The Roundabout

On Thursday morning George fueled up the SUV and I packed a case of water, a picnic basket with plenty of snacks and fruit, and enough food for at least two meals. We wouldn't arrive in Lilongwe until late afternoon. There is food to be purchased in little communities along the way. You can find grilled ears of corn, fish,  or chicken, but it's not easy to find a sit down restaurant. They are few and far between, so we had to plan accordingly.   There are maybe four towns along the way big enough to have a diesel  station.  At one of these we topped our tank and traveled on.  Around 4:00 pm, we called Pastor Banda to let him know that we had arrived in Lilongwe. We would stay a couple of days in Lilongwe and travel with him each day to teach at a pastor’s conference in a rural area some 45 km from the capitol, heading west toward Mozambique. George would teach the men and I would teach the women.

 The Pastor had already reserved a room for us at a little bed and breakfast called the Longonot Guest House, and we were already looking forward to dinner, a hot shower, and some rest.  We called Pastor Banda, and over the phone he gave us directions, “After you cross the Lilongwe River as you enter the city, start looking for the roundabout. When you reach the first roundabout, just go straight and  in just a short distance, you will be at the Game Store. Call me when you get there, and I will come and meet you and take you to your room.” I was wondering, “And how does one go straight on a roundabout?” But, what do I know. I have only driven once in Malawi, and on the short trip from downtown Zomba to our house, I had George in the passenger seat gripping the door handle and shouting, “Too close to the left! Watch that bicycle!”  

The builders of Lilongwe were fond of roundabouts, so they are everywhere, in almost all the major intersections downtown.  There are a few traffic lights, but none of them were functioning. We entered the busy roundabout the Pastor mentioned, everyone whirling left with seemingly neither rhyme nor reason about right of way. Well, it wasn’t that we didn’t try to follow directions, but when we popped out the other side of the roundabout, somehow we ended up in the suburbs on Kamuzu Procession Road leading to Capitol Hill and a little further on we were on Presidential Way. Magnificent, multistory homes lined the broad streets, each manicured estate surrounded by tall walls, guarded and gated. Any of these beautiful homes would fit comfortably in the finest neighborhoods in any world class city.  This was certainly a different view of Malawi than we had seen before.  

After we zipped by the grand new Parliament Building and the Presidential Palace, we decided we couldn’t possibly be anywhere near the Game Store and found a place to turn around. We drove back to the roundabout the Pastor mentioned to give it another whirl, so to speak.  This time, the roundabout shot us out in another direction. In a short time, we were in a pastoral setting, where along the roadside vendors catering to bicycle and pedestrian traffic had avocados, mangoes, tomatoes, and baskets of peanuts for sale, spread on burlap.  A little further on, we saw women and girls balancing water buckets on their heads walking along the roadside and young goat herders prodding their charges to graze in the ditches. I couldn’t imagine a Game Store here.  

At this point, we were looking for a public building that Pastor Banda would recognize when we came upon the Water Board Building. We pulled into the parking lot and called him again, this time to come and retrieve us.  The pastor got a little laugh out of us for getting lost, but fifteen minutes later we were at the bed and breakfast a few blocks from Game Store.