Moonshine and snow

Last weekend was one of those extraordinary nights, a clear cold winter night where the moon was a three days past “full.” It had snowed a couple days prior and there was still a snow cover on the ground. The moon was close enough to full that there was a significant amount of moonshine. I took a glance out our front windows and did a double take. It was 10 PM at night but for a few seconds it almost seemed as bright as an overcast day. The dull light cast by the almost full moon was reflecting off of the snow seemed to cause the snow to have a dim glow. I stood at the window momentarily entranced by the sight. The call of my pillows and a night’s sleep threw me out of my trance and the spell was broken. But the vision remains. Two ordinary events –– four inches of snow and moonshine combined to create the extraordinary.

copyright 2008 K. Tyler Miller

Moonshine

I love The Moon, yet all to often I fail to notice how extraordinary she can be. She is a regular in our night sky for about 25 days out of a month. The length of time that she is visible, depending on the phase that she is in, and the cloud cover.

When I lived in urban areas with their attendant light pollution, there were times when she was the only object visible in the night sky. Moonshine had little meaning to me for all those years because lights in the urban night sky masked it. I have vivid and fond memories of my first full moon in our then new house in semi–rural western New Jersey. It was probably in early June of 2001, and the sky was clear. Some time after the sun went down, I took a glance out side and was startled to see shadows. It was extraordinary. I went outside and watched my own shadow as I walked around our yard.

This was very, very cool! I was so excited. Like a little kid, I ran inside, grabbed my partner, asking her to come outside and see the moon shadows. I grabbed her hand, dragging her outside to look at the moonshine and the moon shadows.

That was almost seven years ago. I have seen, and am ashamed to say, ignored many subsequent nights where the full moon shines brightly, offering her soft light and shadows.

Sunshine

I was not quite sure what to write about today until I was sitting in my living room with my laptop doing some journaling. Our house is positioned so that we get some nice sunshine coming in our southwestern facing windows, especially in the winter. It was wonderful to see the sun, especially after a couple of grey days this week and some showers to come over the weekend.

So today’s ordinary extraordinary event is the sun, sometimes known as that strange yellow orb.

The ordinary

I wrote the other day about enjoying the ordinary. Ordinary activities have taken on new meaning to me over the last few months since returning from Africa. I met people who have so little and are among the poorest people on the earth, yet they are warm and happy people. So, I came back with new appreciation for what I used to call ordinary things.

And in the ordinary, I have found the extraordinary.

I get up early four days a week to go the local YMCA to work out. Since I get up about 6 AM, this means that it is just before sun up. I drove the two miles to the Y with a clear view to the pre–dawn sky in the east. And I saw Venus and Jupiter within about three or four degrees of each other. A simple thing, this pairing of these two planets was. Their quiet beauty struck me, shining in the pre–dawn sky.

Two planets I have seen many times before on an ordinary morning. But in an extraordinary alignment.

A couple of days later the were 1 degree apart. But I had to imagine the pairing because it is raining.

I'm back

I have to be honest. I have been struggling with resuming writing in this blog for a few weeks ago. I have been sitting here for about 40 minutes trying to figure out how to start writing again. Write a sentence, delete it, write another sentence, and delete it again. I went on like this for a while until I told myself to get a grip and just start writing.

I can only think of seemingly ordinary things to write about, such as the winter solstice. I always like the winter solstice because it is the shortest day of the year. The winter season lay ahead of us, but knowing that shortest day of the year is over always gives me some hope. It does take awhile before the longer days are noticeable. I write this in early February. A couple of weeks ago, I did notice that the days are a little longer. We go out to dinner to celebrate the winter solstice. I realized that this was my second winter solstice. This may have been a unique and perhaps once in a lifetime occurrence because I was in Malawi, south of the equator on June 21, 2007.

On that day, being from the northern hemisphere, I automatically thought that summer had started. Only to realize that, in fact, it was the first day of winter. And being in the tropics, the day was eleven hours long and much warmer than my usual first day of winter.

