From November '92 to July '98 I have been living as a missionary in one of the poorest countries of the World, Malawi. I have vivid memories, at my arrival, of the oppressive heat wave of the first days. The rainy season was just about to start. The rain had failed the previous year, causing a situation of emergency. The exhaustion of oily skinned bodies tortured by famine was for the first time under my eyes. The months from November till March are still the months of hunger and malnutrition. Children who happen to be very poor orphans are left to eat only green mangos, mice, grasshoppers, grains of toasted corn, because the scarce food is for the adults that go to hoe the fields.

In those first forenoons I used to walk down to the mission hospital and observe how, in a scheme to defeat malnutrition, the babies under-five were weighted: their legs paddling out of two holes from a sack hanging from the hook of a scale secured with cords onto a branch. A nutritionist once told me to advice mothers to provide at least one egg a day for their toddlers. The physicians of that mission hospital succeeded in making miracles with the few available medicines. The problem remains, the most common drugs have to be imported into the country from abroad and so they were too expensive to purchase. A tablet of aspirin was often the “universal remedy” for all sort of illness.

I felt outraged when old people were accused of witchcraft. The people, bound by local customs, traditions and beliefs, addressed the matter of health and sickness primarily from a witchcraft mentality. The spirit, as well as the body, needs healing. Sick people would be taken to hospital only when the traditional cures had failed. You cannot imagine how many sick people I had to take on board on my pick up, even expecting mothers and on bumpy roads. On average in Malawi there was one physician every 50 thousand people.

In those days, what made matters gloomy was the fact that about a million refugees, escaped from war in bordering Mozambique, were scattered all across the country. Children are everywhere in Malawi. The statistics speak of 6-8 pregnancies per woman. They were given beautiful names. They were called Chimwemwe (Joy), Chikondi (Love), Chifundo (mercy), Mphatso (gift): this is also my African name.

In my first mission, I spent many hours struggling with the study of the local language, Chichewa, that I really didn't succeed in chewing. My patience was tested while learning from children and also having to learn the body language in order not to be intrusive and to know how to wait, giving value to the present time. On that first Christmas night of 1992 I had the joy to read my first mass in this language rich of mysterious sounds.

Immediately after, I received my “African baptism” with the first attacks of malaria and the fear not to make it. When I felt better I started visiting the communities to say mass for them in their chapels. To cook bricks and to build chapels with the mud and with the straw roof was considered a community work. In those villages the true wealth was Jesus incarnate not in the gold and in the silver of our churches here but in the simplicity of heart of the people.

To have leaders, catechists and committed lay people was a big challenge for the small Christian communities. On Sundays, the mass lasted three hours, with dances and songs, the active participation of the believers, the offertories with vegetables, fruit, some eggs brought to the altar, together with little copper coins.

The first Catholic missionaries landed on the banks of the 600 km of lake Malawi at a place called Mponda over 100 years ago. They arrived after those of the Church of Scotland, and from the beginning devoted themselves to open village schools, to teach catechism and to produce the first grammars. I too have left behind a small catechism written together with a schoolteacher, aimed especially to young catechumens. The Bible only recently has been translated in the current language, and not everyone can afford to buy a copy.

In March 1992, the Catholic bishops had the courage to denounce the misconduct of the one-party system, fuelled by the empty promises of the life president, and prompted the referendum for democracy. The first free elections took place the following year. The new parliament reviewed the constitution introducing the multi-party system.

People were dismayed in front of ever-rising prices and the inflation of the local currency. The country had a foreign debt of 2 thousand million dollars; perhaps it was the case to adopt this nation to cancel its burden during the Jubilee 2000 campaign.

The subsoil was poor; the agriculture was of subsistence; the people still worked with the hoes, did not have enough money to buy fertilizer. There were water resources, lakes, and rivers. There was also electricity, but it was for the cities and the industries, not for the 86% of the population that lived in the countryside. There was chaos in the transport. The majority of people still travelled on bicycle the roads were impracticable during the season of the rains and my pickup many times got stuck.

Another challenge to be faced was their models of marriage. One was called 'lobola' (bride wealth) and the other, according to the matrilineal tradition, was called 'chikamwini'. Another local custom was the 'chokolo' (widow inheritance). Well known to me was also the problem of polygamy.

Many young people hedged in on the sidewalks of the cities where they went by their daily routine in an endless search for occasional jobs. Other youngsters, lured by the city-life, took up bad habits and contracted AIDS. How many have passed away in front of my eyes after having received the last sacraments! Spare a thought also for abandoned children, street children, workers children, shepherds children, girls that bring buckets of water from the rivers and from the wells to their huts, already mothers at 15 without possibility to finish it cycle of the primary schools.

