Life in a Rural Village

Everyday

I want to try and give an impression of everyday life in a rural village in Malawi, based on the visits I have made to about 15 or so villages in central and southern Malawi over the last few weeks. These impressions are gleaned from spending a few hours only in each village as I haven’t stayed overnight in a village at any stage, so that tempers my observations. And obviously I am an outsider, an observer only, and a foreigner at that! However, I hope I can convey a little bit of what life is like for rural dwellers here.

Villages are dotted all over the countryside, you can’t really go far off the beaten track and not find yourself in a village. They range in size from a few households to several hundred households. 

 

 

The typical dwelling is made from bricks, produced and fired locally, with a thatched or a corrugated iron roof. Some houses are made from unfired bricks or from mud. Thatch is made from local grasses and usually laid over plastic sheeting such as black polythene. Houses are generally quite small, maybe only one or two rooms, as the cooking and bathroom facilities are outside in other brick or mud structures, which may or may not have a roof.

Some houses are plastered and then painted, but only a few I have seen have been plastered on the inside, most just have brick walls inside which makes them very dark. Windows are small, with wooden frames. In some cases there is glass in the windows, but sometimes the window space is filled with wood or with bricks until the household can afford to install glass. 

Houses are raised up a little on concrete foundations to prevent water entering the house during the rainy season. Most have a small porch made of concrete or bricks, which is where a lot of life happens. During the day much of the household activity takes place outside, I think at least partly because the interior of the houses are so dark.

In most villages, houses are very close to one another with roads or paths running right through the middle of the villages, with houses only a few metres on either side. This close proximity of homes, combined with the outside nature of so many activities, gives a communal sense to daily life. As we have walked around villages, I have been very conscious of wandering through people’s backyards, past their cooking fires and latrine areas, and feeling I am far too close to their everyday life, but it seems to be acceptable. I certainly don’t think they would comprehend the ¼ acre section/block mentality of household life in the ‘burbs of NZ or Aust.

The paths and communal areas are all unsealed, so at this time of year it is very dusty. During the rainy season it must get muddy very quickly. Some people do have little gardens outside their homes with plants either in pots or in the ground, but I haven’t even seen any lawn or other similar dense patches of vegetation to keep the dust down. Chickens, goats and dogs wander between the houses, while pigs tend to be kept in some sort of pen. I have only seen cattle in one or two villages.

Women and children, dressed in everyday clothes

Agricultural Activities

Most of the villages I have visited do not have any electricity so the rhythm of daily life is dictated by sunrise and sunset, while the seasons dictate the activities that occur during the year. All the farmers we interviewed grow crops of some sort, including maize. Other food crops they might grow include sweet and irish potatoes, beans and various other pulses, peanuts, pumpkins, tomatoes, cassava and fruit trees. Tobacco is the dominant cash crop in Malawi so the country’s foreign earnings have been hit by the decline in global smoking rates. It is a difficult scenario as these subsistence farmers rely on the income from tobacco, and changing the crops they grow to something with a brighter future is a slow process. Other important cash crops in different areas include cotton, rice, sugar cane and tea.

Many farmers also have chickens and goats for meat, they don’t seem to use goat milk at all. The dairy industry is very rudimentary and un-developed so dairy cows are rare. And although we did see pigs in some villages, there weren’t a lot of them.

The average size of farms is greater in the north of the country where the population density is lower, and decreases in the south where often a household may only own half a hectare of land. Across all the farmers in our survey, the average farm size was less than 2 ha. That’s not a lot of land from which to feed a family and of the farmers we interviewed, on average they were only about to grow enough food to feed the household for about 9 months of the year. In order to make ends meet, they engage in paid work off the farm if they can or grow crops to sell.

Most agriculture in Malawi is rain-fed, with only limited areas being irrigated. There are some commercial farms, mainly tea and cotton plantations which are more likely to be irrigated. So this means that crops are grown in the wet season and the land is usually left fallow for the dry season, once the harvest is in.

