Playing your house on the stock market

Well into the dry season, a few weeks before the hottest months of the year in Malawi, the landscape is pale brown and dramatic. It’s hard to think that there can be life and that something can grow out of the dry sand. Many trees have lost their leaves.

Only a few months ago, I remember being in Karonga, during the rainy season, surrounded by beautiful leaves and greens, tall maize crops and big trees. I also remember my house being flooded and many villages in Malawi suffered from the same situation. A few months ago, I wrote a post about the floods, about the fact that some villagers build their mud huts and farms on flood plains. I said that they were risking a lot, that even though it was more rich soil, they would eventually get flooded and lose everything. This affirmation is still true, but I realized last Friday why they are ready to take that risk and go with it. They are not without knowing that there are risks of floods, they simply try to make the best out of it.

I was doing field work with a Water Monitoring Assistant, going far into the District to follow up on newly installed boreholes and make sure that the communities are using the water and that the quality of it is good enough. As I’m on the motorcycle, looking around,  driving through the dry and brown landscape, I wondered to myself how can there still be vegetables at the market, only few farmers here use irrigation systems. Then we went over Kamusu bridge, I noticed there is no river underneath, not even a stream, only a few patches of water where women were washing clothes or dishes and kids playing. I realized that there must only be water when there is a lot of rain during the storms, but the rest of the year this is farmable land, offering a soil rich in nutrients and water. There are farms and crops along the path of what seems to be a river bed. It is beautiful, green, flourishing, growing. It is like an oasis in the middle of the desert. I understood why those farmers and family take the risk of being flooded every now and then; this area offers them a chance to grow almost everything they want all year round, even at the driest of the year, without any irrigation system. They can sell there harvest for more money at the market as food is becoming scarcer and tougher to grow on most of the land. I think if I was in their situation, I too would consider the option. It’s a bit like playing your house on the stock market…if you are good at predicting the flow, you’ll get rich and prosper, but if you’re not, you’ll lose big!