Thoughts about home stay...

Home stay in the village was amazing. As the married couple of the group, they chose us to stay with the chief and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Lomos. Within 10 minutes of arriving and introductions, the men went one way and the women the other. I sat and talked with the women about their children and duties in the village. The women were the wives of the chief’s 7 sons. I helped them sweep the dirt between their hut structures. I would never have thought about sweeping dirt, but they really work to keep their areas clean. I also helped the chief’s wife cook nsima. She had a separate hut for cooking. She starts a fire each night and then takes a burning coal to each of her son’s wives for their cooking. Stirring nsima is HARD work! And the women touch the hot pots with their bare hands. Some of the kids were looking at my hands one day at camp and said that I must not work because my hands are so soft. After seeing the kind of work these women did, the work I do seems like a breeze!

We sat in their hut while they ate their nsima with cooked pumpkin and okra leaf relish. We gave the family a 10kg bag of nsima flour some towels for bathing, t-shirts, and some granola bars for the kids. Mrs. Lomas cooks for her husband and her 3 unmarried sons. They all eat together each night. One of their sons spoke enough English for us to converse for about 2 hours. Then Mrs. Lomas insisted on heating water (yes, over a fire) for us to have to wash. We washed our faces (oh, and she also insisted on getting us each our own fresh water). Then we braved the dark walk to the toilet hut. This was a brick sided version of the hole-in-the-ground we use at camp. Using it in the dark was a totally different experience. I was practicing a lot of deep breathing and mind control (there were 3 inch long cock roaches everywhere…and I had to squat over them… you get the picture.) Then Mrs. Lomos showed us our room – this was the room in the hut where she and Mr. Lomos sleep. There was a nice grass mat on the dirt floor and tobacco and onions drying over our heads. We thought we would sleep in the main room where they ate on a grass mat, but they insisted we take their room.

This got me thinking…. How many of us would open our homes to a group of Malawians we didn’t know and then offer them our master bedroom? These people have so little materially compared to us, yet they are so generous. They live simply. They work very hard. They laugh often. They live with or near their families, They truly understand and live the idea of community. It isn’t an idea to them. It is such a part of them, that I imagine it would be hard for us to even have a discussion about it. We have such material and financial wealth compared to them, but at what cost? It makes me think of the ways we have sacrificed other (more sustain?) kinds of wealth in the process. Are their ways to have both, or is it an either or equation. This is so similar to the questions I debated after my time in Ecuador. They looked to the US with such hope and envy, yet I looked at their lifestyles (family, community, culture, tradition) with longing and a sense of how we have sacrificed that for what we have that they covet.