When I left my first mission, there were so many as over 150 small Christian communities in the mission. They were a new way of being church of the minority. Many catechumens were baptized in those years. During Easter Vigil the catechumens received 4 sacraments at once: the three of their Christian initiation and the blessing of their village marriage. The percentage of Catholic Christians had increased sharply from 18 to 25% in few years. The seminaries were full of young people, hope of a luxuriant future of vocations to the priesthood and also to the religious life. The life of the catechists was exemplary.

The African synod had pushed toward a true inculturation of the faith in the liturgy and in the life. A great hope given by the fact that half of the 10 million of inhabitants were less than 15 years old. Try to think what this meant in terms of a Church made up of young people. My message to you is to give credit to these boys and girls. So many of them would have taken gladly the plane with me and join the masses that flock to our countries.

In my second missionary experience I worked in a valley inhabited by descendants of the mythical war-like ‘Zulu’, by then soothed and devoted to cattle raising. Their vision of the role of the woman in a family was appalling. A proverb said that a woman is worth as little as the tail of a cow.

Roughly half of the female population was illiterate, yet the woman was the one going to the fields to cultivate and to the market to sell her vegetables. She provided the food for her children and her husbands. The first request from the parents was to have catholic teachers in the schools. I had to convince children that attending school was worth more then to lead to pasture cows and goats.

I remember my surprise for the discovery of a world populated by wizards and snakes. I was fascinated by the red-hot sunsets, the magic of silent nights under a mantle of stars, echoing the rhythm of distant drums and relinquishing the night-time dances under the full moon and the cry of the hyenas.

I felt embarrassed by the initiation rites. The secret societies had the role with the masks to frighten the young being initiated. The boys underwent circumcision in the woods, the girls for the first enforced sexual act in the hut. They were instructed in the wisdom made of so many proverbs, of their epic stories about the creation of the world, of the fear of the spirits, of the cult of the ancestors, of the rites of fertility, of the prayers to implore the rain, only guarantee of life for the crops.

Through my safaris (trips-visits) I visited many sick people in the most remote villages and I baptized very many children. Nothing can cancel from my mind the party atmosphere of the children in every village I visited. They showed cheerful faces every time that I took them on my pickup for a drive. We missionaries assisted the people with the distribution of food in the more critical months and of blankets in the coldest months. Together with them we celebrated the harvest festivals. Together we shared meals made out of solid porridge and vegetables consumed eating with the hands.

Some leaders accompanied me to bid farewell to my African bishop. He compared the missionary to a cloud of the sky that as it has appeared out of nothing suddenly so it also disappears. The people left their regards at my departure to be brought the people of my nation. They wondered at knowing the length of the trip. They have a dignity: they know how to wait. They asked me how many moons they had to count before I returned. Now that I am here in Scotland among you, I am sure the bishop has succeeded in convincing them that if I don’t return anymore for the time being it is not because of the sorcery of witchdoctors but only because of the will of my superiors.

In conclusion, I have lived between the Alomwe and Angoni tribes; I have known people belonging to the Yao and Achewa, Tumbuka and Asena and many others ethnic groups. The tribe is their wealth. They all reckon each other blood-related brothers and sisters. They grow with a culture of solidarity and mutual help. They called God with many names. He was Mulungu (the Great Spirit), Chauta (the Lord of the Rainbow), Namalenge (the Creative Force), Mphambe (God of the Thunder).

In Malawi I met a lively local church, able to unite these human groups in the only family of God, with so many young people who were thirsty to know the Gospel message. Africa is all of this and much more! She has a soul and I feel privileged, as a missionary, to have shared part of my life with the people of Malawi, poor but with so much dignity and so much desire to live and joy to be alive.

I am now a missionary in Scotland, but I would be ready to leave again for Malawi at any time, if some of you are interested in accompanying me. I have come back more serene convinced to have given but also received and I think about what I can do for them now, to make their stories known, to answer to their letters, to invite our young people to get in contact with them. Now that I have returned I hope not to hold all these experiences only for myself but to share them to the one who still knows how to listen and be marvelled at. As missionaries, we are the new story-tellers, minstrels of a God who is never tired of walking with humanity at the pace of the last and most abandoned ones. Thank you for having read my experience.

Mwalandiridwa ndi manja awiri: You are most welcome!