after the storm

So, last time I blogged was before the weekend, the wedding, the presidential rally and the storm.

The presidential rally was probably the most worrisome, especially given the recent history of violence at such events. The rumour is that at the Thyolo event, the police ran out of tear gas while trying to deal with a riotous audience, and therefore saw fit to resort to live ammunition. That decision surely ranks highly on the Hillsborough scale for effective police crowd control.

The rally was held on the recreation area which abutts the hospital grounds. We had made preparations for safety should things have gotten unsafe for us, particularly since the azungu are predominantly British around here (yours truly included, obviously) and there is some anti-British feeling surrounding President Banda and her election campaign. We had a landrover at-the-ready to make our escape over the tea plantations at the back of the hospital, and many of us prepared an escape pack with our valuables inside, to quickly grab on the way to the jeep.

My bail out bag, fortunately never used!

Fortunately, the rally passed off peacefully. Many Team JB supporters came in buses and tractor-trailers and all manner of vehicles to the tiny outpost of Mulanje Mission, probably increasing its population by a factor of ten or so. Opposition supporters were nowhere in sight, although incredibly but probably inescapably one of the Team JB bus drivers was sufficient enamoured with Manchester United to paint its name on the front of his bus.

The president's election rally. The people on the field are her supporters. The people sitting in front of me, on my side of the road, it is fair to say probably were not.

Despite claims to the contrary, I somehow doubt this is the express coach Mulanje Mission to Old Trafford.

The weather threat also turned to naught, as the storm deviated from its predicted trajectory and mostly dissipated over Madagascar, although I think we might have caught the tail end of it, since it rained basically non-stop from Sunday through today.

In any case, the wedding went off without a hitch, which is the most important thing, despite a good attempt to kill on the way there, by means of a minibus (which belongs to the nursing school at the Mission) with no brakes which the driver didn't realise until shortly before driving at full speed into a ramp in the road near the hospital. The minibus was literally thrown into the air (as were its occupants) but fortunately it landed squarely on its wheels and apart from a few bruised heads there were no serious injuries.

This ridiculous minibus could have killed us all. The brake lights are lying, in fact, it turned out to have no brakes at all. This minibus belongs to the nearby college of nursing, also operating under the banner of Mulanje Mission, so it really ought to have been maintained. The driver is also partly to blame. He pulled away at an unsafe speed for the road, and didn't touch the brakes until the last moment before the ramp, when he had no time to do anything else. It just wasn't good enough, like many things you find in Africa it seems. The reaction of the locals was amazing, they simply shrugged it off: this reaction to such things is also common around here, which I suppose helps them cope with it all, but also inhibits anything getting done to improve matters. On the whole, the British on the bus weren't nearly so accepting, it might be fair to say.

The occasion of the wedding itself was quite wonderful and the traditional dancers and the church choir were particularly fantastic, in fact, like nothing I'd seen before. I've got a couple of videos of them, which I'll post as soon as I have a somewhat faster internet connection.

That's all for now.