Weddings in Malawi

So, sorry I haven't been posting lately.  Every now and then blogging goes to the bottom of the To-Do list and doesn't resurface for a while. 

Anyway, currently I am at Kamuzu Academey in Kasungu district.  It is really quiet here, on account of the fact that school is out. Nice and quiet, and the internet isn't all bogged down so things are moving pretty quickly. 

I have been staying with a volunteer who lives nearby, Alysia, and yesterday we went into Kasungu to go see a wedding.  The man getting married lives in Alysia's village and she was invited to go.  From what I can gather, if you are invited, you invite other people too, so I went along. 

We were dropped off in the wrong spot to we wandered around for a while before we gave up and just went to Kasungu to get to the bank.  At 1pm we headed to the community center for the reception. 

The program said that it started off with "soft" music.  Let me tell you something, Malawians have amazing hearing but they can not play their music loud enough.  They love to have it at ear drum piercing levels, don't know why.  After the music the wedding party danced in followed by the bride and groom.  Any of you remember seeing that viral video taken of a wedding in America where everyone danced down the isle? It was kinds like that, but African.

Then we had about a million "pelekani pelekani".  A pelekani pelekani is basically where everyone gets up, dances around, and throws a ton of money in these buckets for the bride and groom.  In America you get a toaster and 5 crock pots, in Malawi you get buckets of money, literally, buckets.  But these families were a bit more bwana than most people here.  I suspect that a village wedding would not result in so much cash, but the effect is the same, loads of money being thrown at you.  

Alysia and I got up and participated,  I don't know how much kwacha I threw in but each time you get up you walk back to your seat about 20-50 kwacha lighter.

After a little bit you look at the piles of money being counted and a thought crossed my mind, "Is it bad that I want to walk over there and make change?"  Seriously though, we get paid with 500 kwacha bills and those are impossible to use in the village.  Part of me wanted to go over and offer to condense it down for them a bit, that way they have fewer buckets of money to put on their truck, thus lightening the load and saving fuel.  I was being economical.

Speaking of fuel, I know some of you (*cough cough* mom*cough cough*) have been reading about the riots that occured here a week or so ago.  Let me tell you how it played out in Nkhotakota boma.  They closed the People's grocery store.

No, that's all, just closed one store.  Jesi and I ran into the manager at a lodge while we were having a cheeseburger, he had a coke. 

When you hear that something is happening "nation wide" people usually envision mass panic, something absolutely every person is participating in.  When they say "nation wide" in Malawi, they mean it was happening in the three biggest cities, Blayntre, Lilongwe, and Mzuzu, which happen to be located in the South, central, and North parts of the country, and thus it is nation wide. 

So no worries.  There are more demonstrations planned for the 17-18th of August but probably more of the same. 

So to wrap up; weddings=lots of money, and things can get blown out of proportion here too.  I love you all and hope to talk to you soon!

Elephants: An Amazing African Conundrum

How do you hide a dozen elephants?

Simple, put them in a densely vegitated river bottom at 2 am, poof! No more elephants! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After a few days of being informed that the elephants were out and about over the previous night, I informed Benson that, regardless of the time I wanted to know about it the next time it happened! I didn't really realize that what I had been said would be taken quite so literally until just a few nights ago. 

At about 1am on Saturday I was awakened by the neighbor's dog barking, insert ear plugs and continue sleeping.  The next thing I know there are muffled voices coming from outside my house, right next to the window.  Groggily, remove ear plugs;

"Mary! Are you hearing the drums? They are beating them to scare the elephants!"

"Uh...maybe...hang on..."

I look at my watch, 2:30!?!? I only recognize one 2:30 per day and this is not it. There had better be elephants singing and dancing somewhere. I get dressed, which really only consisted of grabbing pants and getting my camera, and head outside.  Benson is there and true to his word, he came to get me for the elephants, so off we go.  

Luckily there is a full moon so we can see pretty well and finally get to the paved road (the M18) and start walking towards the river that drains into Lake Chikukutu not too far away.  Once we get a little closer we realize the elephants are back further and reverse directions looking for a way to cut into the bush on various little paths winding in and out of fields of corn, cassava, rice, bananas, and just plain grass.

