The Tale of the Night That Changed My Peace Corps Service

Scene opens on me standing dejectedly in a downpour in Mzuzu (about two months ago), trying to hitch a ride to Mpamba. Loaded down with katundu (luggage), I am desperate to get home to my warm dry bed with my dog, who has been missing me for over a week. I’m not feeling so hot, scratch that, I am feeling hot, which is precisely the problem. I just wanna go home. Time’s getting tight, the Mpamba matola up to Chikwina leaves in 45 minutes. If I miss it I’ll have to wait another 24-hours to get home, missing yet another day of school and draining my increasingly thinning wallet. Thankfully, a 5-ton lorry pulls up and hauls me into the truck bed, katundu and all. As we speed recklessly around the switchbacks the rain picks up and everyone crammed in the back huddles together and throws a tarp over our heads, so we don’t drown, duh. The cardboard box carrying the contents of my parents’ most recent carepackage has, by this time, disintegrated and the dye on the soaked pretzel M&Ms is leaking out and tye-dying the muddy truck bed. I’m praying we’ll get there soon and that the crazy drunk guy next to me will soon run out of steam and stop trying to engage me in broken English conversation already. I’m not in the mood.

Finally, we reach Mpamba and I am unceremoniously cast from the truck. Thankfully, the matola hasn’t left yet…wait a minute, is it stuck in the mud?! Where’s the driver?! Where’s the right rear tire?!?! Dear god, please don’t tell me it’ll be impossible to make it up the mountain tonight. The citizens of Chikwina, all waiting for the matola, are huddled under the roofs of tuck shop porches trying to stay clear of the pounding rain. No one knows if the matola will go up, and people are worried that even if it leaves, it won’t be able to make it up in this weather. Half the road is washed out and the truck is no match for the mud, even if hadn’t rained that afternoon at all. My instincts at this point told me to call it quits and get myself to a room in Nkhata Bay or see if my PC buddy Christian is at home and crash with him. Looking back on it all, that’s exactly what I should have done. But oh no, I had to get home…

The driver eventually shows up and reattaches the right rear tire as the rain finally lets up. Things are looking good and 20+ of us pile into the back of the beat up Toyota. Among the passengers are a handful of drunk men, another handful of not-as-drunk men, the Reverend who lives in Jumbo, two babies with their moms, some elderly women, my counterpart, Anna, the driver, his conductors, and myself. We set off with smiles on our faces and hope in our hearts.

We make it about 4 km before the men have to get out to push and pull the truck up a muddy hill. Another half km goes by before they have to repeat the process. This goes on for about 2 hours, every km or so they deplane to bail out the truck. Anna keeps reassuring me that at some point, we will make it home. She, of course, is wearing a motorcycle helmet for safety as the truck slips from one side of the road to the other. It’s about 7pm when we’ve still gotten nowhere and find ourselves well stuck in a mud pit, which we have made worse by trying to back out of. Some guys borrow a hoe and dig the tire out. We reload, travel about 5 meters and immediately get stuck again. This is getting ridiculous, but we’ve gone far enough that walking back to Mpamba would be just as foolish as walking up to Chikwina. The men are able to free the truck, but at the expense of something important in the engine and blah blah, whatever it’s a breakdown. Its 8pm, raining, cold, muddy, and we’re stuck there on the side of the road for the night. Wait, what?!?! I don’t think so! No way am I staying out here tonight with crazy people and drunk men and mud and rain.

Anna comes up to me and says, “ready to go walk up?” I laugh, thinking she’s joking. We’re about 10km down the mountain from Chikwina, and it’s the middle of the night with a storm coming in… Turns out she wasn’t joking.

A small group of us who refused to subject ourselves to unnecessary misery all night chose the lesser of two evils and began our ascent. The Reverend, a lovable curmudgeon, grumbled the whole way as the moms and babies shared the single umbrella. Some of the not-so-drunk men helped me with my katundu, and Anna wore her motorcycle helmet. I didn’t talk much. Too much effort and I was back in my “I’m not in the mood” mood. Along the way we lost some of our companions to exhaustion, as they left the road and banged on friends’ doors to crash there for the night. Two to three hours later, drenched, muddy, exhausted, wanting to f’ing die, I unlock my front door.

I have this ritual whenever I come home from a long trip. I’ll open the door, throw my stuff into the house, call for Doug, and flip the light switch. Nothing ever happens when I flip the switch. I do it as just kind of a sarcastic reminder to myself that the highly corrupt and useless government electric company, ESCOM, has not yet come to hook up my half of the neighborhood, which has been waiting for electricity for three years now. I do it to confirm that while I was away, they have not come to finish the job, despite my efforts of pestering them weekly, via phone calls and office visits, reminding them that we are still out here in the bush waiting for their attention. I don’t really care about electricity. In fact, I prefer living without it. I enjoy ending the day when the sun goes down and marking the beginning of the night by lighting a candle. Cooking takes a lot of effort and I have to really think about what I want to eat and if I’m really hungry enough to start a fire. I’ve deserved my meal by the end of the whole process. Charging my phone and computer is a hassle, but you win some you lose some. Really, I pester the ESCOM office because I know that if I don’t do it, they will never ever come out here. Never. And whoever lives here after me (hopefully a qualified health professional who can really contribute to the health of my village) will never get the benefits of electricity and will, most likely, ask to be transferred as soon as they move out here. And so, I have carefully constructed a relationship with the ESCOM director of this region, in which I barge into his office, inform him that he’s failing Malawi and is a disgrace to his profession, and he agrees with me and offers me a ride in his company car to wherever I need to go in Mzuzu. It’s actually a solid friendship. But I really never expected anything to come of it, at least not so soon.

So, after two+ hours of hiking up that damn mountain in the mud and rain in the middle of the night with a thousand pounds of katundu, I unlock my front door, throw my stuff into my house, call my dog, and flip the light switch, expecting the usual nothing to happen. But not this time. I honestly thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I must be going crazy after that whole insane travel ordeal. Somehow, my living room was bathed in artificial florescent light. I unflipped the light switch in my surprise. On cue, my living room erased itself into blackness. No way! No f’ing way!!!

Immediately, my neighbors, the Nurse in the house to the left of mine and Chitani the Hospital Attendant in the house to the right of mine come rushing over. Mind you, its 11pm, at this point, it was like they were waiting up for me to come home. They were like a pair of kids on Christmas morning who just found the half-eaten cookies left out overnight, proof that Santa had been in the house. They both rushed excitedly to inform me that I had electricity. I know! I can tell! They were way more excited than me, but that’s as it should be. Who am I to get excited about electricity when I’ll go home in a year where power cuts are unheard of and most people don’t know how to make cooking fires? It’s a big deal to them. Electricity at my house means that my outside security lights will light up Chitani’s front yard, the Nurse might get a health professional to help her at the Health Center and fewer people will come to her house asking to charge phones for free. I, however, actually felt a sort of loss. I will miss the candles and the burning charcoal and the cooking effort…a little. Some part of my Peace Corps experience ended that night, or at least changed drastically, it’s a turning point that deserves to be marked.

But, on that otherwise miserable night I heated bath water on my hot plate and made soup for my tired body and soul, thankfully all in under 20 minutes. I fell asleep in my nice warm bed with my dog at my feet. That night also happened to be the night I realized mefloquin was legitimately making me strange. The next morning I made a call into the office and switched over to malerone. And in the end, looking back on the last month or two, that was what really changed my service, not the electricity.