Bus trips are bizarre

 7^th December 2011

Life is too short to sleep in. Then again, some days I feel that life is too short to not sleep in. This conflict is never a problem when traveling by bus in Africa because, believe me, you want to get to the bus station early. You want to take the first morning bus (usually around 5 a.m.). You want to board the bus as soon as possible. Once you see it pull into the station, you want to be on it. This is why I was at the Lilongwe bus station in Malawi at 4:15 a.m. yesterday.

If you’re not there early, things are nearly guaranteed to be more miserable than just being on a bus for 12 hours and praying/wishing/hoping that the bus won’t: breakdown, take a corner too fast, take a corner too fast while going downhill on a road without guardrails (wait, what are those things again?), hit a person who – believe it or not – is completely unaware of the bus honking its horn as it careens down the street and who decides to dart across the road just as the bus nears. Or maybe it’s a herd of cows that are in danger of being hit, as they meander across the road just as the bus turns a corner. There is, of course, always the risk of the bus getting waylayed by the police who decide that, because the bus is transporting too many sacks of potatoes, it cannot continue its journey for about, oh, eight very slow hours.

All of these are not what I want to experience on a long bus trip. But I have no control over them. What I do have some control over is my seat. So at 4:15 a.m., I climbed onto the bus for Lusaka, determined to get one of the coveted window seats on the two-seat-in-a-row side of the bus instead of the worse three-seat-in-a-row side. And at 4:15, forty-five full minutes before the time the bus is scheduled to depart, there is only one of those precious good seats left. And it’s mine.

The trick about being a woman traveling alone on a bus is to get a good seat neighbor. And by ‘good’ I mean not a man. Not that I’m trying to be sexist here, but I’d rather not have a man fondling my thigh under the cover of his trenchcoat that he has draped ever so casually over his leg and part of mine. (Yes, that actually happened to me once on the train from NYC to the town where I was living outside the city, on the very last train at around 1:30 a.m. I think.) I don’t want to be totally on edge for 12 hours on a bus. So I opt for women or children as my seat neighbors. I just place something on the seat next to me when a man boards the bus and remove it when a woman or child boards the bus. That simple. So you can imagine my surprise when, at 4:30 a.m. and still with plenty of empty seats left on the bus (and with one of my bags on the seat next to mine), a man asks me, in English, if someone is sitting in the seat next to me. I’m in the second to last row of seats on the bus, so I can see all the empty seats ahead of me. There’s absolutely no reason for the man to sit next to me.

"Is someone sitting here?" he asks, pointing to the seat next to me, where my bag is.

“Hopefully,” I say, not wanting to lie exactly.

 “Eh?” he asks, not understanding my response.

 “Hopefully,” I repeat again.

“Eh?” he responds, still confused.

“Hope-ful-ly.” I say it more slowly this time.

“Eh?”

“Someone might come.”

“Eh?”

Dude, it’s 4:30 a.m. Sit in the empty seat behind me. Or in front of me. Or across the aisle from me. But don’t make me want to kill you first thing in the morning. That’s not cool for either of us.

“YES,” I finally lie, and he looks crestfallen.

Boy, I sure ruined someone’s morning. But I have made my day more delightful when I move my bag off the seat so an 8-year-old boy, traveling with his older brother, can sit next to me. Children are my favorite. When the bus fills up, a little girl sits in the seat behind me. At one point, I place my hand on the top of the back of my seat, and she kisses it quickly, then looks away.

Bus trips are bizarre. Which is probably why I take them.

This is why I love Malawi

5 December

The story can’t begin at the beginning. What story does? Chronological order is overrated. Time travel is not. And what better way to travel through time than tell or read a story?

Today, I am still at the lodge in Lilongwe. I thought I’d be leaving this morning, but Mondays there is no direct bus from Lilongwe to Lusaka. And I’m on my way to Livingstone, Zambia to go to Victoria Falls, and in order to do that I need to first get to Lusaka. I leave the lodge around noon, heading on foot to Crossroads, a small shopping complex with a few banks, restaurants and clothing shops. It’s hot today, and I swear I can feel the skin at the part in my hair getting sunburned as I walk the ten minutes there. But I have a purpose. And that overrules the possible sunburn.

