Mike Climbs a Big Mountain

I am utterly exhausted in that beautiful, satisfied, aching kind of way. I’ll tell you about today in quite a lot of detail because it’s actually captures the feel of the whole trip a little bit.

Food

We had visitors and we were staying at Kamuzu Academy (the most bizarre boarding school in Africa, in case I haven’t mentioned it before, you can probably google it) so my alarm goes off at six and I endeavour to rouse everyone from their slumbers so that we can go and get breakfast at the school canteen. It was a pretty simple one by KA standards – bread and butter and rice porridge – but I have developed a deep and delightful passion for the rice porridge (of course accompanied by a more-than-healthy dose of Malawi brown sugar) so I am happy happy happy.

Transportation

So we head out to the town, the challengingly spelt ‘Mtunthama’, and look for transport to Kasungu for 6 mzungus (that’s ‘white people’ in Chichewa) and 3 massive backpacks. We end up in a small saloon car. With another Malawian passenger. So that’s a classic, slightly battered five-seater carrying eight people and a lot of bags. This was in fact only mildly uncomfortable and now I put it down in numbers it seems feeble in the face of general Malawian minibus practice – the other day me and my friend Sam travelled in a 7-seater minivan which was carrying 17 people. The next time you hear a politician talking about immigration and declaring sagely that “sometimes, you just have to say, there’s no room on the bus,” think to yourself: This person has obviously never been to Malawi.

Goodbyes

We get some cash out in Kasungu and then make our way to the bus depot, take a bet on one minibus to leave before the others or the anticipated ‘big bus’, and say goodbye to Rosie, Jenny and Grace. These are awesome people, and it’s been awesome to see them, and they have very much enjoyed staying at Chimbowe and playing with all our kids. As everyone does, they have complained about how much stuff our community does for us (dish washing, clothes washing, hot water for baths...) but are secretly just jealous! Hopefully we’ll see them for my birthday in a couple of weeks.

Big Mountain

Next on the agenda for me, Mike and Sam, is Mount Kasungu. Like all the hills here it just comes out of nowhere in the middle of completely flat bushland, so it looks pretty spectacular, and I have since discovered that it is 1071m high. We ask some people how to get there and instructed to walk ‘straight, that way’ and obey with confidence. The plan is to climb it (apparently it takes about two hours) then eat lunch at the summit (purchased at Sanan Superette, a shop which sells good biscuits at good prices, and is painted entirely green, so has much going for it) and come down in time to buy some building materials for Sam and be back at KA for dinner. So we follow the path until the path becomes a trail and then we follow it as it picks up and starts to wiggle its way up the mountain. It’s pretty much as I expected: a bit steep, rocky, overgrown, and every time you turn around an even more mind-blowing view presents itself for your enjoyment. And then the trail disappears. No worries, we decide, we can see the top, we know where we need to go, let’s just go there. So we get going. In the absence of a trail, however, the fact that this is the end of the rainy season and the grass is at full height, in this case well over head-height, becomes an all-too-tangible reality. Our ankles become very quickly saturated with prickles and sticks and little balls of thoroughly unnecessary spikiness. Our bare knees become red from the sun and the constant tickling of grass and scratching of branches. I hit my head on a branch. We take a lot of breaks to eat some of the food we were supposed to save for lunch, and far too much of our limited supplies of water. We keep going, encouraged periodically by noticing, again, the startling beauty of the country  spread out below us like a strange, handmade, all-green patchwork rug. The sun shines. I put some more suncream on but I can actually feel the backs of my hands and my neck burning. We sweat. A lot. We keep scrambling upwards through the grass and over the rocky outcrops – sweet, non-grassy relief whenever we can find them – towards the summit. Michael helpfully observes that we are making no noticeable progress. Myself and Sam disagree optimistically. A surprisingly good samosa gives me a boost. I keep thinking about how good it will be to reach the top. I say this, hoping to inspire the others, although I’m distinctly lacking the necessary eloquence at this point. This goes on for a long time. About 2 hours. 

And now we’re getting up to a really excitingly rocky bit, and I can see the top, and it’s not far away, and I speed up, and then slow down a bit to let Michael go in front, and we’re so, so nearly there, so close, and Mike crests a little slope and says, “Ah. There’s heaps more. About 100 metres.” (100 metres doesn’t sound like a lot, but at this point I’d say we’re genuinely up around a 40-50% gradient so it feels fairly significant.) So we keep going some more. And then I hear the others start to woop. And I clamber over the last few rocks and all around me I can see for miles and miles and miles and I woop too, and I point at the sky and say thank you to Jesus for being awesome and also that none of us have fallen off or broken our legs or been bitten by snakes. And we rejoice. And we eat food and drink water and chat. And we take loads of stupid photos. And it is good. Unfortunately we can’t just leave it at this and continue with our lives because we are now 1071 metres up a mountain. So we set off to go down. And this is much more difficult actually, and we all do a lot of falling over in the long grass, and not a negligible amount of complaining, and after a long, long time, and a lot of little prickly bits in our socks, we make it down again. 

But of course, from the bottom of the mountain we’ve got a half hour walk to town – throughout which we plan in detail what drinks we will buy as soon as we find someone selling cold drinks. I spot someone selling apples on the side of the road and go for it because apples are juicy and that’s close enough. And then we find a shop with a fridge and fanta has never tasted more beautiful, ever. And then, of course, we have to do food shopping, and Sam has to buy hundreds of nails and twelve 10 ft iron roof sheets. And we have to carry these things around, to a truck home, and then from the truck to KA, and me and Michael both cut ourselves on the metal, which is nastily like a papercut, just a lot bigger. But when we arrive at KA, there’s free dinner, and it’s fish, and they give us a boiled egg each as well, and good sauce, and lots and lots of cold water. And then I get to have a cold shower at the guest house, and sit on a sofa and listen to music and go on facebook chat and write a blog.

Jesus

This day has been good practice for me, I think. Because I’ve discovered recently that Jesus doesn’t just not make everything easy for us. He doesn’t even make everything into a really cool movie script where it’s tough and gritty and real and then we overcome adversity and reach an incredible, dramatic climax, and the good guys win and everyone hugs everyone else and then the story stops. Following Jesus is beautiful and hard all at the same time. And then sometimes, there are moments of breath-taking brilliance. Moments where I just need to go outside and sit down somewhere and smile and say, “Nice one, Dad”. Moments where a few words of the bible hit me so clear, and true, and beautiful, that I actually weep. Moments where you stand on top of a mountain and look around you at the world in all its awesomeness, and you take stupid pictures with your mates and laugh and take your t-shirt off just to feel the breeze, and every nerve in your body knows that God is good. But you never get to just walk away. You find yourself 1071 metres up a mountain and you realise that going down is actually scarier than coming up.

Coming back to school after the crazy passport thing has been like this for me – the big climax came, everything went mental, everything got sorted, roll the credits let’s go home. And then I realised that I can’t go home because I’ve got four more months. And at first I really didn’t like this realisation, but then I also realised that Jesus has got another 4 months of adventures and gloriousnesses to teach me and change me and love me and be kind to me and I cannot wait. And then, gently, it dawned on me that he doesn’t just have four months of these things. He’s got a whole lifetime waiting for me. And then something a lot lot longer and a lot lot better.

So basically I’m just trying to say that maybe you can’t even see the summit, maybe coming down is actually quite scary, maybe you just really want a fanta. But just know, always know, that God is good, and he knows what he’s doing. And he even knows just what those annoying spiky things in your socks feel like, and he actually cares. And that’s pretty much the coolest thing ever.