Small Balance of Favors (eBook)

Chapter 1

“Your name is Wirrard?” She continued to poke at her head through her hair with a clear Bic pen while Will wondered if hair that black and that shiny and that perfect could really be hers. Most of the women here seemed to have such perfect hair, almost as if it had been painted on, and he wondered if this was a trait specific to Malawians or if all Africans enjoyed such blessed heads.

“I go by Will,” he said, offering his most endearing smile. Will had only been in Malawi a short time, but he had managed to read a guide book called “Malawi for Foreigners”. Although generous sections of the book were written in Mandarin, in the English section he had found an important note indicating that Malawians and other Bantu speakers tended to intermingle the pronunciation of R and L, similar to Japanese who are learning English. So, in southern Africa his name, which had thus far only been a liability, was now converted into a full-scale handicap, for here it was pronounced more like “weird” than Willard.

In Canada, no one who knew him called him Willard, but apparently whoever ordered business cards at THET Concepts didn’t know that. What would they know about names anyway, he thought…they work for an outfit called THET. Honestly, it was only one letter away from theft, and for Beltway Bandits, that seemed a risky association. Not that there was any dishonesty in the organization – the consulting firm was clearly doing important work on behalf of USAID, DFID, UNDP and others of unquestionable principles. They focused on training, collaboration and baseline consensus building among stakeholders in the education and health sectors. At least that’s what their website said. This was Will’s first real job and it was in international development, and as a Canadian he was proud of that.

“Anyway, prease take a seat,” the receptionist said, motioning to two overstuffed captain’s chairs with chrome grill cladding. One of the grill pieces hung haphazardly and he noticed that the chair had a piece of concrete block where one of the feet should have been. The chairs were on either side of a small glass table with an improbably bright gold finish. On the table were several dog-eared in-flight magazines from Ethiopian Airlines and two issues of the International Development Review from 2015. Above the table was a dusty print of an English country scene, complete with horse and buggy in a gold plastic frame. Next to the print hung a local creation - a Malawi village scene made with sesame seeds and carved wood pieces glued on to a black cloth.

As Will sat down, he faced the receptionist’s desk, where she sat under the official photo of the president, inscribed with “His Excellency the President of Malawi, Professor Zondwayo Sithole Kabisa Phiri”.

“The poor guy had his full name used there,” Will thought. Willard Card Thrasher III believed that his father should have learned from experience and excused his son from the burden of carrying his name. But there it was, printed right on his new business cards. Willard Card Thrasher III.

“Did they get that off my passport?” wondered Will. The only time he ever heard his full name used was in church, or if his family was teasing him. Thinking about home and being far from it gave him a momentary adrenaline spike – not the enjoyable kind, but the worry kind, and he quickly tried to re-segment his life so that he could focus on what he was doing now.

The door from the hallway opened with a screech. The aluminum partition that created the office was installed slightly askew, and the door dragged on the floor as it opened. A younger lady entered carrying a small package wrapped in newspaper, which she delivered to the receptionist, along with a glass bottle of Fanta. The receptionist rummaged in the lowest drawer of her desk and handed the young lady an empty Fanta bottle in return. She quickly slid the package into the drawer and closed it gently. They said something to each other, but Will had no idea what – he had read that Malawi was an English-speaking nation, but people only seemed to speak to him in English – they all had other ways of talking to each other.

The red phone on the receptionist’s desk made a ringing sound from the 1960s and she answered it and spoke that language which Will couldn’t understand.

She hung up the phone and said, “The PS is leady now”, motioning to the door behind her. Will sprang to his feet and instantly felt dizzy. He wondered if it was the jet lag or the anti-malarials or the heat. As a Canadian, he was not accustomed to these things, but he didn’t have time to think about that now. He had to concentrate on his job. He was about to meet Happy Nyirenda, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Gender Relations. This person was only three steps from the president of the republic. The permanent secretary answered to the minister, and the minister was appointed by the president, which meant Will was working close to the top. There were only 33 ministries in the whole country, and some of them might not be as important as this one. This caused Will serious reflection and stiffened his resolve to face his duties.

He stepped into the office and suddenly realized that Happy Nyirenda was a man. When he had first seen the name on the government directory, he conjured up the kind of competent and joyful woman who might be named Happy and who the president might have appointed to steer gender relations in the country. But this round cheerful man peering up at him was not at all what he expected. The permanent secretary seized his hand and with a huge smile said, “Yes, my dear, prease do come in. Welcome to our rittle country. How was your fright?”

The meeting with the PS had been very useful. At least that is what Will was writing in his report as he sat in his room in the Nyassa Lodge that evening. The PS seemed so cheerful and agreeable to everything Will suggested that Will had begun to believe he might actually be good at this work. Maybe his natural rural honesty and humble Canadian approach was just what important Malawian policy-makers needed to help them get moving with the vital task of development – and in this case doing it in a gender-balanced way.

It would make sense that THET’s management, who had such long experience with development partners like these, would have selected the right man for the mission – and Will was that man. As he typed out the action items that had been agreed from the meeting, he contemplated his own effectiveness in this new environment and remembered the conversation a few hours earlier upon his return to the lodge.

He had been greeted heartily by Adrian, the proprietor. Adrian was a big, wide, white man bursting out of a khaki shirt with a gray yoke – a shirt that vaguely reminded Will of the Boy Scout uniform he had to wear when was younger. But instead of flags and merit badges, this shirt was embroidered with the logo of the lodge where the pocket should have been. Adrian wore the short-sleeved shirt untucked, and it draped like a tent over his midriff, almost reaching the bottom of his shorts. Will remarked how fortunate this was, because those were the shortest shorts he had seen since he left university.

As Adrian handed him the key from its cubby hole, Will thought this would be the ideal time to bring up the cold water. He politely mentioned that the water heater didn’t seem to be working too well.

“Yahg,” replied Adrian, “the solar geezer’s packed up, eh. Shame, shame.”

This comment struck Will as strange. What did a geezer have to do with hot water and was it really polite for Adrian to talk so openly about other hotel guests? He had met the American gentleman in the lobby the day before who was representing a solar company, but the man wasn’t really that old – could this be the solar geezer Adrian was referring to? He was a bit wrinkled perhaps, like lots of people who have had too much sun, but he definitely wouldn’t have been granted geezer status in Canada.

“Yahg, we busy with that. We got an oak who is fairly switched on and he’ll have a look at it, eh,” Adrian concluded with a nod.

Will had left confused. In Canada, oaks were trees and he still couldn’t see how it all connected to geezers – the only thing he was sure of was that the hot water was definitely not “switched on”.

But he could get through one more day with non-hot water (he couldn’t really say that water in Malawi was cold), and then he would be off to Munich for a conference with all of the other THET associates working in Africa. This was his first trip to Germany and it promised to be a good one. He felt slightly guilty that, as a budding development expert, he actually did look forward to traveling to the developed world. Wasn’t he supposed to love being in Africa? He worried that he might actually enjoy the luxuries of Europe and that this might reflect negatively on his character.

God had made the Europeans as well, of course, and supposedly loved them just as much as the Malawians, but their economies were developed and that didn’t seem fair. Why were the Malawians still pounding maize meal in sinjas, while the Europeans had...