So in an otherwise ordinary year, I experienced two winter solstices.

Moving on

I have been posting about Malawi and related issues for the better part of a year now. Over the last six months, I have been posting about observations and thoughts taken from the hand written journal that I kept during my trip. Much of the focus of my writing on Malawi over the months since returning from Malawi has been in this blog, and I am at or near the end of what I can write about in this forum. While I have one or two possible writing projects that I will be working on privately and offline, I will be posting here about other things.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure what direction my blogging will take. So, my posts may be more along the lines of “random ramblings about what I am happen to thinking about at the moment.

Added on November 29, 2017 The writing projects on Malawi that I had envisioned when I finished writing about Malawi never materialized. Nonetheless, I am a better person for the two weeks that I spent in Malawi.

Nearing the end of writing about Malawi

I have known for a while that I am nearing the end of my blog entries based on my trip to Malawi last summer. At least this may be the end of this phase of my writing about Malawi. There are a couple of more things that I want to write about. One is my last afternoon in Malawi where we visited a program in Lilongwe, Youthcare Ministries, that has a residential/education program for young teenage boys. Those of you who read my postings from Malawi know that I was somewhat emotionally exhausted by this time of our trip. And I was homesick, counting the hours until I could start my trip home. I felt like I could not absorb anymore. Then we arrived at the Youthcare Ministries residential.

I met the boys in residence, toured the facilities including the residence and the classroom, and talked to the teachers. I was so glad that we visited. In some ways this was a highlight of my trip. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it was because as an urban planner who spent a couple of years working in urban America, I could “understand” what they are trying to do at Youthcare Ministries; to take children off of the “streets” and the associated lifestyles and give them a chance for something better.

I felt the hope because the boys are smart, friendly, and articulate. I can’t imagine what their lives were like before coming to Youthcare, but it was immediately clear to all of us how far these boys had come. So, there really was a feeling of hope. And when, even after six months have passed since my trip ended, I find myself despairing over some of what I saw, felt, and experienced in Malawi, I have only to remember the faces of these boys and the hope embodied in each of these fine young men.

Education in Malawi

One of the things that interested me while I was in Malawi was the difference in the education system as compared with America. Primary school, roughly equivalent to what we call kindergarten through eighth grade in America, is free. I am fairly certain that the government sponsors primary education, During our travels, we saw many school children, many dressed in uniforms, walking to and from school.

A Saturday children’s program we visited on our second full day in Malawi used the grounds of a primary school. The building was small. It appeared that all grades shared one classroom. If memory serves, there were few, if any, of the accoutrements in the school that we are accustomed to in America. Before traveling to Malawi I knew that school supplies that we take for granted here in America –– books, papers, pens and the like –– are often hard to come by. Many of us traveled with pens and pencils to distribute to children. Many Malawian children attend at least some primary school.

The situation is quite different for secondary schools. We were told that for every 10 to 12 primary schools there is one government sponsored secondary school. Entrance is by exam, where the exams are extremely competitive. I could be wrong, but it is my understanding that government–sponsored secondary schools are free.

There are also private secondary schools. While admittance is also exam–driven, I got the impression that the exams for private secondary schools were not as competitive as for the government sponsored secondary schools.

Sad to say, there is a gender disparity in secondary schools. One figure we heard is if 15 girls start secondary school in what they call form 1, only one will graduate.

There are four grades, or “forms” in secondary schools. I got the impression that students enter form 1 around the age of 11 or 12. After form 2, they must pass a test. If they fail, they either repeat the test, or they or out of school. After the graduate form 4, they must pass another test if they want to go to the University. The government pays the university fees for qualifying students. Students typically start university at the age of 16.

Many of the community–based programs that we visited try to include money for a couple of secondary school scholarships in their budgets. These scholarships then go to teenagers in the villages where they work.

People I met, part II

The other day I wrote about some of the people I met in passing while I was in Malawi. There were many people that we met who worked with Malawi-based organizations. In this group I include people that we met with over dinner as well as representatives from the community-based organizations we visited, and a couple of hospitals.

