School Trip to Cape Maclear

Last weekend there was a school trip to Cape Maclear. Some of the teachers have never been to the nearest sights in their own country, like Cape Maclear. Traveling for touristic reasons in general is not a common practice in Malawi and many don’t understand the benefit of it. Henry says that to Malawians this is “spending money for nothing”. As a result of this only those who live directly at the lake know how to swim. Only one of the teachers here at Zipatso Academy knows how to swim, even though we are located only 30 km from the lakeshore.

The bus ride to get to Cape Maclear was already quite an adventure. We had a bus for 60 people, but we were 90. So some were standing, some were sitting on each others lap and many were sitting on the backrest of the chair, while another person sat on the chair. It was about a three-hour journey. Fortunately we prayed before the ride, and nothing happened to us. There was ony one dangerous situation where the bus took a short cut on a dirt road. It had to cross a very narrow part where on both sides the it went down steeply. All of the students were looking out the window and suddenly the all came jumping to the other side with their face full of fright. I knew that couldn’t be good. Looking out the back window I saw that the road almost collapsed on side, so the bus could have tipped over. The street was ruined after our crossing. I can see now why Malawians are so religious, I myself started praying that we will get there and back safely.

One thing I haven’t talked about yet is trash. In Salima, people basically just throw everything out of the car onto the street or wherever they happen to stand. And still there is not a lot of trash to be found, not because they have cleaners that clean up every night like in Switzerland, but because people in here get it and do something with it. If you throw away something like an empty water bottle, it takes on average about 5-10 seconds until somebody comes and picks it up, to use it for something. So it feels very weird to do, but you can really throw everything on the ground. It is common practice to light fires with plastic, so whenever you need to light a fire you can just look for some plastic, it will be lying around close to you. Kamkwamba says in his book, that “Africans bend what little they have to their will every day. Using creativity they overcome Africa’s challenges. Where the world sees trash, Africa recycles. Where the world sees junk, Africa sees rebirth” (p. 253). His whole story underlines this statement: he used trash from the scrap yard to create a windmill and essentially give his family electricity. However, not in all of Malawi it seems to be a common practice to just throw the trash on the streets. In regions where people are richer and in touristic regions this behavior is more of a problem. At Monkey Bay for instance there is a lot of endeavor to keep it clean (as we could see from papers saying that people should help clean the area on a specific day). When we arrived there our students left everything on the floor. This is how it looked like:

So of course the locals were getting angry, but the students and even our teachers did not understand these people complaining about the trash at all. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. A student translated for me, that they were shouting they will block our bus from leaving if we didn’t pick our stuff up, the students were screaming if they did that they will come out and kick them. As this was happening some students threw more trash out of the window, just to aggravate the locals even more. One of our teachers almost got into a fight with one of the locals. This shows how the culture of just throwing everything away might be difficult to change (and might become a problem once the whole country becomes richer and not as many people use the trash).

We finally got there after a tiresome drive. The students were informed that there wouldn’t be enough beds and that they’ll have to share. Nobody was complaining. The students and the teachers ended up sharing a one-person bed, some were sleeping on the foor. In a small hose like the one in the next picture there were 30 students sleeping. We decided to go into a lodge for 11 $ (including breakfast) instead, also to not take even more space away from them.

We went for food, which is where we met a tour guide who started talking to us. He explained that we could go to an island with him and have food there and so on. We agreed to do it. Then he said we just needed to pay 25 $ in advance for him to buy the fish. We said that we would definitely show up, but didn’t want to pay anything in advance. After all we had just met the guy. He still agreed to go with us the next day. (Later we found that it said in our guide “In Malawi sollte man sich hüten, Vorkasse zu leisten, wenn jemand auf der Strasse Bustickets oder Ausflugstouren wie Bootstrips etc. feilbietet. Man bezahlt immer erst an Ort und Stelle!”). This night we experienced the first African rains. It rained very heavily for hours. The start of the rainy season…

The next day, I got a call by our guide again that he bought the fish but needed money for rice and so on. I refused again and we got a bad feeling about it. But then we asked the owner of our lodge if she knew the guy and she said yes. Finally, everything went great. We got on the boat to Thumbi Island. We ate a great meal, saw some very special animals (some animals in and around lake Malawi are unique, adding to the biodiversity), and some special plants.

Our tour guide and the boat driver.

The fishes here were still alive...

Some of these plants seem to survive against any probablility...

Some wild rangers in the back ground. Officials like these are extremely friendly in Malawi. Normally you would have to pay a fee to visit the park, but because we were here with the school we didn't have to. It has never happened to us that officials have tried to rip us off, on the contrary.

Malawians use these boats which are hollowed trees for fishing.

After a drink and a walk with the students we went to otter point. The water at Cape Maclear is very clear (our tour guide told us that that was why it is called Cape Maclear, but we found in our book that Maclear was an astronomer who lived there…).

We also saw an extremely old Baobab tree, where apparently already Livingstone used to teach his disciples underneath this tree.

Later that night we met a group of medicine students who were working in Zamia, who were our age. They were from Ireland, New Zealand, and Denmark. In Africa there is such a shortage of doctors (especially also in Malawi there is only on doctor to 50’000 inhabitants), that they are already allowed to do things that they wouldn’t be able to do in Europe, so they can get some practice. I went for a drink with them to a weird bar where there were only men hanging in chairs and later to a very western bar.

The next day we drove back again. Because some of the rows got broken on the ride towards Cape Maclear we weren’t allowed to sit on the backrest anymore, which meant there was a lot less space to stand. At some point I just laid down on the floor intertwined with all the feet, one of them was pretty much in my face the whole ride, but fortunately the guys feet were not stinky at all.

This is how fish and other animals are being transported in Malawi. This is our cook Godfrey.

My Volleyball is a big hit here.