Yesterday, I realized several things: 1) After working everyday for weeks on end grading end-of-semester assignments of 300 students and then final exams of 300 students, I’m a bit off my game. 2) I don’t have enough cash to pay the lodge for two nights. 3) The ‘ticket’ I bought at the bus depot earlier in the day was not actually a ticket but just a reservation card, and I was worried I’d gotten scammed out of $40 (see #1 for reason/excuse for not checking when I bought it). 4) I realized my GRE math score is actually considerably lower than I had initially thought. As in “oh my god, I’m totally stupid” low. As in “if I weren’t the spitting image of my father, I’d kind of assume I couldn’t have come from my engineer father’s genes” kind of low. And if I could use #1 as an excuse again, I would. But, I’m just going to go with the fact that I don’t care about math anymore (shhh…I think I just heard the hearts of some of my nerdy math friends breaking).

For reasons 2 and 3, I needed to leave the lodge. I get to the shopping complex, get cash from an ATM, turn to think of my next move, and then immediately get distracted by a sign for a coffee shop. Mmmm…ice coffee. So. Easily. Distracted. By good-looking men and signs for coffee. I’m not sure which makes me more pathetic. Like a moth to a flame, I head to the coffee shop for coffee and then start talking to the cashier. I tell her my story about the bus ‘ticket’ and being worried that I won’t get an actual ticket today or that I’ll be forced to pay again. ‘So,’ I ask, ‘Do you know how I can get a mini bus to the bus depot, to Devil Street? I need to try to get my ticket today.’ (Seriously, no poetic license with the name of the street. That actually IS the name of the street.)

She gives me really detailed instructions, so detailed that I think I can’t possibly get lost along the way or back. And I easily find where to get on a minibus heading toward the depot. As I get off the minibus at the depot, a Malawian woman getting off the minibus looks at me, motions me to follow her, and says, ‘Let’s go.’ For some reason, I know she’s going to walk me to the depot where I need to go, so I follow her. It is complete chaos in the area surrounding the main bus depot. There are people everywhere, walking on the side of the road, in the road, carrying goods to sell or sacks of potatoes or grain to put onto a bus. Minibuses are everywhere, honking their way through the streets to clear the road enough not to nick someone as they pass. The road is bumpy and dusty and impromptu stalls line the side of the road, with people selling airtime for cell phones, mangoes, candy, soft drinks. We walk up the road for about five minutes, and she points for me to go right. She continues straight before I can get out much of a thank you.

Just as I knew she was going to show me where to go, I know that she has directed me to the wrong place. I was just here yesterday, so I remember that the place I need to be is nearby. I walk around for a while, trying to find the ticket counter that I need. I get a lot of looks and several men say ‘hi lady’ or ‘hi mama’ or ‘hi sistah’ as I pass. I weave around the stares and calls and minibuses and people and cars and finally find the ticket counter. The same guy from yesterday is there, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He remembers me, gives me my ticket, and tells me to be there at 5:30 the next morning.

A couple of weeks ago, I was teaching, winding up my classes, preparing my students for their intense final exam. The students had a 3-minute speech to prepare and give as well as two business letters to write, all within the final couple weeks of class. Even though I have 300 students, I know nearly all of them by name. I honestly don’t know how I’ve done this. Granted, sometimes it means looking at a student for a full 30 seconds before the name clicks in my head. But hey, that’s a lot of names to remember. And the names started out as foreign to me as Chikumbutso, Tiwonge, and Mphatso and as unusual to me as Novice, Precious, and Eden (the last three are men, by the way). So when, in Lilongwe amid the complete chaos that is the bus station, I hear “Hi Ms. Howland!” and turn to see one of my students, I know that it is Benjamin. He’s in a minibus that is about to leave, but we shake hands and say “hi,” all smiles. The whole country seems like a small town to me. And sometimes that annoys me. But most of the time I’m happy to run into people I know. It makes me feel like I’m back in Kent. Well, sort of.