Like a Hurricane

Unlimited electricity. Huge towering buildings. Elaborate dances on 4-lane highways. Trees and roads in close harmony. People wearing whatever they wanted and not whatever they had. Incandescent stores of plastic electronic gadgets. My list could go on but I don't know yet where to put things. The hole in the middle of my chest is equal to the things that people have that don't grapple with necessity. The coming back has been one of the hardest things I've ever done and I haven't finished yet. I left some. Ignorance is bliss. That means something to me now. If I thought my life and mind in Malawi was a whirling storm, I've stumbled into an earthquake. I find it hard to look into the mirror. I find it hard to be around people, not only because they bring up too much to think about but because they remind me of too many things I wish I could forget. That I don't know if anyone cares about. I don't really wish I could forget any of it, but the deep chasms it has left are being filled with things now that don't seem to matter as much. What hurts the most is watching my life that I engulfed myself in slowly waft away like memories. That it seems I could choose to forget it like a middle school dance if I wanted.
I found myself on the porch of my house of the past 2 years unable to talk. Unable to think really. Surrounded by people I know but unable to relate to how I knew them. It's like a light switched was turned off and instead of stumbling in the dark hitting furniture I just stood in place. This place that by all grand standards hasn't changed is an imitation of the ideas of my home that I carried with me.

An idea of Malawi I'm taking with me is a weekend before my last I'm awoken by my housemate in the middle of the night desperately bantering on her phone. I'm told her car has been wrecked by our guard while returning from taking some friends home and seeing as she's on medication it will be me to wrangle in the wreckage. While contemplating the early morning of work I have scheduled, I try and collect something to pull the 'stuck' vehicle out of whatever situation it's fallen into before contacting our neighborhood friend for a favor of a ride. If I had known the night's unfolding events I would have made different arrangements. Driving by the ambassador 'resorts' of Area 10 I see the car half-lodged in the sunken bricked ditch and its two road-side tires pointing to the trees and a crowd of a dozen men standing around the calamity on an otherwise quiet night. It is a sheer miracle that this car didn't end in rolling flips but managed to stick two tires into the foot cavity of the ditch. If it weren't for the mass of men that either stopped or walked from their nearby guard posts to help, the car was never going to free itself from the crevice, and we all put our full might into lifting the car out its frozen mid-flip stage and back onto the road. Thanking everyone for their efforts and seeing the stopped cars off I drifted to bed myself when I'm met with the armed police-guards arguing with our own car-wrecking guard. The sight of guns in Malawi are so few, select to only the military, that having one a mere foot from me as a man calmly and defiantly requests payment escalates everything in my body. The hours spent in this night issuing calls for compassion are met with opportunistic greed as the two machine-gun toting guards and their posse refuse to let us leave; leaning against the dented car claiming their obligation to receive payment for their work, they've no notion of 'do a good turn'. As the hours toll by and I lose my temper repeatedly, I look on at my friend who also has an early work day ahead and begins to fade physically but mentally is ablaze with adrenaline. His girlfriend has to sit in their car for the latter half of the engagement for fear of passing out. No amount of logic or decency or hope will pry these six men in total from their perceived payout and almost helplessly I continue arguing in English to the few that could understand. Finally with the last legs of my sanity their determination begins to fade and a phone call to my housemate who tells them of their fruitless efforts in Chechewa relaxes their hold and they 'allow' us to leave tonight but only if we come back tomorrow with the money. We're off. I'm exhausted.

On the way to the Lake to finish up my work in my last Malawian weekend, the driver absent-mindedly hit a goat. I watched it trot across the road and before I knew it we had spit its lumbering body out the side of the car with the driver indifferent to the minor jolt. He just stared unflinchingly ahead with a look on his face that seemed a resigned sigh of shame. That moment will live with me for the rest of my life. In reflection over what it posits as a contrast to my own culture and it is that Malawians and assumably others in Africa are not divorced from death. Not built up away from the earth and the animals that are no less a part of it. Like the days and the seasons, the lives that grow in this land pass and rather than glossing over this natural process with parking lots of plastic supermarkets, technological innovations and thousands of moving pictures, and most dulling the silence, one is grateful for the day, aware of the efforts necessary to sustain and comforted by the moment. The two differing concepts of time refer to living in the moment, whether your life is busy calculating the future or the past, a work of tabulating perceived expectations or if your life resides in the five senses bombarding you with pleasures and worries enough that there's no need to go look for them elsewhere in time or space. What does your business meeting in 10 minutes compare to beholding a friend amid transit, words and smiles exchanged on top of red sands wriggling with ants and life and beneath umbrella canopies of birds, chirps, petals and seed pods.

