So the solution of donor bulldozers had made the problem worse and put many manual laborers out of work.
‘The government had been paying five men to maintain the road. Then they stopped paying them. The road has been deteriorating ever since.’
‘The school in Livingstonia looked in pretty poor shape,’ I said.
‘They need twenty-four teachers to run it. There are only fourteen at the school. The English chap is leaving, so in a month they will only have thirteen teachers for about six hundred students. Teachers’ salaries are so low, you see.’
I said, ‘I’ m wondering why a foreign teacher should go to Livingstonia to teach if Malawians are not willing to make the sacrifice.’
With the sweetest smile she dismissed the question as much too logical.
‘What sort of vehicle do you have at Livingstonia?’ I asked, thinking of the white charity-dispensing Land-Rovers I saw everywhere.
‘An ambulance, but it’s nine years old and it’s off the road at the moment for repairs,’ she said. ‘Rather a sad story, I’m afraid. We were in Lilongwe a month ago buying parts for it, and tools, and a roll of material for school uniforms. We had tied them very securely in the back of a pick-up truck, but just as we got in and started to pull away some boys jumped on the truck and cut the ropes and stole everything.’
There was theft and vandalism everywhere, she said. A boy in Lilongwe had yanked a gold chain from her neck. She had shouted ‘Thief! Thief!’ but men sitting in cars nearby just watched as the boy ran away. The Livingstonia boat was damaged by vandals, and so the two clinics on the lakeshore that could be reached only by water were out of luck.
‘My husband’s very good at fixing things, though.’ When he wasn’t operating on patients, Don was patching boats and repairing motors. And it turned out that he had known those two other do-it-yourselfers, the Roseveares.
We talked about AIDS. Una said, ‘There must be a great deal in the country because we’re seeing many cases, and we’re in a very rural area.’ Hospital workers themselves were infected, two of the Livingstonia clinical workers were HIV positive.*
‘We have no means to treat AIDS patients — no medicines. They die at home. We had a man who had a severe hernia. We operated on him but he didn’t improve. We tested him. He was positive. He went home and died.’
‘Why do so many people have AIDS here? Is it just because they don’t use condoms?’
‘I asked that question some years ago,’ she said. ‘There has to be blood-to-blood contact, but many Africans have had the other STDs, and it’s those that create the possibility of infection. But we see so many other ailments. Lots of malnourished children. Lots of anemia. It’s the malaria — it destroys the red blood cells.’
We had crossed the forest of the plateau, the dense pinewoods that had been planted fifty or sixty years before as a source of paper pulp. But the scheme hadn’t worked — too costly to transport the logs, too expensive to manage — and so the trees were being cut down for fuel and charcoal. Once through the forest we came to the moorland and the outposts of the plateau, sodden and isolated villages, huts with roofs of black rotted thatch. Then we descended through the rain and mist to flatter land, great stretches with the bouldery hills I had seen in Tanzania and Kenya — Rift Valley features, the remnants of the age of vulcanism. Some egg-shaped boulders were the size of small mountains.
At Mzimba where we stopped to refuel I looked around the market. There was hardly anything to eat for sale, some dirt-caked roots and wilted greens.
‘It’s the time of year,’ Una said. ‘The crops aren’t ready. Last season’s food’s been eaten. And, you know, children in Africa aren’t a priority. We see children in very advanced stages of malnutrition — bellies distended, skin peeling off. Some of the children are dead by the time they get to us.’
Since this mission nurse of long experience was such a fund of information, I asked her about simple hygiene. Why were buses and matatus and enclosed places so much smellier than they had seemed long ago? Was I more fastidious now as an older fussier man? Asking her this, I struck a nerve.
‘Oh, the smell!’ she said. ‘In church when they are all together — the smell in church!’ She shut her eyes and smiled in horror. ‘But you see there is no hot water for washing. And they don’t wash sick people — they think it’s bad for the patient, that washing will make them cold and more ill.’
At Kasungu we stopped for passengers and I got out to stretch my legs. The rain was coming down so hard I had to shelter inside the depot, where I complained about the rain.
‘That is because you are a European,’ said an African in the garage where I was sheltering, looking out at the downpour. ‘I am an African. We like rain. We don’t like the sun as Europeans do. Europeans lie down in the sun almost naked. Africans — do you ever see them do that? Eh! No! The sun makes us hot. But the rain is good. It gives us a good temperature. It makes the crops grow. Unfortunately now we have floods and the maize cobs are rotting in the fields.’
This seemed to me a pretty fair assessment of cultural difference.
Back on the bus I said to Una, ‘It’s such an uphill battle. Do you ever ask yourself, “What’s the point?” ’
‘We do what we can,’ she said. And you know that Livingstonia is very beautiful. The lake is lovely. The people have good hearts.’
‘But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’
This was too broad a subject. She said with what seemed like hesitation but something that was actually a statement of fortitude, ‘It’s — just — light a little candle.’
We passed grass huts, smallholdings of tobacco, some of them being harvested, soggy fields. Not much traffic, though many ragged people marching down the road.
‘My husband is sixty-four. He’s going to retire sometime soon. The government has no plan to replace him. They probably won’t send anyone.’ She looked grim, saying this. ‘If we’re not here, there’ll be no one
‘What’ll happen then?’
‘They’ll die,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll just die.’
We were in open country, nothing in the distance but bush, and clouds pressing on the horizon, everything green. I had been nagging about the problems, but Una the optimist had reminded me that Livingstonia was lovely; and this sloping bush was lovely, too — empty Africa, green from the long rains.
But she was pondering her absence, because after a lengthy pause she spoke again, ‘That’s what happened before. They just died.’
She went back to watching the road ahead, for we had entered the outer villages of Lilongwe district, the tumbled huts, some mud-walled, others just shacks. I admired this woman, for her humility especially. One of her greatest virtues was that she was unaware of how virtuous she was. She had not uttered a single word of sanctimony. She had no idea that I was a writer. Her sympathy was tempered by realism, yet she had not complained of her fate. No Malawian nurse or doctor would have gone near this public bus, nor taken the three-day road trip from Livingstonia to Lilongwe.
Medical and teaching skills were not lacking in Africa, even in distressed countries like Malawi. But the will to use them was often non-existent. The question was, should outsiders go on doing jobs and taking risks that Africans refused?