The rainy season seems a long way off

It’s Tuesday evening and I’m hiding from the heat sitting directly under the slightly misshapen and inefficient ceiling fan. It begins to cast shadows as it goes round now, reminding me the mosquitoes are on their way; in just 30 minutes the light will have gone. It’s time to start shutting the windows, bolting the white burglar gates on the doors and spraying Peaceful Sleep on my seemingly highly edible feet and hands. It’s never quiet at night. Sometimes you can hear the hyenas, sometimes just the stray dogs of Area 15, the insects, and the buzzing mosquitoes which seem to be irritatingly gifted at getting inside mosquito nets. They form the company when it’s too hot to sleep and too hot to get up and investigate the ice situation. By the morning the first sound is of Dave, either sweeping our drive, piling up dust and earth which never seems to go anywhere, or the swishing of his panga knife from side to side cutting the grass or hacking down more bits from the mango tree. At just past 6am, Dave’s wife walks down the drive balancing something on her head. Half an hour later the two oldest girls start the walk to school, dressed in their bright blue uniform, carrying their shoes. Just as I leave, at 6.45am, Dave is often leaving too, this time to walk Susie, the youngest child, to school. She only started school this month, and every weekend can now be seen having her hair carefully braided in different styles while sitting on an upturned plastic bin under the papaya trees in the back.

Sitting in Jo’burg airport waiting for the connecting flight to Lilongwe at the beginning of September I wasn’t entirely sure I’d made a good decision to come back here for another year. Arriving at a very hot and dusty Lilongwe airport 3 hours later I was just as unsure. Francis’s eagerness at running inappropriately into the customs bit (just as my case was being searched and my mother’s fruitcake and some vacuum packed cheddar questioned) to grab my case and drag it to the WFP car lead to sleep-deprived uncertainty. His ‘welcome home’ just didn’t sit quite right; home is a deceptive term. It was bye-bye August life and hello Malawi life, with remarkably little being part of both.

The first 7 days of being back I ached with missing, desperately tried to retain my August life, and questioned everything. I wondered when I would wake up and not miss. Then it all stopped. The need for home-contact stopped, the missing stopped, and being here took over: the joys of 25p avocados, fresh peppers and tomatoes from our garden, the sheer cheeriness of people, the lack of complaining, the excitement rendered by an international newspaper, and just the happiness of being in the sunshine, afternoons spent entirely experimenting with the new kitchen blender and a pile of fruit, impromptu aid worker parties every week with old disco music, being barefoot, the insane driving, the strange white girl once again, and Dave’s enormous grin when I walk in the gate of our compound after work every evening.

If I stand up at my desk I look out on the whole of the city centre, the new bit of Lilongwe built when the old dictator decided that the capital should move from Zomba to here in the 1970s. Part of the joy of being in the tallest building in Lilongwe – a massive 9 floors of non-lift functioning, open stairwell danger – is the view. From the balcony of the Nutrition and HIV room I can stand, apple-eating, and watch the dust rise and fall over the peaceful town, the village of Lilongwe as it’s called. During rainy season we estimate when the clouds will release their rain as they approach, and during marches and demonstrations we can watch from above as crowds sing and celebrate, or promote the latest cause, weaving their way between buildings which shape Malawi. I can’t see the Old Town from here, a vast expanse of dry bush gets in the way through which Kenyetta Drive links the two towns. All I can see beyond Stambic Bank and the UNICEF building is bush; dry, dusty, browning. Below me is Mugabe Crescent. How comforting that Malawi and Zimbabwe are so close that the new road from Blantyre to Mulanje has recently been named or renamed the Robert Mugabe highway. Renaming is common place. Only last week Chilambula Road, off which is Area 15, became Paul Kagame road in honour of the President of Rwanda’s visit. I’m utterly confident that in a month or so the new sign will go down and the road will go back to being Chilambula until the next President comes on a visit. On the crescent below me is a man selling bananas; not the bananas of the UK with their long, yellow, plasticine-perfect sheen, but small, mottled, squashy bananas, which when unpeeled are perfect yellow without a bruise in sight. Under the trees next to him is a Celtel lady, selling phone credit to Celtel users – Malawi’s premier phone network, and also the one which stopped functioning for a month last year when something caught light in the factory and the replacement had to come from South Africa. Also under the trees is a man sitting next to a phone, a rubber-sign maker, and a Nation seller – the newspaper of choice. Occasionally there is a woman who lies in the rubble of a semi-built wall. She is always naked from the waist up, and just lies on the dusty bricks, silent. At the end of the crescent is the PTC – the Peoples Trading Centre – a shop of ultimate Malawian-ness. The same albino sits under an umbrella at the entrance with his hands out. He is an old pro, unlike the little children who run around, dancing in front of your feet, trying to extract money.

