(An account of a short-term missionary’s adventures installing wells in Africa. Third of eight parts.)
It’s hard to imagine there are worse roads than those right here in Jackson, Mississippi. ‘Third world’ is just a metaphor. In Malawi, East Africa, roads are - if possible - fourth World. Today’s adventure concerns driving those roads as a recent volunteer for Marion Medical Mission (https://www.mmmwater.org).
Let’s start with the basics. Okay, I get it - they drive on the left side of the road, my steering wheel is on the right side of the car, shifting is with the left hand. Check, check and check. Vexing complications all, of course, manifest in initial awkwardness such as driving too far to the left, confusion when turning or passing and so forth. All are overcome with good cheer after a few learning hours behind the wheel and frequent admonitions from my Malawian field officer.
Then the fun begins. The roads, in short, suck. The asphalt, or ‘tarmac’ in most of Malawi is a hellish, largely un-repaired strip of road pocked with potholes ranging from basketball to bathtub size, and which sometime run completely across the highway. Think of the bombed airplane runway at Peleliu.
But there’s more! The sides of the tarmac are often eaten away, narrowing the roadway at random spots which causes cars/bikes/motorcycles in the opposite lane to suddenly lurch into your lane. When you react by sliding to the left to avoid a collision, you drop off the edge which is often 12-18” high.
…Travel note: Leaving Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; 10:35 pm. Much to my surprise, on this return flight we crossed the Red Sea and flew over Mt. Sinai in Saudi Arabia. Imagine that…
While driving at night, which we were warned never to do but which became a too-common occurrence, the smoke from constantly burning nearby fields obscured the road. It was usually illuminated only by the undimmed headlights of oncoming traffic, often 18-wheelers with only one working high beam. Frankly we were lucky if headlights were on at all, as motorcycles occupied by three or more often emerged from the haze unlit.
Motorbikes carried everything imaginable on them. I saw live pigs, wooden doors and bags of concrete. Of course, no cyclist wore a helmet. Compounding this mayhem, throngs of pedestrians walked on, and often simply stood in the road visiting friends. Most seemed to wear dark clothing. Gentle toots of the horn did seem to move them a bit (I actually developed a blister on my ‘tooting thumb’), but for the most part one drove through crowds of people who were not eager to accommodate drivers.
Driving the tarmac, though, was only a tiny part of the day. The real action commenced ‘off-road’, first on the main gravel arteries. In Mississippi we call them “dirt roads” and all in Malawi are horribly misshapen by disrepair and overuse. These took us bumpily to the rural villages on gradually smaller capillaries in similar states of malformation. To say these dusty biways were in rough shape is like saying that Berlin in 1945 had infrastructure challenges. Oh, there were stretches of moderately smooth surfaces, marked by the occasional fissure or jutting rock to be sure, but these only served to build up a false confidence soon shattered by sudden hidden perils.
Once, on the 12th hour of my first white-knuckled day as a driver we ascended a hill - at night, of course. I couldn’t see this pothole (see the picture) and so slammed into it. Miraculously, we didn’t eject the worker riding in the back and sustained no damage to the truck. We met our worker again the following week near the site and he said without prompting, “You the bump bump guy!” He agreed to stand in the hole to emphasize its depth – that’s him in the picture. Much to my surprise he signed on for another day of work.
Each day in the field we drove deeper into the bush for hours, stopping to tend to intermittent well sites. No longer were these ‘roads’ in any sense of the word, as they slowly devolved into pre-modern goat paths driven only rarely by motorized traffic. The surface was usually no wider than necessary to allow only people and livestock to pass. One looked in vain for evidence any four -wheeled vehicle had traveled here as we blazed ahead, straddling the meandering ribbon which - and this is the dicey part - began to ascend into the rocky hills.
Jeff Weill is a senior status judge living in Jackson.
