6/29/09

The days are short here. The sun comes up a little after 6 in the morning. By 6:30 in the evening, it has completely given way to the stars of the night. The stars are incredible. When we arrived here it was cloudy at night for days. The clouds have since been peeled back, the wrapping paper for a gift of beauty not often seen by those of us in metropolitan areas. The stars fill the night sky, billions of them each trying to outshine the others. White stars, stars in red shift, stars in blue shift are all visible to the naked eye. I attempted some photographs of the night sky, and while they do look nice, they cannot even remotely capture the nature of God’s creation in the sky.
The sun rises over Lake Malawi shortly after 6 in the morning, as do the local fishing villages. At quarter till 6, the sky is dimly lit in hues of orange and purple, as if to let you know that something wonderful is just over the horizon. And it is. The villages are quiet. There are one or two boats on the lake, making their way to shore to bring the night’s catch. In the next 20 minutes, everything changes. By the time the sun’s first rays peek over the distant mountains to reflect off the lake’s surface, the local villages are bustling with activity. The smell of small fires cooking breakfast defies the wind coming off of the lake. The beach is littered with fishermen getting their rowboats ready for the rough waters they will battle for the next 10 hours. In the distance, you can hear hammers pounding out another day’s wages.
Though the days are short, they seem to be hours longer than they are. Life is slower here. If there is a sense of urgency about anything, it is invisible to the western eye. Time here is measured more by sunup to sundown than by the minute hand. Except for lunch. It is as though everyone knows exactly when noon hits. It would seem that the entire country shuts down from 12-2 for lunch. Trips into town must be planned around this anomaly, as nothing can be accomplished then. Life then resumes for the remainder of the afternoon, until night calls to the weary to go home and take rest.
Children can be heard singing traditional songs of faith through the evening. Every note has been passed from one generation to the next. The rhythms and harmonies are as organic and beautiful as the surf of the lake breaking on the beach. Chichewa lends itself to being sung, as if the language was built around the music, and not the other way around. All too soon, however, the songs of the children are drown out by the obnoxious music of one of the local bars, an unfortunate pickup of western culture into this beautiful place. But as sleep comes over you, you can’t help but to thank God for this place and these people and their smiling faces, and pray that tomorrow will be as beautiful as today.