Farm Life - A Picture Story

I spent the last week on an animal farm here in Malawi and it was truly fascinating – an awesome experience. I learned a lot about the culture of the 80-90 % of Malawians who live on a farm, and I think that the experience was much more intense than if I traveled for this time instead. I will tell some of the stories through the pictures.

This is part of the group with which I was staying. The three guys on the left are the sheppards, then it's the leader of the far and father of the two girls, and the old man is the guard.

This is the family.

This guy is a neighbour named Ernest. He spoke English quite well, so he became my personal translator and explainer. He was the one I hung out the most with.

This one is the owner of the farm, Mr. Masina.

Driving the Cattle

The first two days I accompanied the sheppards and drove the cettle. They had over 30 cows and many sheep as well as goats. The job was to walk with them to a place where they could freely eat grass. So all we had to do was to walk somewhere for about 9 km, take a break there and then walk back. Sounds easy enough but underneath the sun in the burning heat it's actually quite a challange and it takes a lot of energy! I was drinking 5-6 l of water every day and it still wasn't enough.

The way the people of the village greeted me was really funny sometimes. They couldn't believe that a Mzungu was driving the cattle. They were laughing sometimes and making wome okes with me. And everybody wanted to talk to me. All the kids always asked "Bo?" the Malawian way of asking the French word "bon", so whether I was ok. There were some kids singing a song in Chichewa going "Good morning Mzungu, good morning". The village hospitality and friendlyness, together with the huge interest for me (just for being white) was very strange, but in an interesting and good way.

Climbing for mangoes.

Food

In the evening of the second day the boss of the farm, Mr. Masina, came and his son (of whom I am the teacher) asked me if I could eat some pig if they killed one. I said they didn't have to kill a pig just because I was there and he answered that everybody will profit from it. I said that I could eat some, so we killed the pig.

As I mentioned before, Malawi is a great place to become vegetarian. I decided to check more where the meat is from from now on, so that I am sure it had a happy life and all the standards were met.

At first they burned the surface of the pig to get rid of all the hair.

The good thing was that really all the parts of the pig were used. Even the blood was caught with a bucket when they cut its throat. The blood together with the guts were leter cooked. I think that this was the reason I had to throw up the next morning and felt sick all day, with diarrhoea and a head-ache.

Otherwise the food was usually quite good. I tried to cook Nsima a couple of times, but needed quite a bit of assistance at first. Water & maize flower sounds easy enough, but it does require some skill and know-how. The relish (which is what they call any side to the Nsima), are the leafs from the small tree in the following picture. It tastes a almost like spinach. Nsima was what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

Here the woman was grinding ground nuts for another meal with the small fishes (osupika). The boss of the farm gave them a big bag of those small fishes whenI arrived, so we ate a lot of them (almost too much).

The cooking place.

Baking Bread

We baked some bread using this bread flower, yeast, salt, and water. The small baby in the background started crying every time it saw me...

We baked the bread for a small tea house that they had in the market.

A couple hours later...

This was the oven.

The next day we visited their tea house to drink a tea. In Malawi, tea always means that you will eat something as well, usually just a piece of bread. There are many tea houses and they usually just sell tea and bread. Malawians like their teas quite sweet. Ernest looked at me funnyly when I only put one big spoon of sugar in it. "Only one?" he said, "no that's not enough". Usually they put at least 4 of those big (!) spoons of sugar in it.

Collecting Honey

Ernest kept some bees, so one night we went to collect some honey. First he had to chase the bees away with fire.

We just took bites of this - it was very good...

One of the bees stung me, you can guess in which finger...

Building My Own Chair

I'm getting a private lesson at chair making. This guy - one of the neighbours - just shouted we should come and learn how to make chairs. I thought why not? So we sat down and he instructed me.

Later some other neighbours joined just to chat. It was really interesting to chat with them. We talked about a big variety of things. One guy asked me how much I paid to go back to Europe over Christmas. When I told them they couldn't believe ait and said I shouldn't spend that money. It was a capital to start a whole business. Later they wanted to know if I was ever on the moon. At first I wasn't sure what they meant, but yeah, they were seriously asking if I had ever been physically on the moon. Apparently they heard that people were now going to the moon. I told them that only about 5 people in the world had ever been to the moon and that that was a long time ago (I googled it and it was actually 12, last landing 1972). In the villages it seems to be quite easy to spread rumors and lies.

We also talked about gayness. One of them who was in school (he knew that I was a teacher) asked me which poem I liked the most in the book A New Introduction to English Literature (it is the book which is taught at all the secondary schools in Malawi). I told them which ones I liked and he told me his favourite one was a passage from The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde. I told him that I liked that one too, and asked if he knew that the athor was guy and was killed for it. This got us into an interesting discussion about gays and how to deal with them. Any gay act is illegal in Malawi and they all supported this notion. I told them about my views on the matter and think could at least get them thinking. But they had good arguments too, like the problem with HIV (which is worse with gays) and the need to have extreamaritial sex if you are gay (which again increases the problem of HIV). I told them that that was very bad, but if you lived in a society where being gay is tolerated you could just openly be gay, and didn't need to cover it up with having a wife. However, Ernest thinks that all gays should be killed. What is really nice about Malawi though is that you can talk very openly about anything, and no one ever gets angry or anything like that. I knew about the views about gays and still I could bring it up and we could talk about it on a very objective level.

While the family's baby always cryed whenever it saw me, this one always seeked my proximity. His name was Christian, a really adorable little guy.

Fixing the Thatched Roof

Helping to fix the thatched roof.

The farm from above..

Infrastructure

My home during this week.

I slept on the thin mattress, but my body alread hurt from that. Ernest slept on this mat, the sheppards on the floor...

The toilet. The toilet paper are the leafs of the tree to the left (the younger ones are less likely to break ;) ). You'll get used to it very quickly, but with diarrhea it is more comfortable to spend the time sitting down...

The other toilet.

The Shower

The chairs

Learning to Hunt (Malawian Style)

The main hunt is for birds. Malawians like to lay out traps and then wait nearby until they catch something (almost like fishing). The put this wire on the ground and put some food there. if a bird steps in it its leg will be caught by the wire. They have another method where they put glue near water or on tree branches, and when the bird sits down it can't fly away anymore. The third method (next picture) is the most sophisticated one. Here the neck of the bird will be caught when it tries to eat food within this square, triggering the wire (which is attached to a bent tree branch) to snap.

Random Pics

The grandfather making a hoe.

The dogs liked to lie in the poo.

Carrying water is a distinctly female job in Malawi. A lot of quite hard jobs are jobs for women - chopping fire wood is another example. The usually cute 'fumbling with my phone holding it the wrong way and having no clue how to operate it' was pushing the limit of my neck muscles here, as I still had to carry it for about 200 meters...

A baby pigeon.

Even though I said I didn't want to eat any more meat (because of the pig incident) they killed and prepared this pigeon for me...

The sheppards eating Nsima. As I said, in Malawi one eats with the hands, and they most often share a plate.

The stable for the goats and sheep was about a meter off the ground, so they had space for their shit to fall through the wooden planks.

These guys were building a borehole that will be much closer to the farm.

The dogs tail was cut off, beacuse it had some disease which they didn't know how to treat. Also dogs in Malawi are often quite thin...

There are many big termite hills like this one. Before the house where I was staying it sounded like water was flowing, but it was just termites eating. In Malawi termites are eaten as a relish.