Rastafari

In case I haven't made this clear in the past: one of the odder aspects of life in Malawi, especially in my town of Lilongwe is the presence of a vast number of Bob-Marley-paraphernalia-toting, dreadlock-wearing, perennially-mind-altered Rastafarians. They are all over Malawi, one government official I spoke to believes that the population is coming close to 1% of Malawians. They perform several functions in the Malawian economy (interfacing with the tourist community as sellers of souvenirs and growers/distributers of marijuana are their primary industries), but are also distinctly visible around town due to their appearance and outgoing/occasionally aggressive demeanors. I count a couple of them as my friends. Although to associate with Rastas often certainly gives you a stigma in the community that is not entirely, or sometimes in any way, positive.

Anyways, the other day we were hosting one of our work teams at our house: guys working on an investment project for us, Noah took them out to lunch and when he returned, realized he had locked himself out of the house. I was in the meeting on the other side of town at the time, but after receiving a couple of frantic text messages, I eventually got out of it and heard the news. I called my landlady who told me to go pick up her carpenter and he would fix it.

I drove to a part of town I'd never been to before and he showed up: an extra-crazy looking Rasta, decked out with a leaning tower pile of dreads on his head wrapped in a Jamaican-flag woolen cap. The "tools" he brought with him were in a little purse he carried with him.

I drove this man, whose name incidentally is Ras, to our house where Noah and the group were standing around outside. Unfortunately I missed the next hour of awesomeness as I had to go to a meeting, but got text messages the whole time from Noah about what was going on:

“The alcoholic rasta is on our roof”

“This is the greatest spectacle I’ve ever seen”

“Matthews (our quiet and very creepy gardener) is up there now too”

“The rasta just took his pants off”

"He's hammering on the roof and smoking a cigarette"

"Pants are still off by the way"

"He disappeared into the house"

Apparently, the Rasta couldn’t figure a way to get into the house except through the roof (he was definitely drunk), so he got up there with a hammer and cigarettes and somehow unhinged part of the roof, crawled through some small spaces in the house to open the front door. He then hung around for the rest of the day in the yard, laying around, invited his cousin over to smoke, prayed at 4:20 in the afternoon and was generally weird.

The next day, he showed up again. I called our landlady to ask what was up, and she said he was going to make an extra copy of the house key just in case. He was there the whole day, most of the time just staring at the door and slowly eating peanuts he brought with him. Although at one point, I had to drive into town to do an errand and he asked if he could get a lift, and then just hung out in the car while I was in a meeting.

The last day of Ras completed his spectacle, he arrived again in the morning in the same clothes and smelling like a sniffable pen whose color was "Drunk and High Hobo" and asked if he could take out the lock for the day. This altered our plans a little bit, as someone always had to be at the house. And when I got a basically incomprehensible call from Ras at noon (I had to hand the phone to a stranger for translation), I was starting to get fed up with the antics. It turns out the key copier would not make a copy for this clown of a human without the presence of a more responsible person or a note and ID of the person whom the house.  I wouldn't have trusted him either.

By 5 o'clock Ras replaced the lock and had a copy of the key. After two days, a large amount of beverages and smokables and hours of staring at inert objects, he left.

And I never got a picture,
Fox

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Hey Y'all,
Apologies for the delay, a nice combination of our busiest work to date coupled with a little sickness. Whatever. It rained for the first time in three months the other day. Mind-blowing. In other news, this post is completely devoted to a man who assisted me with work the other day, giving me one of my strangest African work stories.

I went to the Anti Corruption Bureau of Malawi today hoping to gather rather pesky information on the operating budget of a particular government body that I knew must be public information. After a particularly grueling scavenger hunt looking for the information, I happened on the ACB and asked if I could speak to someone. I was immediately guided up through the maze of a building (without windows, just white walls and doors with stickers saying "This is an corruption-free zone," felt like something oddly out of 1984) to meet with an appropriate person. They had me wait in the hall when they couldn't find the right person and that is when I met my contact. He noticed me at the far end of a long, thin, insane-asylum corridor, and came bustling down it. Maybe 5'2, a suit jacket that fell to his knees and glasses like coke cans, he nearly bowled me over trying to shake my hand. He has a slight speech impediment, so to this day I am still not sure if his name is Villary or Hillary. Or maybe something in between like Vihilarny.

He hustled me into an office, with an introduction as Deputy of Investigations, an over-the-top welcome and a health ration of vigorous head nods and promises of aid. I told him the information I was looking for, and he sat back thought for a moment, literally disappearing below his desk in ponderance (New Word). Then he told me we should go, asked if I had a car and we were off.

This was the beginning of a day-long dream. We were simply in search of this budget, but Villary took it upon himself to barge unexpected into any government office we passed, with me as his entourage and demand various information, accuse corruption and watch for the response. First, he found a secretary at the Ministry of Finance, roused her from her seat and pillaged her desk for "articles of suspicion"(again for image sake, keep in mind this man is the size of a 13-year old, dressed like a hobo clown at an old-timey circus and has an unintentionally hilarious speech impediment that turns "Where" into "Vere"). He found nothing, but asked her if she had seen anything, and when she said no, took out a notebook and recorded in capital letters her name and the word "Reinvestigate."

His best impromptu attack though was on an office where I was actually receiving some of the help I needed, and Villary, impatiently twitching around in the corner, took the opportunity to open more drawers. He found a 20 Kwacha note, which is the equivalent of less than ten cents, underneath a calculator and almost lost it. He asked the poor man working there where he got the money, did he have a receipt to justify the calculator, if he had ever committed acts of corruption and so forth. Finally, he took all of my business cards I had with me, promising to give them to the "right people." And handed out all of them to anyone he found "justifiable," secretaries that let him peruse their logs, guards who opened the door for him etc. He kept the last one and said "I will not forget this day of exorcising corruption."

Terribly Nice Guy,
More to come soon,
I Promise,
At the Approval of the Wizengamot,
Steven