Because the rains were erratic at the start of the growing season in Nov/Dec 2011, crop yields are down on previous years and the government has estimated that by Feb/March 2013, up to 1 million people will be facing food shortages and hunger, particularly in the south of the country.

The Reality

It is tempting to view village life through rose-tinted glasses as an idyllic, leisurely way of life, more in tune with the seasons and mother earth than our frantic city-based lives, and to romanticise about the way that villagers are living close to nature and so somehow are more pure and untainted by modernity.

The reality is that life in a rural village in Malawi is very tough. It is physically hard work – almost all agricultural activities are carried out by hand, including cultivation of the fields, planting, weeding and harvesting. Animals are rarely used to plough or cultivate fields, and on small-holdings there is no mechanisation. This does mean that having trees growing right in the fields, amongst the various crops, does not cause any issues as the farmers just cultivate and grow around them.

All food preparation is done by hand and food is cooked over an open fire, fueled by firewood that has to be collected by hand and carted home, on the head. Most villages have pumps for water that are relatively central, but water is again carted home in basins balanced on the head. And any hot water for washing or cooking must be heated over the fire.

 

Cooking shelter made from thatch

Toilets are hand-dug latrines, 

surrounded by brick walls 

but sometimes open to the sky.

When you want to build a house, you make your own bricks on-site – you dig the clay, fashion the bricks in a mould, leave them to dry for a time, then fire them in a kiln on site – fueled by local firewood. And then you can start building. A lot of furniture is also locally made, with some villagers specialising as carpenters. But again, all the tools are hand-tools – chisels, saws, hammers. There is no power, so no power-tools!

The lack of electricity means you can’t read at night, but then most homes wouldn’t have any books. Paraffin lamps are the main source of light although some households do have a small solar panel to provide electricity for a light, a radio or, very occasionally a television, or to recharge the ubiquitous mobile phone! Many people do have mobile phones as landlines are virtually non-existent in most areas, but accessing the electricity to charge them is a challenge. Some enterprising folks have set up battery-charging stands as a business where they have access to power.

The lack of electricity means also means there is no refrigeration, no internet access, no washing machine or iron, no stereo, no heaters when it is cold at night. Clothes are hand-washed and hung out to dry. But because everything is so dusty, they don’t stay clean for long.

The most common form of transport, apart from walking, is the bicycle and many households do own one. This allows people to travel from village to village and for the longer distance exchange of goods and ideas and gossip. For long trips, people will catch a bus or minibus, if they can get to the main roads and if they have the money for the fare.

Children in the villages play the games that children play everywhere – chasing one another or kicking a ball around. Football (soccer) is huge here and many villages have a football pitch. Some children will have a proper ball, others make do with a homemade ball fashioned from a dense wad of plastic bags tied together in a sphere. These homemade balls are remarkably robust and many children have amazing ball skills. Girls often play netball, with hoops roughly fashioned in an approximation of a circle. And younger children often play with a bicycle wheel or tyre, steering it down the road with a stick. But there are no plastic toys, or dolls, or tonka trucks to entertain the youngsters.

In one village, we chanced across a woman earning some additional cash by brewing homemade alcohol. The fermentation process was followed by steam distillation, with the photo below showing the rudimentary apparatus. It took about a week or so from start to finish and she brewed up a few litres each time for sale. In the same village, there were a few young men who had been indulging in the product who were very happy to pose for photos for me!

Steam distillation of alcohol provides additional cash income for this

 woman

Home-made entertainment after consumption!

The role of the church is very strong in the lives of almost all Malawians and in villages, many activities are centred around church life. This provides a strong social focus for people, as well as spiritual support. There is also a lot of interaction with various government and non-government agencies such as agricultural extension officers and health workers and others, so these interactions in bring new ideas and technologies, and help keep people informed. Radio is a powerful medium for communication in these rural societies too.

However, I know I would not be able to live this life, to live without books and without access to so many things I consider necessities. For me, the spectre of unremitting boredom looms over the idyll, however close to nature it would bring me.