Kande Village

One of my favorite ways to get to know the local culture while I'm traveling is to visit a small village and see how things are done away from all the tourist sights. That can be a little tricky while on a three-week long guided tour, but fortunately there have been a few opportunities to see that.

This morning I walked with the other people on the Gap tour to Kande Village, nearby our campground. It's interesting to see how things are done so differently in every country in Africa even though the countries really aren't that far apart. In the United States communication and transportation are so efficient that regional cultures seem to spread quickly and get diffused into each other. I think that's less common in Africa. Big cities are more or less the same everywhere, but as far as villages go, what I saw in Ethiopia was very different from what I saw in Tanzania, and what I saw in Tanzania was different than what I saw today in Malawi.A local man from Kande Village led us past small houses made of orange clay bricks and into the center of the village. To begin our tour he showed us some cassava drying in the sun. Cassava is a vegetable that is grown in huge quantities by villagers in Malawi and it makes up a large part of their diet. The stuff is gleaming white and looks like giant pieces of shredded coconut. Hopefully it doesn't taste as bad as it smells. When we approached a large canvas covered with drying cassava the stench was so overpowering that one lady commented that one of the local kids must have messed his pants. At first I wanted to try some but after smelling the stuff I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. Maybe it's an acquired taste.The local men in Kande Village have given themselves nicknames that they use in place of their given African names. Our local tour guide introduced himself as “Banjo”, his self-proclaimed twin brother was named “Mel Gibson”, and one of the others who bragged about his incredible talent for wooing women called himself “Mr. Smooth”. Banjo led the entire group into his small home as part of the tour. Of course the house was nothing like those found in developed countries, but it actually was a lot nicer than I thought it would be. The exterior walls were made of clay bricks, the house sat on a concrete foundation, and there were even a few old chairs and a wooden table inside. If not for the roof made of thatched palm leaves the thing could almost pass as a legitimate building.The tour concluded with visits to a local school and a small clinic. The school was in a tiny brick building not much bigger than Banjo's house, and for each teacher there were over one hundred students. I spent a few minutes visiting with some kids from one of the classes and looking over some exams that were laying on a desk. I was surprised how advanced a lot of the questions were. The particular tests I was looking at were math tests and the problems were every bit as difficult as tests I'd expect to see in elementary schools in the United States. Unfortunately I also noticed that most of the scores were below 25% - not too great for a multiple choice test with four possible answers for each question.

After a short visit to the clinic where about fifty pregnant women were waiting to be tested for AIDS we all decided that it was time to head back to camp. The village was very interesting, but it was also a very overwhelming experience. Each of us had been assigned a personal tour guide that walked with us the entire time and tried to make conversation. Giving each tourist a guide was a nice gesture by the village, but the guides were constantly making sales pitches for cheap handmade souveniers, short fishing trips, or anything else that they could conceiveably offer. Also, hoards of young kids followed the group and even though they were very cute and very nice, they also demanded a lot of attention. The combination of the sales pitches and the crowds of kids was pretty draining for everyone even though we hadn't yet finished the tour.

Visiting places so affected by poverty always leaves me with mixed feelings. It's interesting for me to see places like Kande Village for myself, but it also leaves me frustrated that there is very little anyone can do to really solve the problems there. Many of the kids wrote their addresses on scraps of paper and gave them to tourists so they could send them money or school supplies, but it's debatable whether sending the things would really help. I'm of the opinion that donating to a reputable charity is much more effective in the long run than trying to contribute to a single individual or small group of people.

Later today I went on another dive with “Aqua Nuts”. The dive master today took me to an old rusty safari vehicle that was sunk by the dive company and is lying fifty feet down on the floor of the lake. We also saw a few crabs and, of course, hundreds of colorful African ciclids.