They are all extraordinary people with the same generosity of spirit and warmth that I wrote about elsewhere. They took time out of busy schedules to meet with us and answered our questions. Some of them acted as tour guides, showing us how to get to the remote villages where they worked. I always felt welcomed, never once feeling like we were imposing. Quite the contrary.

I wish that I could find the words to express that spending time with each and everyone of these folk had a profound and lasting impact on me. As the weeks have gone by, I have found myself thinking about each and everyone of them. When I do, I offer a prayer.

People I met

I have been reviewing my blog entries over the last couple of days. I don’t think that I have done justice to all the wonderful people that I had the occasion to spend some time with during my two weeks in Malawi last June. I am not just talking about the staff and volunteers working with the various programs that we visited, all but a couple being funded by the Global Aids Interfaith Alliance (GAIA). There were also people we met along the way: staff in the various hotels and lodges where we stayed, the children and adults we met in the villages we visited, storekeepers, customs officials at the airport in Lilongwe, South African Air employees at the airport, people we met in restaurants, etc. As I write this over four months after I returned home from Malawi, I am certain that there are people that I have left out of this list.

In some cases the people who stand out the most to me, over four months later, are the ones who are nameless, with whom I had the very briefest of encounters.

There was the smiling warm welcome of the customs officials at the airport the day we arrived.

All the children who mugged for our cameras.

The entire congregation at the Our Lady of Fatima Roman Catholic Church in Salima where we worshipped our first Sunday.

The foreign currency exchange teller the one time I exchanged currency at a bank. He had a nice smile.

The two young men at Senga Bay who sold me some beads.

A woman who worked at the Malawi Department of Health who told me where the restroom was. I did not know where to go, so I asked a woman in an office. She was very nice.

A couple of female police officers.

The students at the Lydia Projects secondary school.

One of the managers at the Hotel we stayed in Zomba.

The waiter who brought me some bread to eat during a power failure because I was feeling queasy from taking my malaria pill on an empty stomach.

A woman tending pigs in one of the piggeries we visited.

Some boys learning carpentry.

Our guide for our two-hour trip on the Shire River in Lilondwe.

A child with AIDS sitting in his mothers lap.

A village chief.

A young Malawian man who is a mountain biker.

Our guide at the Mua Mission who told us about tribal customs in Malawi, and how they differed from region to region.

Girls jumping rope.

After clearing customs at the airport in Lilongwe for the first leg of my flight home, Lilongwe to Johannesburg, I found that the rest room in that portion of the airport was closed. The customs official let me back into the main terminal to go to the restroom without having to clear customs a second time.

When people die

I was going through the journal I kept while I was in Malawi looking for my notes on the education system in Malawi, when I ran across something that I have been meaning to write about. That is, what happens to the possessions, including a house, when someone in Malawi dies.

In America, unless there is what is known as a Last Will and Testament providing otherwise, the house, possession, money, etc. will probably go to the spouse and children (or other family members) after the decedents debts are paid. I am being extraordinarily simple minded in that statement because I want to make a comparison to the Malawian way of doing things. We heard a couple of stories of how it works in Malawi. To put it simply, in Malawi the brothers of a man who dies can come and take the dead man’s property, leaving his wife and children with nothing. There was the young man, D, whom we met early in our trip. D had to leave the University in his third year when his father died to help support his family.

Another women we met, C, was finishing her Ph.D. at the time we met her. Her first husband died, and his family came and took everything. C was left with nothing. She worked hard, eventually going to graduate school where she met the man who became her second husband. C told us that there is a new law that says that the wife and children can keep the dead husband’s property.

Fish, part 3

One of the highlights of our trip was our two–hour boat ride on the Shire River. We got a chance to see fisherman first hand. Two or three men or older boys man a small wooden boat. I believe that the boats were similar to what I would call a row boats with one man standing in the stern (back) working the fishing nets. We saw several fishing boats during our two–hour cruise on the river.