Last week dark, heavy clouds approached the building. Lights were being turned on mid-afternoon – an unheard of extravagance. My colleague Inge came in to announce rain. Impossible I thought, this being September. We turned to Osborne, seeking the Malawian viewpoint. ‘No rain’ he said with absolutely conviction, ‘there will be no rain.’ And there wasn’t. Apart from the fake mango-rains of November, the proper rains won’t come till December, suppressing the dust, turning the country green, energetic and puddle-ridden.

I feel a bit like a sorcerer at work at the moment, stretching out my hands moving supplementary feeding sites into alignment over the country. Phase one was completed just before I left (the phasing out of non-Community Therapeutic Care – CTC - sites), and the careful, accurate work of scale-up is now beginning. Scale up in three districts occurs in November. Having picked these three districts for scale-up before the others because I have utmost confidence in their district health office, I got a little nervous a week ago, thinking that maybe I was fooling myself that a scale-up could be carried out smoothly. Down in Nsanje the health centres which will be having supplementary feeding now on a permanent basis have all been tried and test. No worries there then. In Thyolo there is very good NGO support of nutrition activities, and the scale-up only involves 5 centres, so no major concerns there either. But Mzimba, oh dear, what was I thinking? Being sweet talked by the CTC coordinator for the district, and falling for it, now what was going on in my mind? Anyway, instead of the original 5 centres for scale-up, perfectly manageable, and easily oversee-able by me and the district based WFP Food Aid Monitor (FAM), there are now 24 sites. Mzimba is an enormous district, the largest in Malawi, and if not for a difficult chief would be split in two. The district has already put a request into UNICEF for training in supplementary feeding to occur at the end of October. Roger, my ally, the Norwegian nutritionist at UNICEF, let me insert lots of things into the training. Anyway, my concerns over the new CTC sites in Mzimba will be leading to a little visit up there next week. It’s not actually a little visit. The distances are such that it’s going to take at least 3 days to get round every centre, vet them, chat to them, check their food storage capacity and generally be as anal as I can about health centre hygiene.

It’s easy to slip back into Lilongwe-living. I sometimes think of the big glass building in Victoria where I am to start work in September 2008 and imagine that I’ll be dreaming of the sunshine, the big blue open skies with the cartoon clouds, the space of Malawi, the ease, and regret not savouring every moment – because I certainly don’t. My friends who left in September and aren’t returning write wistful emails about the lack of sunshine and the grumpy people in the UK. They complain that the tv is always on, everyone wears black, and no one smiles properly. Malawi is not a paradise land, being wracked with poverty, uncertainly, basic lacks of health and education facilities and unpredictable weather which can launch the entire country into an emergency, yet it’s gentle, forgiving, beautiful.

Some major decisions have been taken this month, not least which swimming pool to frequent for the next year. Last year in a desperate attempt to find anything vaguely familiar Anna and I signed up to the British High Commission and its clean, non-pestering, carrot-cake offering swimming pool. This year I am branching out and abandoning my roots. The BHC pool is a twenty five minute bike ride on a Sunday morning, and off-limits on a Friday afternoon – our half day. A mere 10 minutes away is the Portuguese pool, three times the size, not quite as clean, with tiles coming away from the walls and a not-quite-right smell, complete with overly attentive Mozambiquan staff. But hey, it’s ten minutes, which in this heat is about all I can take on a bike before I melt and turn into a squashed tomatoe look-a-like. Plus, it’s rather conveniently located just past Foodzone, the Indian supermarket open on Sundays, and – at the moment – selling coke light and nutella. So, Sundays have taken on a good look: an early morning swim and then studying for the rest of the day, trying to focus on health economics and epidemiology and not thinking about the exams at the British Council in June.

It’s a nice sort of life.