BLOG: That Icky Feeling

The fence around our Zambian home.

“It just makes me feel icky all over.”

These are the true words spoken by a fellow mission co-worker in Malawi, as she returned from talking to another guest at their door. This guest, like so many guests at a Mzungu’s door, sought a loan, another loan to be more exact. Whether their house or ours, almost daily, especially around meal time or nap time, someone stops by with something to sell or a story to tell, each with the goal of procuring some specified sum of money for some other specified worthy cause.

In my case, it usually happens like this.

There I stand, on the front stoop, listening to a single father use what little broken English he knows to ask me for money so he can buy “milk for the baby.” He looks down and lifts up a bag of fresh cassava leaves, “I have these cassava, but we need for the milk for the baby.” The leaves are common enough around, and constitute a staple food for many villages, where they are steamed with a tomato or peanut butter, if one can find it. They are usually eaten with Nshima, which is like an unseasoned grit-cake, which can be made from the root of the cassava plant, but is usually ground from maize. He looks into the bag as he awaits an answer. I look into the bag as well, like somewhere in all those leaves, there is the answer I need…

READ THE REST OF THE BLOG POST HERE.

This blog post like all posts labeled BLOG on this website, first appeared on the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church blog, Glory Be: A Tale of Two Zambian Trained Missionaries.  There, you can find scores of other original blog posts by Andrew Ruth.  

The original introduction is reproduced above, but to read the entire post in its original format, please visit “That Icky Feeling.”