We also saw large groups of people at a couple of sites along the river. According to both Luzu and our captain, the people gathered at these sites were wholesalers or distributors. The fishermen sell their catch to these wholesalers or distributors. They in turn, sell the catch to other distributors who then sell the fish to restaurants, grocery stores, or smaller operators who sell at open–air markets. Or they may sell the fish on their own without going through a middleman.

Fish, part 2

On our first full day in Malawi, we went to open a open air market in Malawi. And you guessed, there were lots and lots of fish for sale, sardines and tilapia (or chambo)

mostly. Two things interested us, one was that the fish sellers displayed the fish in very interesting decorative patterns. I’m sorry that I did not take any pictures, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I still have the image of circular patterns of sardines. Real pretty.

More interesting was that the fish on display was not on ice. And there was no refrigeration. We asked our friend at CARD and Luzu about this. Turns out that the sellers and the buyers know just how long fish keeps without ice or refrigeration. Buyers may have coolers and they can purchase ice blocks.

I had chambo, a whole chambo in Zomba. It is quite tasty. By a whole chambo, I mean whole, including the head. I couldn’t deal with the eyes. Someone told me that the eyes are good, but I decided to pass on the eyes.

Fish, part 1

We are big fish eaters, eating fish a couple of times a week. Like many other Americans, I go to the store to by my fish. In some cases, the fish has been prepared in some way, salmon is marinated, crab cakes are made, or fish is breaded. Yes, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I do not marinate nor do I bread my own fish. We spend a little more for the fish we buy, but it is worth it. One of our few luxuries.

Thanks to federal regulations, I know the country of origin of the fish I buy and whether the fish is what they call “wild” or “farm raised.” It always tickles me to buy “wild” swordfish because I do not think that swordfish is raised on fish farms. But the law is the law. We like farm–raised salmon over wild salmon because farm raised salmon are fatter than their wild relatives.

Sometimes I think about where the fish comes from and the loss to fish populations. I know that I should not eat swordfish, because the swordfish population is severely depleted from over fishing. So, I compromise and only buy swordfish once or twice a month.

And we like to go to fish hatcheries. Don’t ask me why. We just do. Deep sea fishing, well let’s just say I had one bad experience on a fishing boat off of the Jersey shore watching people torture this poor blue fish. I prayed that I would not catch any thing, and I did not. And to this day, I rarely eat blue fish.

So, when I travel, I check out the fish. I know that my Lake in Vermont is stocked with trout. The Rivers near me are stocked with trout. I find out where I can buy good fresh fish, and when the fish deliveries come in.

When I traveled to Malawi, one of the first things that I noticed was fish. Fish was sold by in the open–air market in Lilongwe. Stay tuned for more on fish in Malawi, tomorrow.

Goats

I think that I already written about the large number of goats that we saw during our travels in Malawi. If I recall I wrote about the large numbers of goats that we saw on my second or third day in Malawi.

Fairly early during our two-week stay in Malawi, we realized that Malawians rarely used goats for their milk. Given the great poverty and the attendant hunger and malnourishment that goes along with poverty, some of us wondered why goats were not used for milk. I learned from some of my fellow Malawi travelers that goats are high milk producers. When we asked Malawians that we meet about this, many did not know. Some may have offered that some of the goats we saw were wild, but my notes may well be a little fuzzy on this particular point.

Our friends at CARD offered an answer to the question of why goats were not used for milk. The answer is that most families have cultural resistance to this because in their way of thinking, goats are only for meat. At least one of the agricultural programs in Colleges in Malawi are working on a goat dairy program. But this is on a small scale.

I should add that I don’t recall seeing many dairy cows in Malawi.

Food Security in Malawi

On the morning of our last day in Blantyre (June 25), we had our second meeting of our trip with staff members of the Churches Action for Relief and Development (CARD). CARD is affiliated with the Global Aids Interfaith Alliance (GAIA), working in the southern region of Malawi. The staff was a fount of information on a variety of issues relating to life in Malawi. While we were waiting for others to join us, we had a chance to pick the brains of these CARD staff members. I will write about a couple of the issues that we talked about in the next couple of blog entries.

