(Bill) Rollercoaster

Each day can be a roller coaster of emotions.  This is true in any part of the world, but seems especially realized here.  This morning, we rose at 5:45am as a family.  Elizabeth went off to run on her own—somewhat comfortable to do this now.  The boys changed into their school uniforms  (I still can’t get over how cute they are!) as I got going with oatmeal and lunches.  We’ve settled into a pretty efficient routine to afford us extra minutes of sleep ahead of the 7a.m. school start time.  The bus driver (me) got the kids off to school and I left the car in the lot to get my run in tracing the neighborhood roads surrounding Saint Andrews.  I’m trying to explore different parts of the city and I’m coming to a place of acceptance that I will never be an anonymous jogger in Africa. 

I get home to get cleaned up and outside my window I can hear Blessings, our gardener, singing song after song from church.  He has great pitch and the range of Mariah Carey.  I take extra-long to perform every bit of hygiene that I possibly can so that I can just listen to the beautiful worship.  This is the top of the roller coaster for the morning:  beautiful sunny day, kids off to a good school that they are happy with, Elizabeth running, ME running (!), Blessings helping me get my vanity project of a vegetable garden off/out of the ground.

And then I turn to the rest of the morning, dealing with much of what ails Malawi:  inefficiency and corruption.  Buying our car (“Black Mamba”), I knew, would be a headache.  There’s a certain degree of paperwork to deal with in purchasing a car in the States, but here, it’s a performance of black magic to conjure up the proper documents in the right order.  I feel that my role in coming to Malawi is, in part, to navigate these channels and absorb the stress related to it (hopefully better than I did my traffic stop last Sunday!) so that Elizabeth can be focused on what she’s here for.

I won’t go into all of it, but there has been a whole lot of driving around town, communicating with various parties.  The driving part is still a bit stressful as I fear I will be pulled over by the police that seem to lurk at every major intersection with seemingly nothing better to do than hassle drivers into coughing up Kwacha. 

The communication piece is the most frustrating, however.  There was a big corruption scandal in Malawi recently called “Cashgate” (funny how Watergate established the terminology for future government scandals around the world).  So now, the normally impenetrable process of buying cars has grown even a few more layers of bureaucracy to satisfy the accountability demands of donor nations and groups.  Sadly, these anti-corruption measures have only provided more avenues of corruption to bypass the anti-corruption protocols established for the original corruption.  Got it?

I have no doubt I would have all my proper paperwork by now if I were willing to throw money at people.   Instead, I go from place to place getting just one more signature or official stamp.  Former British colonies love their stamps!  I’ve had three different intermediaries who have provided different degrees of help and all these people know people who can help make sure that things go smoothly.  All this cloak and dagger stuff has me yearning for the DMV!