Or maybe it's the overabundance of information being fed about a life few may actually realize of wealth and convenience, where one need only focus on accruing success by the approved steps of school, college, work, money. A word-perfect plan if you have the initial capital to invest, if you have the food to sustain long seemingly fruitless days, the ability to spend time on abstract growth rather than tangible sustenance. Another image that stuck with me on my lake ride was that of a dozen men spread out along the center of the highway hand painting the white lines. Men carrying buckets and brushes straddling the middle of the road painting lines with cars whizzing by on both sides. A different vibe rules the day and now I'm stuck trying to squeeze two into one. I used to wear 3 or 4 shirts to school because I couldn't pick one. I like Anthropology because it incorporates every discipline. It's much harder to put this into practice, and every food purchase, every transport decision, every greeting or meeting of eyes, every cloud and every tree... every moment reminds me of the life I was in. I can't compare the two lives that I have. I find it hard to talk about anything that truly impacts both sides. Of course I've managed to get my two-line summary down to the necessary question, "How was it?".

I'm sitting in a minibus on the way to the market contemplating a myriad of things, feeling the side of the minibus flex under my ribs. The rusted trunk held down by a rope and my bag resting unaware in the back. I glimpse at stickers plastered to the inside while I listen to Snoop 'tell it like it is'. Remembering the children of Likoma dance and rap, enraptured by flute and English, the sight of Micah holding my camera and looking at the grass dance in no way he's ever seen before, his eyes watching me sail away on a boat, a shaking grin hanging on his face, the long talks with Kindness in my yard about plants and welding and babies and history, the walk down Zomba st. past guards and children with afternoon mischief on their minds, the dusk fireworks exploding over barren fields and lonely trees...

In the last hours of Malawi it's as if the city had to mark my passage. Cell phone coverage was shut off indefinitely shortly before I needed to talk to people, and as I've grown accustomed to doing I just leaped into rather than feeling out my landing. My housemate's rental car decided it wanted to stop working for 10 minutes after packing up my things and I'm already at the wire so far as time. Get to the airport with my bulging bags and the desk proceeds to tell me I can't bring 2 bags on a plane in South Africa even though I later saw, again, half the people boarding with a couple bags apiece. Then charging me for overweight fees, I have to leave the exhausting line to use an ATM machine that doesn't work because the cellular network is down. Manage to arouse the interest of a bank teller and withdrawal enough money to cover my fees and after waiting again I'm brought to an office on the opposite end to write a receipt for my cash payment, even though they don't accept credit cards. Get back in line to get my ticket printed and thankfully swiftly move through immigration and security before immediately boarding my plane and leaving this beautiful country with the sun shining through puffy clouds and gravity pulling my heart down with it.

My layover in South Africa was but a glimpse of the alarming shift I was embarking on. Back in organized, orderly, thorough, and it's just South Africa. A shock of how exhausting things have been, even the simplest of things. The sheen on everything is addictive, the clear air punctuated by a collage of lights, blinking and moving and scattered in depths. Floor tiles and designed wall colors distracted even a stroll to the bathroom. It's like seeing a contemporary art museum after a month of camping. I was not doing anything like camping but I never forgot that I'm a part of the earth. Because you're in the middle of it, cause you see the lives that rely solely on it, no glitter to blind the seriousness of survival. Now having stumbled into a mirage I'm surrounded by creatures basking in their comforts. Old ladies changing their glowing white socks into the same. Steaming cauldrons of food cooked and waiting before anyone has issued their hunger. People wearing neck pillows in case they may want to lay their head down at a moment's notice. I'm alone. Or maybe I'm just reeling from the selfish desire to have my experience matter, of having those experiences I only glimpsed at mean anything more than something to sigh or laugh at. Just something to pile away in my story pile. If I seem angry in my thoughts they are self-directed, putting my own frailties and faults in relief to the guilt I harbor. This experience was more than a document but a perspective. To borrow from my friend Joe Pug, I went "to test the timber of my heart". I came back not knowing how I fit.

On the flight back to American sentiments, I watched the only thing that seemed appealing on the movie list. Alice in Wonderland. I still don't know if the flight was me tumbling down or crawling out of the rabbit hole. A different place with different rules, different values, different goals, different on so many levels yet undeniably still part of the same. Still familiar but presently foreign. My first two weeks back were a blur. I felt like a child let loose in the city. I walk into the coffee shop where I work after 2 days back and what do you think is hanging up on the wall? A global calender with each month a different city in the WORLD... it's currently a picture of a couple getting married with the tagline below reading, "Lilongwe, Malawi". I felt like I was colliding with everyone I met, with every routine and habit I left.

Even now, months past, I still haven't left Malawi, and a part of me knows I never will. My mind has been stretched and my soul has been tattooed. Watching the 200 hours of footage I've brought back is like flying away to Mzuzu. I escape to Kumbali for afternoon coffee and music before riding with Finn back home. The market din speckled with children in NY shirts, the trees and hills in full 'fall' bloom. I have a fever, and the only cure is Nali. Here is where I conclude but I have no conclusions. Perhaps the ellipsis will do. The unsaid, the unfinished, the expectant, the hesitant, the calm, the careful, that which can only be experienced, that can't be spoken, that won't be left out, that won't fit in, that encapsulates and says nothing, or everything...

(http://vimeo.com/15467043)