Episode 7
The Potato Path
One thing I've realised is that African woman are strong. They will walk miles on end to get places, and they will do it with the most enormous piles of anything on their head. During a trip into the village, a coworker and I had to walk what seemed to be miles to get to this lady's house to interview her because she was benefitting from the WFP aid. After 15 minutes of walking in the heat, I just about died. That was before I was told that the woman lived on the other side of the mountain! That nearly did me in. As we were walking up the mountain, I felt like we were in LOTR, on that endless journey to Mordor. Anyway, it's pretty humbling when you are about to die climbing a mountain while carrying nothing, and these women do it every day with gallons of water on their head!
There is a path in Zomba called the potato path, and it leads up to the Zomba plateau. My friend and I decided to climb the potato path, but our third friend dropped us off at some random site that he claimed was the start of the potato path. So not true, because soon, we were faced with hills that were about 30-40 degrees steep and near impossible to climb up without sliding down. The way we ended getting up was we scaled the tree trunks that had been cut down. We honestly looked like monkeys scampering up fallen tree trunks. When we got back to Zomba, we looked up the map and discovered we had not climbed the potato path, but had climbed some non existent path. We decided to name this new mzungu path "chadleen."
One thing I've realised is that African woman are strong. They will walk miles on end to get places, and they will do it with the most enormous piles of anything on their head. During a trip into the village, a coworker and I had to walk what seemed to be miles to get to this lady's house to interview her because she was benefitting from the WFP aid. After 15 minutes of walking in the heat, I just about died. That was before I was told that the woman lived on the other side of the mountain! That nearly did me in. As we were walking up the mountain, I felt like we were in LOTR, on that endless journey to Mordor. Anyway, it's pretty humbling when you are about to die climbing a mountain while carrying nothing, and these women do it every day with gallons of water on their head!
There is a path in Zomba called the potato path, and it leads up to the Zomba plateau. My friend and I decided to climb the potato path, but our third friend dropped us off at some random site that he claimed was the start of the potato path. So not true, because soon, we were faced with hills that were about 30-40 degrees steep and near impossible to climb up without sliding down. The way we ended getting up was we scaled the tree trunks that had been cut down. We honestly looked like monkeys scampering up fallen tree trunks. When we got back to Zomba, we looked up the map and discovered we had not climbed the potato path, but had climbed some non existent path. We decided to name this new mzungu path "chadleen."
posted by kathleentse at 4:21 pm
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