"Absolutely beautiful mountains" I remarked to my driver Pheobe, as we exited the Blantyre airport parking lot. Pheobe smiled and nodded. "Yes, they are quite beautiful," she uttered, in a hushed tone and paused, before continuing "it is just too bad what has happened to them." I nodded, quizzically, before giving in to curiosity and asking what she meant. "You'll see" she replied.
We drove in silence for a few miles; me looking all around at the surrounding countryside, her navigating the narrow road in our oversized stick shift 4x4. As I looked at the mountains, I couldn't figure out what she meant. What had happened to them? Did they shrink? Erode, perhaps? From here, even though they were miles away, they seemed utterly majestic. High, sharp peaks rose up into the sky and each seemed to have its own topography, some with lush trees, others with barren rock. I continued to look out the side window until I felt Pheobe downshift and apply the brake slowly, which forced my gaze back towards the road. The road itself was pockmarked with holes and its ability to fit two cars passing side-by-side seemed as miraculous as an umbrella appearing out of Mary Poppins' suitcase. Then, about a mile of head of me, on the left hand side of the road (which was the side I was sitting on - cars travel in the left lane ala UK) I began to spot a rather odd sight. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at, as there were not only strange shapes in the distance, but a huge quantity of them as well. I was looking at a line of about two-hundred bicycles.
They were all in single file line, hugging the precious remaining inches of asphalt. From a distance, their relative closeness to one another gave off a serpentine look, and as we approached, I saw that the space between one back wheel and another front wheel was barely enough to slide a piece of paper between. But that wasn't the odd part. What was strange was that not a single person was riding the bikes. Instead, each operator walked alongside their bicycle, feet off the asphalt on the bare ground which sat a few inches below the lip of the road. Each walked slowly, laboriously, head down and hands positioned either on the handlebars or on the back of the seat pushing the bicycle up the hills on the pockmarked road. This wasn't by choice. They couldn't sit on the bicycles had they wanted to. Perched on each seat sat two to three large conical bundles, raising anywhere from three to six feet above the bicycle. Each bundle was dark brown, and was easily five times the width of the bicycle itself, which, combined with the height of each pile, formed the strange sight that I had spotted a mile earlier.
Pheobe, sensing my impending questions, began: "That James, is what is happening to the mountains. These are merchants who go up into the mountains in order to cut down our trees and create the bundles of firewood you see on each of the bikes. They are leading to the deforestation of our beautiful mountains and using it to make a profit. They will take these and sell them in the market place for people to build fires, makes goods. It's quite sad because our mountains used to be covered in beautiful trees. Now only a few such mountains remain." I nodded and agreed with her that it was quite sad to see, but it still wasn't making sense to me. "I don't understand though...maybe I am wrong, but the mountains, they are very far away, yes?" Pheobe nodded, "Oh yes James, very far. They are maybe 10 km or so from here, and they still have a ways to go before they get to the market to sell them." "Wow," I responded, dumbfounded at the prospect of pushing such a heavy bundle perched perilously on a bicycle seat for such a long distance. "And they all go at the same time, yes?" I asked. "Yes, of course" stated Pheobe confidently, "and they must get up very early in the morning to do this as well. Most of these men left for the mountains at three in the morning and are just returning now [at 8:00 AM]." I shook my head incredulously. "I can assume they do not look very forward to this day very much, right?" I said somewhat jokingly, smiling at Pheobe. Pheobe did not smile as her brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed quizzically for a moment before responding: "It is their job. They do this every day."
"Oh" I responded. And went back to looking out the window.
