Today I walked continuously for 9 hours. Yes, NINE hours.. by the end of the journey I think my right feet started to get muscle twitch.. you know we had got such a professional tour guide, so professional.. that I think he got so motivated to show us as much as possible despite receiving so little pay..! He only asked for 500kwacha (about £2) for NINE-hour walk imagine!!! We didn’t know we were dragging ourselves into such strenuous exercise at the start of the journey as 500kwacha should only pay for walk for an hour or so... but who knows this tour guide was so niceeee – that’s the thing I really like about Malawians – not all –but some, they’re so genuine, so naive, so free of bad will you know. They just work, and don’t know how to ask for pay that is worth for their work. And it makes me extremely angry when I see others who come in to exploit all these people with the purest hearts in the world. Of course by the end of the journey we paid much more than 500kwacha.
I went with two friends, who work at Zomba District Hospital, whom I got to know some time ago. They were good companies. Probably because we’re about the same age. And I also got a chance to listen to their life stories, which again involves a lot of hardship I once only read from books. Now it became so real to me. sometimes I think this trip has touched me so much, not because I am learning anything ‘new’, but because I am re-learning something I already knew.. you know sometimes you know something but you don’t ‘realise’? and that’s what happening to me now – I saw documentaries, read books about Africa before I came. I know how hard life could be; how cruel the reality could be – but when the facts hit my face, it sometimes paralyses me.. to me everything becomes too ‘real’ that I found it hard to swallow the reality..
Anyway, back to Zomba plateau.. oh she really is a beauty. BEAUTY.
If people admire Scotland and Switzerland so much, why not Malawi? Indeed Malawi has so many nice places, including Zomba, that don’t receive as much publicity as others who could afford the advertisements. You get a chance to stand on top of a cliff, overlooking the whole city; admiring the contour of the earth created by mountains, rivers – unspoilt by modern development; and standing on top of the cloud that you could actually see the shadow of the cloud.. breath-taking beauty!!!
And every night, I mean EVERY night – you don’t have to go away from the cities, you don’t have to drive very far to get to the outskirts or beaches, you just need to look up in the sky – you see beautiful stars... so beautiful....... as there isn’t light pollution, not even in the cities. People don’t waste electricity unnecessarily. There isn’t street light even at the posh-est residential areas. As most people stay home, with families, after dark. Then people retire to bed early so that tomorrow they can wake up early. No late night movies. No facebooking. No wild parties. Just simple life. Simple joy. You call that dullness? What good you get from all these fancy technologies? Does it make you happy, or a better person? I don’t know.
Well to me, I call that life.
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