Martyrs’ Day long weekend, we drove up to Nkhata Bay to the widest part of Lake Malawi and stayed at Mayoka Village. You should definitely stay there if you find your way to that part of the world. They have sweet little cabinas, a bar and clean toilets all connected by a maze of stone stairways planted on a hill on the water. Good food, good music, free boating and snorkelling for $10 a night. Late at night we would stumble through the bush to some local village bars. Authentic village dance clubs with enclosed dirt dance floors and liquor that comes out in the plastic packets that shampoo samples come in. My fav. My Malawian friends say that until they were 12-13 years old they would have to stay inside and mourn the whole Martyrs’ Day weekend to respect those who died during the independence struggle. Back then, if you were caught dancing or playing soccer you would go to jail for an entire year. Luckily times have changed.
As I have mentioned a million times before there is a petrol crisis in Malawi. Often people are forced to find connections on the black market where petrol is often diluted and sold for 2-3 times the regular market price. At 700 kwacha ($4.12) a litre, we barely made it to Nkhata Bay on a tank of gas. By the time we got home we had spent MK 70,000 ($411) for roughly 750km. But people here in Lilongwe were saying that was cheap because it is being sold for KM1000/litre ($5.88) here. Needless to say, we were short on cash on the way back and with an expired registration we were pretty nervous to be ‘fined’. We had every digit crossed, with smiles ear to ear trying to charm police with our limited Chichewa at every check point. Only once we had a talking to for having these huge rubber balls we bought when we were driving through a rubber tree forest. ‘Don’t you know this rubber is stolen?’ Actually, no, we didn’t. We kept asking ‘what we could do?’ and the police would respond ‘it’s up to you....’ Thankfully, he just let us go because we only had about MK200 combined.
I was terrified speeding through the narrow, hilly roads with tall grass curtains on either side that only allowed visibility seconds before you passed a person or animal. Stupidly, I had told our friend driving about the rules of the road in Zambia, where there are not many rules and so few police and police vehicles that any existing laws could not be enforced. Needless to say, there is an enormity of unnecessary loss of life and limb. While I was in Zambia a friend had a car accident and I was shocked to see the left side of his handsome face covered in deep scars from chin to eyebrow. Later, I found out that the damage wasn’t due to the accident itself but afflicted by a mob of people who beat him up after hitting someone with his car. Street justice. We know the person was not immediately killed because people generally torch the car in those instances. This is such a common issue that the Peace Corp policy is to first drive to a police station before offering help to the person you hit, despite the limited number of ambulances, hospitals and doctors in the country. I say I stupidly told my friend, because I feel like he is going to adopt this as his personal policy and I completely disagree.
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