My notes are a little sparse in places, so please bear with me. We were about 10 or 11 days into our trip at this point. At this juncture, I was mentally exhausted and very homesick so I was not journaling with the vigor and intensity that I was earlier in the trip.

The first item in my notes from that day falls under the broad issue of food security.


The context for writing about food security in Malawi is simple. There is not always enough food, especially when there has been a drought as there was a couple of years ago. Or when droughts are not an issue, excessive rains during the November to May rainy season can lead to excessive runoff and even floods.

Included among the discussion points were:

1. Is there enough food to sustain a family through a drought;
2. Nutritional value of the food;
3. Accessibility of the food, who gets the food, in a particular household; and
4. The right of children.

CARD does the following:

1. Responds to emergencies, i.e. something the people were not expecting such as drought, and floods.
2. Works with villagers on ways that their village can work towards being self-sustaining including: goat production, crop production, and water sanitation.

HIV/AIDS is an added pressure in the case when one income earner is lost due to illness or death.

I was interested to find out that something on the order of 40% of (family) harvest loss of is due to post-harvest infestation in the form of mice and insects. Chemicals are utilized, although I suspect that this come at an added cost that might be out of the reach of many families. A number of natural remedies are used. Ground up leaves from a certain trees or ashes are mixed with the maize to ward off weevils. This seems to work. Ashes are also mixed in with the potato crop to prevent weevil infestation.

One model for rodent control that we discussed could come through communal grain banks. Here individuals come together as a group and construct a brick structure – bricks can be made by hand – with rodent guards. The idea is that the individuals in the group will come up with an agreement on storing and then using grains and other groups. I got the impression that this model is not yet widely used, if at all. But it is an interesting one. And if the bricks can be made by hand and then cured by fire – to stand up through the rainy season, I think that this could be a very cost-effective solution for rodent control.

Resuming blogging

If you have been following my blog, then you know that I have not posted anything in over two weeks. I spent some of this time starting to write some private reflections based on my recent trip to Malawi. But the last of those writings were about ten days ago. I have been in a relatively dry period in regards to any writing. I am not here to go into a prolonged analysis of the whys and the wherefores of this dry period. Rather, I am ready to move on and continue with posts to my blog.

I am not exactly sure what I will be writing about here. It may or may not be about Malawi. I think I am at a turning point in my blogging about Malawi. If I am to post on a more regular basis and, at the same time, take time when I am preparing an entry on Malawi, I might want to intersperse my Malawi entries with reflections on other things.

Power Blackouts and Malaria Medication

By our third or fourth day in Malawi, we experienced our first power blackout. This one lasted about one hour. By the end of our first week, we had experienced three more. All around the dinner hour, at least what was our dinner hour. We tended to eat on the late side, sitting down somewhere around 6:30 to 7PM. Eating out in Malawi, often requires a longer wait for food than I am accustomed to in America. Sometimes we would not finish eating until 9:30 or 10PM at night.

Some places had generators, others did not. At the hotel where we stayed in Zomba, they had no generator. Between the power failure that meant that they could not cook, and needing to take my nightly malaria pill with food, I was not a happy camper. I usually had a package of nuts of a power bar in my bag for such a purpose, but had opted to leave all this in my hotel room. Silly me. The one night I really needed the power bar so I could take my malaria pill, I did not have it. I took the malaria pill about an hour or so after the “designated time”, designated because I was under physician’s orders to leave 12 hours between my malaria pill and my thyroid pill.

Some more time passed, and I started to feel nauseous from taking the malaria pill without food. I mentioned this Don, who is a physician, and he helped procure some bread from the kitchen so I could settle my stomach. It worked, and our food came not long after.

