Landscape

Landscape is a local village located a half a mile down the main road. I mosey down the back path instead, through newly cut maize fields scattered weedy with old stalk and cob, skirting women with massive rolls of straw or else twenty ft. long cane bundles balanced perfectly on their head. The space is open; the sky sweeping honest blue toward Landcape which looms huddled in brown dust in the distance. I enter through a random backyard, rounding corners to the main market center. Most mud-bricked houses have tin roofs and are fenced with bamboo mats or else chitenge cloths, but you can peep gatherings of women and children (or else hear them hollering at you), cook smoke rising, a group of men playing Boa (much like the game Mancala), a drunkard, a Muslim, all the while sidestepping scraggly chickens and uneven ground. I am of course followed by a group of children that thickens the farther I endeavor, as well as a man with a marriage proposal. I’m here to buy candles and cookies. Row-housed vendor stalls measure approximately 8x10 ft. with their teller window guarded with chain link fence. All are typically selling: laundry soap, toothpaste, white bread (labeled Brown… bah!), airtime (strips of 20, all worth 10cents of cellphone time… bah!), pencils, groundnuts, ect. Adjacent are tables selling tomatoes, dirty bananas, sometimes tangerines, small bags of charcoal, eggs that will turn grey when scrambled, and bundles of three piece kindling. There are twenty chiefs in Landscape. There is a water board that measures and charges women by the bucket load. Small gardens are little to nonexistent, and while permaculture is a striving effort here at the center, it is a hard sell to a place where water is limited and the ground is as hard-packed as the people’s resilience.

Most of the Kusamala staff lives in Landscape. So too does the temporarily appointed night-guard Daniel, who was recently caught red-handed rifling through a room, flashlight in hand. He hastily fled into the night with alcohol breath, yet strangely, we found our dirty dishes stolen, one of the couch cushions flung into the path, and Biswick’s pants strewn on the chicken fence. The police were called… yet here in Malawi if you call the police you better be willing to pick them up, or else call a cab!... not kidding. Daniel blamed the children from Landscape. I would probably blame the booze. After being hauled to the police station, I too was summoned to reclaim what they thought was our dishes. The whole police station is probably no larger than our common room. I was ushered into a pantry of a backroom where I sat sandwiched between our large Community Outreach Manager, Eston, and the culprit, Daniel. Three women sat in front yelling Chichewa at us. I sat quiet and thought about the gasoline tank squished under the desk, the plaid suitcase stuffed hastily into the corner, the mattress I was leaning against, and the cellphone that kept blaring ‘Alingo’ by the popular group P Squared. The dishes were not ours, but Daniel will stay in jail until his court date. For a culture where stealing is quite frowned upon, it is odd how often we are missing cassava and groundnuts from our staple-field. Blame though, seems as fruitless as our avocado tree dwarfed by the three bananas alongside; as blotched as the papayas that have recently shown signs of the 'black spot' virus. Circumstance and nature can be cruel, yet can also flourish as freely as our passion fruits whose veins reach high and climb. Passing through Landscape on my way home I spotted five tomato plants nestled against one of the shanty houses. I pondered the kind of spirit it takes to tend, not beat against, that hard-pack resilient earth, to grow and flourish against the odds.