Kelvin

I am back under the blue mosquito net, in the same banda, in Usisya. The night is less tempestuous than last time I wrote, though the occasional lightning flash illuminates the sky far off over the Lake.

I had quite a big night a couple of Fridays ago. I indulged myself with the legendary Friday night barbeque buffet at Mayoka Village, a well-known backpackers in Nkhata Bay. The barbecued Chicken and Beef was heaped high on my plate, garnished by rice, salad, veggie patties, garlic bread, kasava chips and I don’t know what else. I washed it down with a few beers, and being in the generous mood bought a round of shots for some people and white wine and tonic for others. The bill came to 4,500 Kwacha, about £16. I was a little shocked, but what’s £16? … the price of the congestion charge over consecutive days, and certainly a lot less than a piss-up in London. Fuck it, I thought whilst unfurling my gangsters stash of 500 Kwacha notes. I felt a little more sober after Benjy the barman responded to my drunken enquiry of how much he earns … 10,000 Kwacha a month.

Kelvin is a nice chap. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and is an avid member of the conservative Church of Jesus Christ. Kelvin told me after dinner tonight that he is currently in Standard Four. In equivalent terms to the UK, that is the upper sixth. Kelvin is 27. He started Standard One in 1998, but intermittently had to take years off. Not to spend a year on a kibbutz, or get stoned in Thailand whilst thumbing through ‘The Beach’ and ‘The Celestine Prophecy’, but to fish. You see, Kelvin and his family couldn’t afford to send him to school every year. School fees in Malawi are 4,450 Kwacha a year … just short of what I spunked at the bar, in one night, at Mayoka last week. So, in the time it has taken me to get a decent university education, jet around the world a few times and work for 5 years, Kelvin a seemingly diligent and smart bloke, hasn’t got his high school diploma.

I have been made responsible for paying the wages to the builders, labourers, bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers on the construction site. Tomorrow is payday. Each worker is getting 200 Kwacha per day worked, totalling up to around 4000 Kwacha a month … which I am informed, for Usisya, is a healthy package. If school fees are roughly the same as a months work, it shouldn’t be too hard to manage them … right. Wrong. Take into account that the average number of kids per household in Usisya is four or five, that paid work is temperamental at best, and that some costs are exorbitant. For example, it costs 1000 Kwacha to travel the round trip to the nearest town by truck or boat. In UK terms that would mean an average earner would have to pay around £500 to get, lets say, from Watford into central London and back. The cigarettes I like to smoke, Stuyvesant Blue, are the expensive variety and cost 200K … a days wage. And that’s a good wage. My nightwatchman Elias earns 3000 Kwacha a month, to support 3 wives and sixteen kids [1 wife and 6 kids inherited from a dead brother]. We were both amused/bemused the other night when considering that if he spent two weeks wages in London, he wouldn’t have enough change from a pack of fags to buy some king size rizla.

Food for my thoughts.

It’s 21.42 … way past my bedtime. Up at 5.30 tomorrow for a swim, wash, coffee, cigarette and shit, then off to the construction site for 7.