Village in a city via Body in Motion
Being a New Yorker and having spent the last two years in a city so large, it was of indeterminable size (best guess on Kinshasa: somewhere between 6 and 10 million), life in Lilongwe is dramatically different. For starters, if you didn’t know where City Centre was, you wouldn’t know you’d driven straight through the middle of it.
Lilongwe, despite only having about 600,000 residents, is about as sprawling as African capitals get in the sheer sense of distances between anything of significance. To get to a friend’s house in an adjacent neighbourhood, one more or less has to drive through the bush.
Case 1: Just the other night on the way home to Area 43 from Area 10 (they are next to each other and I’ll come back to this), I saw a snake in the road. For those...
On our way back from the Lake of Stars music festival last weekend, we passed a friend’s broken down pickup by the side of the road. Having already made ample use of jumper cables at the aid of those with less energetic car batteries, we stopped in the name of good karma.
We picked up a local mechanic in a nearby town and brought him back to the truck to take a look. Within a couple of seconds, the mechanic found a leaking gasket and set about the repair by African gasket. A notebook cover was converted to two snug-fitting nuts on either side of the faulty gasket and got the engine running tout de suite.
When the truck’s owner asked if the replaced gasket would carry him 3+ hours back to Lilongwe, the mechanic asked “Today?”
By the time we were loaded back into...