Fast forward to about 4am.  The group of elephants has split up, half are going back to the reserve with half still milling around in the river bottom and we have yet to see them.  We hear them quite well.  Out here the only time you hear a tree crashing down is if people are behind it, so knowing that some really massive animals are out there just knocking them over, and at night they look completely black, is more than a cure for any attention defficits one may posess at the moment due to lack of sleep.  You are wide awake!

We are now standing on the edge of a rice field in the river bottom, we have lost all height from the surrounding hills and are at the same level as the elephants.  They are about 200 yards, by my guessing, in the bush and we can hear them happily muching on anything they please.  Every now and then you hear an almost rubbery, squeaky sound, kinda like the sound two pickels make when you rub them together, that is the sound banana trees make when their stalks are ripped in two.  But the elephants move further back. 

We double back up the hill and cut down on to the sandy part of the river bank where we can cross over to the side the elephants are on.  Both us and the elephants are now moving East paralell to the river.  It is 5:30 and the sky is just barely starting to lighten, we come up the sandy bank and into a large open area.  There they are!  Just vaguly you can make out the shapes as your eyes try to focus.  There are about a dozen of them, a small group, 30-40 is more normal. 

Photo op! Kinda. The first picture didn't turn out, no flash and it was too dark.  Okay, I think, one flash photo won't scare them, right? Well......  The camera goes off, and one of the largest of the dark masses turns and faces us, you can make out the big ears fully extended trying to asses us from a distance of maybe 75-100 yards.

Benson: "Oh we should be turning back.  He doesn't like it."

Me: "What, he's coming this way???"

Benson: "We are turning back now!"

So we back off and the elephants melt into the forest.  It was amazing, you have been folowing elephants all night! Walking in their footprints, listening to them execute their complete and total mastery of their environment, as they cut a swath through the forest.  Then to glimpse them for so brief a moment almost isn't fair.

After this, the sun is up and of course we don't see the elephants any more so we turn to go home.  When we do, I realize what a highway we were in. There are tracks and dung everywhere, some tracks from a very young baby.  Also, you realize why exactly they are all over the place.

Down in the river bottem there are no houses due to seasonal flooding, only crops, lots of corn and rice which the elephants have decimated in the course of one night.  As we are walking out of the fields towards the settelments, we pass a farmer on his way to what used to be a corn field.  This field was planted later and well watered and would have acted as a cushion during the hungry season for his family.  It is gone.  As we pass he is speaking to me and Benson translates, "he wants you to, please, kill an elephant."

And what else is there to do.  All the people can do is bang drums to try and scare them off but we all know a full grown African elephant pretty much does what he wants.  So we come to the amazing reality we are faced with.  We are failed wildlife managers, we have failed here.  Everywhere else, every other species of game here is managed, albeit certain tecniques aren't that great, but they have plans. Hippo, crocodile, leopard, lion, all dangerous animals, have different policies.  But elephants, the true King of the Jungle, possibly the most unpredictable animal you can run into out in the bush, is untouched.

There is no mamagment technique, nothing. And not having a plan, or any sort of direction, equals failure in my book.

And there is nothing villagers can do but sit back, bang some drums and watch their livelihood disappear overnight.  It is easy to have an opinion on something, very easy, to throw out advice, condem those who's ideas clash with out own, we hold the noble stance, the high ground, "these people don't realize how important and wonderful the elephants are. How sad."

Believe me, they realize it, at 2:30 am we passed other women who were outside hoping to see the elephants, people were asking me if we really saw them. I was taken out in the African bush by someone who wanted to share these amazing animals with someone who had never seen them in their natural habitat before. They fully understand them and what they are capable of, never think they don't get it, they see it and they are frustrated by it. 

What they are lacking in is solutions, real solutions, to the largest attractive, nusiance of an animal on this planet.  And let me just say that someone had better come up with one fast.  Growing populations of elephants and people will result in only more conflict, and a peaceful resolution is, as far as I can see, nothing but a dream.