A Series on Religion, Part 3: A Sunday at Church (Glimpse)

“You haven’t been to church yet?” Yamikani asked. She looked at me with a mix of disbelief and horror. True, I said—I’d been in Malawi almost a year but hadn’t attended a single service. “Why not?” she asked. I shrugged. “This week,” she said, “you’re coming with me.”


Yamikani at a conference. Her cap is scrawled with “Jesus,” but don’t mistake her for a proselytizer. She rarely raises the topic of religion with me, and we agree on numerous topics: improving access to contraception, encouraging girls to remain in school, spicy chips, handbags.


And so I found myself, on a breezy Sunday in July, at Yamikani’s Pentecostal church. I sat on a blue plastic lawn chair in an auditorium garlanded with gaudy drapes. Banners reading “2010, THE YEAR OF DOMINION” hung on the walls. A few people asked which church I attended in America. I told them it didn’t exist in Malawi. The answer made me feel a bit slimy, but I’ve met little success explaining my agnosticism or my confused religious heritage (a Catholic mother, a Jewish father, a lifetime of lighting the menorah as the Christmas tree twinkles in the corner).

We began by greeting each other with high fives. Nice! Way hipper than handshakes, and with recent reports of swine flu in Malawi, far more hygienic. The preacher’s stage presence was explosive. His voice boomed at the beginning and grew increasingly raspy as the sermon wore on. He beat his right hand up and down as if thumping a drum. Another man worked as Chichewa interpreter and personal sweat-mopper, chasing the preacher with a large white handkerchief. I admit, though, that I had trouble following the sermon, in which the preacher kept mispronouncing “irrevocable,” declared himself a lion, and accused another pastor of being a wizard (three days after they met, this wizard pastor died—don’t worry, though, our preacher assured us, “I did not kill him”).

My musings on wizardry were cut short, however, once it was time for personal prayers. “And if you can,” the preacher said, “you may speak in tongues.”

In what? Yamikani confirmed his words for me. Curiosity overtook skepticism and I strained to make out the voices of the congregants around me, but it was all a muddle—Chichewa, English, maybe some tongues.

As I rocked on my plastic chair, I instructed myself to be open-minded, but instinct told me this was bunk. I kept quiet, though, as the service proceeded. Near the end of the sermon, the preacher returned to the topic of witchcraft. I’ve grown accustomed to this topic during my time in Malawi. The daily newspapers carry frequent reports of witchcraft: men growing female genitalia, vindictive individuals preventing rain from falling over their neighbors’ gardens, invisible Satanists flying through the city, bewitched rats stealing money at local markets. Traditional healers set up stalls in the city center and in outlying townships, selling bottled herbs and gnarled roots. I try to stay mum when witchcraft enters the conversation, to remind myself that religion here is a blend of imported monotheism and traditional beliefs, but I couldn’t suppress an eye-roll as the preacher rehashed the topic. Then, however, he made me bolt upright.

“There is no witchcraft or sorcery—” he boomed.

Yes! Redemption! (In the rational, secular sense, of course.) Cogency!

The interpreter put his words into Chichewa.

“—that will work against me!” he continued. “In Jesus’ name, I am protected!”

I slumped back into my seat.

A Series on Religion, Part 2: Sex and the Bible (Glimpse)

Malawi’s population is overwhelmingly Christian, and conversation often turns to religion. I, unfortunately, seem unable to clamp my maw when talk swerves this way (see Part 1 of this series, in which I discuss my mother’s exit from the Catholic Church). Here is Exhibit B.

As part of my research on gender issues here, I spend time with a group of young women in Ndirande, Blantyre’s most populous township. As a foreigner in Malawi, I’m often assumed to be an expert in every imaginable field, and the women call on me to answer difficult questions. Once, as they crowded into a bedroom to compare pregnancy stretch marks, one turned to me with a solemn look on her face. “Rebecca,” she asked, “is there a medicine for this?”

