Random Rattling

Today we met at the office to work in the morning, and went into the Old Town for lunch and to visit the markets in the afternoon.

I went through the books and pulled out the old editions with new ones present, and the old pharmaceutical guides. There were several very old PDRs and similar references – that’s bad. Drug information needs to be current! The other things mostly seemed to be the usual old textbooks given by faculty clearing out their offices. Ruth was horrified when I just whipped them out and threw them on top of the shelves to be withdrawn – like most librarians, she’s not pleased by the idea of discarding books. These need to go, however, for space and also for the need for updated information – working tool and reference collections should be up to date.

We also worked with Koha, just to see how it did. It didn’t do well – there’s a glitch that we discovered just as we needed to leave. You can add books just fine, but it won’t add members. So, we looked it over carefully to see exactly what it did wrong, and we’ll try to find a patch Monday.

After being dropped off in town by the big Shoprite grocery story, we walked to Nando’s, a
South African fast food joint. I had a very good chicken chile sandwhich, and Ruth a quarter chicken, which took forever to come. I like this restaurant – it’s much better than our usual fast food shops.

We stood in the long, long end-of-week queue to get money from the ATM, AND IT REFUSED MY CARD! I was worried – the thing said that I had already drawn my limit, when all I pulled was 2000 mkw that morning, which is about $14, and the limit is 40,000 mkw a day. The last time this happened, somebody had stolen my card number and wiped out my checking account. Considering communication issues, that most places can’t take credit cards, and that all I had was about 5500 mkw to shop with, I was upset. Luckily I found out when I got back to my hotel and used the one next door that it was the ATM’s issue – my card was fine.

We went to the tourist curio market first – this is a group of vendors spread out at the main Post Office who sell wooden carvings, with some baskets and a few other things. Malawi is well known for its carvings, mostly made of ebony, mahogany, or teak, but most of them have the exact same things, just made by different people. There were lots of animals, especially hippos, elephants, and impala, Noah’s arks with ten to thirty little animals to go inside, carved wooden pens and pen holders, masks, boxes, wall art, candle holders, little carved statues of mothers with children, and jewelry. There are some big round boxes with deeply carved leaves and vines in them, and some tables and chairs that come apart, that I like very much, but they’re too big to carry home, and I don’t need to have to find space for anything that bulky anyway.

The vendors all say to come look, come look, looking is free! I wished that they would LET me look – they all wanted to talk me into their items. There are also a few gloomy beggars, one with a baby, and one with a disabled child. This is the most depressing part of Africa for me – it’s full of lively, active people, all very busily engaged in business or other purposeful activities, but there is also major poverty, and I’ve seen several people with disabilities that could have easily been corrected or helped begging, or struggling along the street. There was a man one day that was bent entirely over by some spinal thing, more or less crawling…

I had told Ruth that I wanted to look for a box for my business cards – there weren’t any that size, only jewelry boxes or big empty ones. So, she found the carvers with the best price and art, and we contracted with them to make me one for the next day! I would never have thought to do that, but they’re going to make me one exactly the right size with a water buffalo on the top (I really like them) and crocodiles on the sides, out of mahogany.

I also bought a mask for my collection – I don’t have one from Africa, and I really like this long, skinny one with an old man’s face. I had intended to look for gifts for people – small touristy things – but if we’re coming back tomorrow, I’ll wait and save the money for the next market, as I don’t have much left.

We left, walking well away from the vendors so that we could walk away with no distractions, and walked along the road to cross the bridge to the real market and shopping district. This bridge goes over a river that is heavily used by people to wash clothes and get water – we saw many of them. I wanted to take a picture, but there were way too many people walking in too small and too broken a path to take the space.

One thing about Lilongwe – people walk everywhere, but there are very few sidewalks – you’re usually walking with or past a great crowd of people on a broken narrow curb or in a dusty, worn trough. There are also a lot of holes or deepish gutters that have to be stepped over or avoided. I wondered how often people fell in or tripped over them, but Ruth says not often unless they’re drunk. I would fall in eventually if I walked around that city for long, NOT drunk – just clumsy – I’m sure.

