic, unflappable, rock, detached… and I’ve been finding myself living up to them even more (than I probably should) in Malawi. It’s partly an attempt to blend in with the others for whom these “hiccups” are so normal that they’re sometimes unrecognizable. And partly putting on a face because I get so tired of the sweeping assumptions about how “hard” life is in Malawi (meaning how “easy” life is everywhere else in the world that isn’t Africa) for azungus and overcompensate by pretending it’s easier than it is. There are all kinds of reasons why these are poor reactions, but I haven’t found the magical 3rd way yet.

Last week I had particularly bad luck with transportation. All of the examples I listed above happened at least once in those seven days. But one leg of a trip from Blantyre to Phalombe stands out in particular. Check back tomorrow and I’ll share the tale.

 

**Also: This post is quite unrelated to work. But I encourage you to read more about what I’m actually doing, and consider making a donation to support my work, at https://perspectives.ewb.ca/kristinanilsson