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A Holiday Parable for 2020
[Adapted from a Facebook post from December 24, 2020]
In 2002 my family went to Mzuzu, in the northern region of Malawi, for Christmas. It is about a four hour drive from Lilongwe, the capital city, and eight hours from Blantyre, where my mother still lives today. On the second or third day of that trip, Dad decided that we should take a day trip to Nyika Plateau, a beautiful plateau a couple of hours away; we would stop at the lodge owned by a friend of his, have lunch and some sodas, and then head back down to Mzuzu.
But December in Malawi is the rainy season, and so the inevitable happened — we got stuck in a thick patch of mud on one of the dirt roads up to Nyika. We got lucky on where we got stuck, though; a large bus had become stranded in the same mud just up the road from us, and so a bunch of people came and helped push the car out of the mud and onto a slightly drier part of the road. After giving everyone who’d helped out a little bit of money — for a chicken for the new year, he probably told them, as that was his shorthand for this is a gift, not an entitlement— we continued on our way.
“We can’t come back on this same road,” he said as we drove on. “But no worries — we’ll just drive up to Chitipa, turn around, and come back down on the Karonga road — we’ll be back in Mzuzu by nighttime.”
Any Malawians reading this piece will now be cracking up, because that’s exactly what did not happen — Chitipa is in fact Malawi’s northernmost district, where our northern border post with Zambia is. There was no “just going up to Chitipa.” We still stopped at Nyika, but for a 20-minute bathroom break rather than a couple of hours for lunch; nonetheless, it was 7:30pm by the time we rolled into Chitipa, and there was no way we were then going to try and set off for Mzuzu by way of Karonga at that time of night.
Somehow in the pre-smartphone era Dad still managed to find us a decent resthouse on the fly — Chitipa Inn, whose pictures I looked up for the purpose of this piece, and it still looks the same— and said we would decamp there for the evening to rest, and then leave at first light for Mzuzu. Mom, for whom the expression “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is not merely an occasional scolding lecture but a way of life, all but told us to sleep standing up.