Anyway, there’s a market there on the land near the river, for things like foods, clothes, shoes, a stall full of balls hanging in nets, etc. We walk past this to the street of shops – I’m looking for interesting fabric, and Ruth needs some hair stuff. This street has a deep ditch/gutter running right down the middle, but somehow the cars don’t get stuck in it. There are many tailors sitting outside of the fabric shops, each using an antique Singer sewing machine with a treadle. They aren’t even like the one my mother had – more like the one my Grandma has and has never used. It makes sense – this type does not require electricity.

Each tailor is surrounded by customers and hanging finished clothes waiting to be picked up – people, mostly women, buy the fabric from the many fabric shops here or the market and contract with the tailors to make the clothing they want. When I showed the fabric I bought to the people at Tidziwe, they asked if I was having it made up here – I might if I had longer! It would be fun to have clothes that someone else had made for me, but I’m taking it home and will do it myself. I wish I could have gotten a picture, but we were afraid to whip my good camera out and take one, especially considering where we were going. I got a few of the street, but none of the tailors directly.

Anyway, we walked with most everyone else to the main Market – these shops didn’t have the kind of fabric I wanted, and I wanted to see the market. The entrance was very narrow, and the ground uneven but worn down by many, many feet.

We walked past people selling clothing, shoes, auto parts and supplies, stationary, food, cheap plastic things, tapes – anything someone might want – from small dusty stalls made of a variety of woods, metals, and plastics. It was very tight quarters – not somewhere for anyone claustrophobic! There’s a constant hum of Chichewa and English, and the noises of people moving things and buying them.

The people here are more interested in selling to everyone who walks by – I still get calls of “Muli Bwanji, hello!” directed at me, but in a more general way than in the tourist market. Even though this market is more crowded, and probably less used to having white tourists wandering around, it is more comfortable for me because of that. This is where people go to buy things they’ll actually use in their daily lives, versus gifts or tourist curios, and the vendors are much more focused on the people that are specifically looking for those sorts of things than on me.

I loved visiting this market – it’s much more exotic to me, although I’m sure that Ruth will be very amused by that when she reads this – the other one was fun and had what I was looking for, but it’s a lot more like the usual flea markets and craft shows that I’ve been going to with my family since I was a child.

The fabric sellers that we went to are in a dark cave-like space with one side open to the path – there are dozens of them, with many chitonje and long lengths of fabric piled up on tables. Many of the patterns are the same from vendor to vendor, but not all. There are more tailors grouped at one end – I wanted to take a picture here, and Ruth asked for me, but they didn’t all agree, so I don’t have one. I love fabric in general, and I like seeing all the different colors laid out – most of these are the deep colors that I love best, with lots of greens, blues, oranges, and rich browns and reds.

We walked through the narrow aisles, and I quickly figured out not to touch the fabric unless I wanted them to pull the piece out and open it for me to see. We walked to the end of the aisle, and walked back to the middle – to the one seller that hadn’t pushed at me about buying the cloth. She also had some that was different from the rest. I bought two pieces of two yard lengths, one red and the other teal, each for 800 mkw – luckily, that was just about all the cash that I had left so I didn’t have to borrow from Ruth. One can become a pillow, and the other maybe a skirt, and both can provide quilt pieces. I saw a length of the fabric I bought in Lusaka – a seller had her small daughter wrapped in it, sprawled across her wares asleep. Nobody else had it, though.

We walked back towards the entrance – it was getting late – and exited past a group of people selling fruits and mandazi donuts. I wanted to try the donuts, but didn’t trust them from here – too many flies flying around and random hands. I did get a picture of this from the car when it eventually arrived.

We waited a long time for the car – the traffic was bad and the driver wasn’t sure where we were. There are so many people here! It’s a great place for people watching – I saw women and men, too, carrying things on their heads, dozens of babies held tight to backs by chitonje, women wearing bright traditional dress and long skirts, women wearing Western tight pants, men wearing loose African shirts, people buying, people selling, people just wandering by, cars, bicycles, a motorbike or two…

That night, after washing very well (Lilongwe’s market is very dusty), Ruth and her husband Mafera took me out to Mamma Mia’s, a very nice and very popular Italian restaurant. I had excellent beef ravioli cooked in sage, and we shared tiramisu for dessert. Mafera had chambo, a tilapia like fish from Lake Malawi – it was excellent (I stole a bite), and I want to get it from the Lake tomorrow when we visit. It was a very nice end to a very interesting day.