During another meeting, a few of the young women asked me to confirm a Biblical detail. I hedged the question. “Interpretations vary,” I said, the consummate liberal arts graduate. Mistake. Especially because the women had just asked me about masturbation. I have no idea how this entered the conversation—the discussion was in Chichewa, and I made feeble attempts to follow along—but suddenly I found myself explaining that while some might consider masturbation a form of sex, others may not. I should have stopped here, but, again, I carried on. “Some may say only intercourse is sex, while some include…uh, other types of sex,” I fumbled. And still I didn’t shut up. “Like, uh, oral sex, or…uh—”

“Anal sex!” the matriarch of the house interrupted. The young women roared.

Oh no. How did our tame discussion about problems in Ndirande turn into this? I hastily attempted (and failed) to divert the conversation.

And then, inexplicably, came the big question—“But Rebecca, you still believe in God, don’t you?”
I handled this query better. “Let’s discuss this another time,” I said.

Across the room, I could hear the matriarch chuckle. “We need to get Rebecca to church,” she murmured.

I sighed and sank into the overstuffed couch, swatting away a fly.

Coming next: the women succeed—I make it to church.

Culture/Shock/Waves (Glimpse)

As I settle back into Malawi after a brief stint at home, I’ve been giving some thought to what surprised me about these few weeks in the United States. I don’t mean the soul-rocking stuff of true reverse culture shock, but the little things, the numerous tiny adjustments I had to make.

First, I no longer had to carry toilet paper with me, most bathrooms provided soap, and I never had to squat over a keyhole in the ground. I looked the wrong way when crossing the street. The Internet was SO BLAZING FAST. Everyone around me spoke English, and I was suddenly able to eavesdrop. I found myself constantly checking the location of my cell phone, both to make sure no pickpocket had swiped it (it’s a commonly nabbed item; I had mine stolen at a Blantyre soccer game) and out of fear I would miss a call and have to spend buckets of cash calling the person back (cell rates are astronomical here). I was jolted by the monochromatism of Portland, Ore., my 75 percent white hometown. On one of my first days in town, my mom and I drove past a man with very pale skin. As we approached from behind, I noted the man’s longish sleeves and large-brimmed hat — here was a guy clearly protecting himself from the sun. My first thought? An albino! (Malawi has relatively high rates of albinism.) No, I couldn’t believe myself either.

Then there were even smaller things, teeny-weeny surprises for which I hadn’t thought to ready myself. I’ll keep this snappy — here’s a list of things I hadn’t seen in nearly a year:

• Escalators
• Moving sidewalks
•Vending machines (what, in particular, is the deal with the iPod/camera/Nintendo dispensers?)
• Sliding doors
• Automatic faucets
• Automatic flush toilets
• Automatic soap dispensers
• Automatic paper towel dispensers
• All right, motion-activated or automatic anything (I had particular trouble navigating my library’s new checkout machines)
• Toilet seat covers
• Bike lanes
• Water fountains
• Disposable coffee cup lids
• PDA (public displays of affection)
• PDAs (personal device assistants) — I arrived in Malawi before the massive iPhone boom
• Miniskirts, short shorts, thighs in general
• Mullets
• Yarmulkes

And now I’m back in Blantyre, readjusting to plastic bags of milk (terrible design; I invariably spray milk all over the counter and often over myself), my too-soft foam mattress, the smell of burning trash, blackouts and water shortages, the incessant attention I receive for my skin color, the barefooted street children already trained at age three to stretch out their dirty and chapped hands and ask for help, mama, help. These changes are annoying, tough, painful. But as I bought a heap of perfect tomatoes on the roadside yesterday and watched the late afternoon sunlight go from blinding to soft, the leaves made somehow greener and the sky somehow bluer, the mountains sheathed in a gauzy purple blanket and the dusty horizon shimmering pink, women pumping water at boreholes and cyclists wheeling home enormous loads of firewood and children racing cars fashioned from old cartons of beer, I vowed, this time around, to lock these images in my mind, to not forget this country’s stubborn beauty when I next return home.