Beating Back the Devil by Maryn McKenna

Author:Maryn McKenna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

NINE

Malaria

March 2003, Malawi

THE GUEST WHO SAT CRAMMED against the walls of the four-room hut could hear the procession coming before they saw it. Sonorous hymns, long lines of praise in complex multipart harmonies, gusted through the unglazed windows along with the misty rain. The singers paced slowly into view: Eight women from the tiny Christian church in the closest village, wearing white blouses, navy-blue skirts and flip-flops that stuck in the churned-up mud of the dooryard. The first woman in the line carried a large cross in front of her, woven from dried grass and purple bougainvillea. Behind the last woman came the ministers, wearing brilliant red plastic ponchos over Roman collars and damp black robes.

The funeral was so well attended that only close relatives and important guests could be shoehorned into the mud-brick house. The rest stood outside, segregated into groups of men and women and clustered under umbrellas and tree branches that provided a little shelter from the rain. The two ministers took up positions on the deep open porch, setting their hard-soled shoes carefully on the slick surface of the earth berm that held up the house. One of them, a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses and bicycle clips still hanging from his trouser cuffs, opened a Bible. “Psalm 22,” he announced in English. Switching to Chichewa, the main language of Malawi, he sang out the first line: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

From under the trees, the entire congregation answered him. “Why art thou so far from helping me?” they sang in intricate harmony. “I cry by day, but thou dost not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”

In the small room at the front of the house, Scott Filler shifted discreetly. The family had put him in a place of honor: He was sitting on a dried-grass mat against an interior wall, facing the windows and with a clear view of the service outside. Still, the unfurnished room was so crowded that the only way to accommodate everyone was to sit straight up with legs straight out in front, a common posture in rural Malawi but hard to take for a Westerner whose hamstrings were unused to it. Anything more than a tiny movement, and someone would notice—either the tall woman nursing a baby tucked in on his left, or the nurse wedged in to his right, who was weeping and blotting her eyes with the cloth of her skirt. The funeral was for the father of Kingston Bulala, the chief lab technician in the project that had brought Filler to Malawi. Diplomacy and decorum required that he wait out the lengthy service without flinching or drawing attention to himself.

It was the end of the wet season in Malawi. Runoff from daily thunderstorms had cut deep channels into the unpaved roads that led up the hills to the Bulala family compound, three tin-roofed huts tucked into a cornfield behind a huge brick cistern. It was the family’s second attempt at a funeral.

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