The return

During pre-departure training one big tip given to everyone was to go away from their overseas placements for a week or so after about 6 months in order to achieve the feeling of ‘coming home’ when returning. It’s a good trick, and it does work, but right now if one more person comes into the office and gives me a hug with a sad, suitably appropriate look, and a ‘I’m so sorry’ comment, I think I am going to crack. I knew before I left that WFP – the good bits of WFP – really are something else. Never have I worked with people I like more, where really everyone has a good soul. Even the security guard on the fourth floor, who I usually avoid, dealt well with a sarcastic reply to his ‘how was the holiday?’. ‘As well as a funeral could go’ I scowled back, and he seemed genuinely nice about it. Saying that, never before have I worked in an organization where family comes first. I don’t think my September 2008 awaiting job in London would look too kindly on me nipping out for a couple of hours to visit my cousin’s daughter in hospital. But I like it. We still get the job done (on the whole), and when Nell walked into our nutrition office this morning to find Laz, Osborne and me having a good chuckle, Laz beamed at her with a ‘welcome to our office.’ These are the things to treasure, especially when I am experiencing post-funeral blues.

On the plane back I got to thinking about the added value of being here. There’s got to be something right, something other than resume related? When I was in Addis I never really thought about added values, it was just as it was, a life. I remember sitting in City Bakery in Addis with my friend Ute thrashing out these issues: will anyone understand this type of work? why should we expect our friends back home to be interested in the minute details of our daily lives and jobs? is it worth the mental isolation if we think what we’re doing is important? will the transience of relationships which are formed have longer term effects? are we missing out on what I sometimes think of as a ‘normal’ life? In Addis I never considered myself to be treading water or putting my life on hold. I was living there. It was a life. I was happy to just be. But here in Lilongwe it’s different. I don’t know if it’s because of the length of time I’ll be here for, or because it is just such a small place, but the feeling of being on hold, of wanting my London life back keeps creeping up on me. When I went back home last week I thought I’d go mad with all exciting food, and decent newspapers. In reality, I didn’t want any of it. What was more surprising was that I didn’t want to talk about my job. My job and my life here are so intertwined that I don’t differentiate. But at home, on the only one occasions someone asked about the job specifics, I didn’t want to talk about it. On the one hand it would be part reeling off statistics and the logistical problems of getting food to 50,000 malnourished children, dumbing it down a little and not using acronyms. On the other hand I could go down the sob story route, about the late presenting quash cases and the use of Fanta in weaning children. Or again, it could be about the frustrations of trying to get things moving quickly when working for an international organsation, how problems repeat offend, how the sheer brick-wall feeling occurs so often that it wears you down, how the physical exhaustion of spending 9 hours in a car 3 days a week wandering around rural health centres can sometimes lead to tears for absolutely no reason. In Malawi I’ll talk about my job until the cows come home. Even to the taxi driver I’ll be expanding on the 6 food groups and the evils of Fanta. But in the UK, I really don’t think anyone is actually particularly interested after the initial and highly superficial introduction. And really, why should they be?

The ever brilliant Roger McGough has some good things to say on this. I’m not in to quoting poetry, but his entire book ‘Blazing Fruit’ could be inserted about now.

So now I have two lives, and while Malawi rubs me up the wrong way more than I could ever imagine there are many things to value too. Post funeral it feels that while death here is so much more common place than in the UK, it seems to mean so much more. I don’t mean to be derisory, but here there is such a dignity to death. Old members of the family are looked after and treasured, not put in nursing homes or farmed out to other paying establishments. There is something quiet, discreet, and meaningful about the way death is treated. I’m not saying that this isn’t the way in the UK, but it certainly feels different here. Maybe it’s the knowledge that here, with the increased religious conviction, there is a confidence that the dead are passing on to somewhere better. What is more reassuring than that?

So coming back to Malawi is a good thing. Good in that it is my home, for now at least. Good that when the taxi came through the gate of 194, Area 15, Dave beamed and clapped his hands. Good that the dresses I bought for Dave’s girls fit. Good that the house still feels the same. When something so permanent in your life goes you think that everything will change. But it doesn’t, and the daily rigours of distribution plans, endless meetings, field monitoring and random chat take over.