We are enjoying learning a few words of Chichewa while we are here and are getting more comfortable with greetings. We learned nkhuku when we were presented with the chicken from the chief of Vulande village. And now we have both heard dimba and dambo enough to be getting it. It is no wonder, as Malawi is a hugely agricultural country. Almost everyone either has or would like to have a dimba or garden. It is not just for fun or because they are joining the “slow food” or “grow local/eat local” campaign. Neither of those concepts ever left Malawi! Here a dimba is a necessity as well as a luxury. To have vegetables to make “relish” is highly prized and a necessary part of adding nutrition to the diet.
Here, if you have enough space and water, you can grow vegetables year round. We see beautiful pyramids of tomatoes along the roadside and in markets and often a few on a table beside the road. Tomatoes are used to flavor everything! Every meat has a red sauce with it and greens are always cooked with tomato. And they are good! Other vegetables common are cabbage, rape, pumpkin (but for the leaves only, not the pumpkins!), Chinese cabbage, green beans and okra. Onions are also put in almost every dish. But maize is the primary crop that determines hunger or plenty that year. Maize is the backbone and everything else is “relish.” Maize is the basis for nsima, the basic starch food and often only food available for many people.
At this time of year, before the rains come, it is easy to spot a dambo. A dambo stands out like a little river of green against the dusty brown of the countryside. The dambo is the low floodplain around what now seems to be a small trickle of water that will swell into a river when the rains come. So dambo land is a prize. It is full of grass, sugar cane and garden plots or dimbas. The soil may be sandy or black and is even used as paint for decorating the outside of mud houses. In the dambo the water is just a few feet below the surface of the ground. Open pit wells are dug as part of the dimba so that watering cans can be filled and rows watered by hand. If one were extremely fortunate, one might have a treadle pump to help get the water out of the pit well more easily. But we have rarely seen one, although they are spoken of frequently and prayed for.
All the dimbas are cultivated and dug by hand with a large hoe. Some plots are divided by ditches for collecting the rain water when it comes and protecting the crop from flooding out. We have seen huge fields which we were sure had to have been machine plowed, but no, the hoe and a strong back had made long straight rows for planting. It is mind-boggling and shocking at the same time. Not even teams of horses or oxen are used. That is one thing to do for a home sized garden, but the scale here is all over the nation with the same method. And to think we bought an attachment to the electric drill to dig holes to plant bulbs more easily! Wow! No hose to water the garden, just a pit and a big watering can for rows upon rows of vegetables and maize! Right now the only place things are able to be grown is in the dambo land. There is no water anywhere else unless you have a huge irrigated sugar or tea estate.
It is frustrating for us to hear of meager efforts on the part of the government to help with agriculture. They seem distracted with other things – yet agriculture is the backbone and the very life-blood of the country. Agriculture teachers and village consultants are hard to come by. Everywhere we go, people ask for help buying fertilizer, seed and treadle pumps. This is life in the balance and every day is a challenge to be met. So if you are wondering what people need here, the list is long. The lucky ones are those who have the chance to dig and tote water all day long at their dimba in the dambo. They will have “relish” tonight with their nsima.
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