A Weekend In Western World

This weekend my community made a trip to Myoka Village, a small resort on Lake Malawi located in Nkhata Bay, about 5 hours south of Karonga. This trip was in honor of Ryan Dugan, the volunteer who has been here for about 14 months who will be leaving next week. Ryan and the other volunteers had been to Myoka a number of times in the past year, and they found it to be a very refreshing taste of home. I, however, found it to be a bit overwhelming.

To begin with, the five hour ride on mini-buses is pretty draining. Imagine riding in a mini-van without air-conditioning with up to 21 other people. 22 was the top number I counted on the trip down. Riding in mini-buses is actually pretty fun, and I’m looking forward to more experiences in the mini-buses here in Africa. In all the experiences I’ve already had, there has always been something fun, interesting, exciting, or entertaining; however, they are far from luxury.

Then, once we arrived to Myoka, we walked into the main dining hall where we were met by somewhere between 20-30 white faces staring at us; I was literally hit with shock. This was the most white people I had seen in two months. I was expecting there to be other white people at this small resort, but I was not expecting the reality of it to shock me the way it did; and I didn’t like it.

Myoka is definitely a little tourist spot, catered to the white, western traveler looking for a cheap place to stay where they can eat, drink, and act like they were back home, away from Africa. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I had spent months preparing to leave home, working hard to raise money so that I could travel here, thousands of miles away from home, and yet there I was, plopped in a little resort that was designed to feel like the developed and western world from which I came.

Sure, I enjoyed and indulged in the food, I had a blast swimming in the water, and I was really happy to see another part of Africa. But in this context, in this place where so many people struggle to get the nutrition they need, where the health care is lacking at best, and where the education system is grasping to get by, I felt totally out of place; it seemed so unjust.

One benefit to the weekend was that it gave me a taste of what I will probably experience when I go back home, and it gave me foresight into the challenge it will be to adjust back to the US—and I’ve only been here for two months. However, that challenge is part of why I wanted to come here. One of my hopes for coming here was to place myself in the middle of the enormous gap between the rich and the poor so that, maybe, I could discern some way to bring the two a little bit closer together.

I’m not there yet, but my experience this weekend tells me that I’m heading in the right direction.