It was not until sometime in our second week that I found out the reasons for the power blackouts. That is, I asked Luzu. We were in Malawi during their dry season. Much of Malawi’s power comes from hydroelectric power. The problem is that during the dry season, there often is not enough hydro power to fulfill the demand for electricity. So, they have scheduled power blackouts that are advertised in the paper. The theory is that, assuming you can get a newspaper, you will know when your neighborhood is going to be blacked out and you can plan accordingly. I forgot to ask Luzu, how the word of the planned blackouts gets around to those who do not have newspapers. Perhaps the radio is used, or failing that there is always word of mouth. In any event, I finally had my answer.

Camaraderie in Malawi

There were eleven of us in the transformational journey group that traveled to Malawi. We ranged in age from 22to the mid-60s with eight women and three men. Seven were from the Pasadena/Los Angeles area, of these seven; five are members of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Stephanie who joined us from South Africa grew up in Pasadena. I believe that her parents are good friends of Don and Mary. I am from New Jersey, while Adam and Rachel were most recently living in Tennessee (I think).

I had never met any of these wonderful people in person prior to traveling to Malawi. The one exception was Don Thomas, whom I had corresponded with over e-mail for about one year. Don had mentioned in an e-mail about how those of us traveling to Malawi together would become “life-long friends.” I had no idea how true his words would become.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised by how safe I felt with the other ten people in our Malawi transformational journey group is an understatement. From the get go, it was as if I had known the other nine people in our group for a long time (Jean joined us on our fifth full day in Malawi). The “normal” walls and barriers that Isometimes put up between others and myself were not there. Sometimes it takes a little while before I feel “safe enough” in a new situation to “knock down the barriers that I erect that may prevent people from getting to know me. Not this time, there were no barriers. In fact, on our first plane ride together from Johannesburg to Lilongwe, a couple of us remarked to the other about how safe we felt with each other.

A couple of days after we arrived, we were commenting on how it felt like we had known each other for “a long time.” While all of us were careful to respect each other’s boundaries, I felt a sense of safety, a sense of community. We were on this journey together and we took care of each other. A couple of us felt “sick”, mostly stomach problems, but nothing major. We never got stuck on a poorly maintained, badly rutted dirt road in a remote section of Malawi. If any of things were to happen, we would have taken care of each other.

I have not seen anybody since I got back. I miss everyone. Many are on the west coast. Don and Mary are embarking on a new adventure in New York City for the remainder of the year. I hope to see them before they go back to the west coast. Adam and Rachael are leaving Malawi on September 20th for Europe and the Middle East. I think that Stephanie is back in South Africa. Tim and Jane have family not far from me, I hope to see them when they visit.

I am assured that we will be friends forever. And even if it has been years since we last saw each other, it will be as if it was yesterday.

Tires

On our second full day in Malawi Luzu had to get the spare tire on the van fixed. This was the day we drove from Lilongwe to Senga Bay with two visits in the Salima area. As we approached Salima I recall noticing a group of young men at the side of road repairing bicycle and automobile tires. A tire repair shop without walls, so to speak. Our first stop was in the town center of Salima for the ATM and a grocery store.. When we had finished our errands in town, Luzu announced that he needed to get the spare tire on the van fixed, that it would only take an hour. Luzu dropped us off at our first stop of the day, the Salima Aids Support Orginazation (SAS0) before driving off to get the tire taken care.

Well before we ready to leave SASO, Luzu reappeared with the van. When we were done, those of us who were riding in the van piled in. Don and his wife and his two passengers got into the car and we were off. Luzu stopped at the same “tire repair shop without walls that I had noticed on our approach to Salima, paid the young men, got the spare and reattached the spare to the back of the van,

I did not think about getting the spare tire fixed at the time. After all, no matter where you live keeping your spare in good repair is a common sense. After all, no one wants to be caught by the side of the road with a flat tire and an unusable spare.

It took a visit to my mechanic the other day to have him repair a flat tire to get me thinking about what it might be like to be caught in remote Malawi on an unpaved road with out a good spare. Not fun. Even with a good spare, it might be difficult to jack up the car on a badly rutted dirt road. Nothing like that happened.

To be honest, it was Ed’s – my mechanic – interest in Malawi that gave me the idea to write about getting the spare tire on the van fixed. Ed, if you are reading this, this is for you.