Society, red in tooth and claw?

I have just been listening to a programme on the World Service about Consciousness and it reminded me of an experience that happened to Lindy on her way home from work the other day. The programme was discussing the apparently recent discovery that fish definitely have consciousness. I am surprised that this is news really, but there you are! The presenter asked the question about whether if we are sure that fish feel pain, it is ethical to fish for them and then throw them back? This is hardly a new question.

Anyway, walking home with Lindy is a bit like walking home with the Pied Piper. I thought I was instantly surrounded by children every time I stepped onto the street, but Lindy spends a lot more time over her trip home and is beginning to know many children by name and to engage in quite involved discussions in a mixture of broken English, rudimentary Chichewa and gesture and sign. She is amazing, a quiet lady who really values time by herself and probably engages with other volunteers less than any of the rest of us, she is always gentle, pleasant and helpful but simply needs to spend a lot of time busying herself with many projects while she is alone. The children just love her and come running out to greet her from alleys between buildings, behind fences, up trees, under bridges, down drainage gulleys, everywhere you might expect children to be playing and quite a few places that you wouldn't. She has made friends with a group of boys who were making complex vehicles out of clay; with all the tiniest and most vulnerable children playing in the street; with big sisters looking after younger ones; with girls who skip and boys who bowl tyres along the street with two sticks. On Friday, on her progress through Chilomoni she became aware of a boy playing with something on a length of string, throwing it into the air and jerking it back towards him. As she got closer, to her horror she saw it was a small bird tied by the leg. She stopped and talked to the boy and soon, as usual she had a crowd of small people around her. She explained how cruel she thought it was to treat a living creature in this way and gently untied the bird's leg and cupped it in her hands. The bird was shivering and unable to fly so she encouraged the children to leave it on the grass in a shady place in the hope that it would recover and then she and her entourage continued on their way. Very quickly she became aware that the boy concerned was lagging behind and soon he ran back and she saw him lift the bird, throw it into the air, catch it and put it in his pocket. Probably the little bird would have died from its injuries or become the dinner of some other creature very soon, but she was distressed to think of its suffering and saddened to think that the boy was so unaffected by what she had brought to his attention.

We are steeped in a culture that is utterly different from our own and it is little events like this one that show how much we are like the proverbial fish out of water. When Peter gave his little talk to the students on Thursday he told them that we are volunteers and stressed that we work for no financial reward and live as they do and eat the same food, but really it is not true. I may sometimes eat nsima at lunchtime, but I don't have it again at tea time. My little house is simple by UK standards but it is better than the majority of homes in Chilomoni. I have hot water on demand in the house. I do not have to carry all my water from the communal taps at street corners, balancing buckets on my head, or even tin baths which are so heavy when full that it takes two friends to lift them high enough to raise them to head height. Even Charles, our housekeeper who has a modern house in the same grounds at Mitsidi does not have electricity in his home. In my last, admittedly more expensive than usual, pre-Christmas week of living simply but definitely not like a working Malawian, I have spent almost three times the monthly salary of a guard who works for Beehive. It is difficult to get my head around all the implications of this. I have started to eat meat because I thought it was the right thing to do living within this very different society, but although the animals have a better life, free-ranging all over the place, they are definitely not killed in a way that is anything like as humane as the average British abattoir. I am constantly seeing men walking home with a live chicken for the weekend dangling head down, being casually carried using the legs tied together as a kind of handle. Is it any wonder that a small boy thinks it is OK to tie up and play with a song bird?